Linda Tatelbaum came to Colby in 1982. She teaches first-year writing, critical theory, and environmental literature/philosophy. She is also actively involved in community teaching through various projects of the Maine Humanities Council. Linda and her husband came to live in Burkettville (Appleton) in 1977, where they built a solar-powered house on a back road. Their garden produces the family food supply. Linda’s first book, Carrying Water as a Way of Life: A Homesteader’s History (About Time Press, 1997), describes how and why she lives this way. Her second book, Writer on the Rocks–Moving the Impossible (About Time, 2000), explores how physical labor can help us move metaphysical obstacles like writer’s block.

When Linda Tatelbaum and her husband headed "back-to-the-land" in l977 to build a solar house and raise their food in Maine, they found the simple life more complex than they ever imagined. With ingenuity, grit, and flexibility, they balanced their idealistic values with the pragmatic demands of adult life.

Through two decades of witnessing rural towns vanishing under pressure from development, Linda's eloquent voice has defended the land, insisting it is not a commodity. A chronicle of keeping faith with nature, these lyrical, wry, and feisty essays celebrate human effort while mourning the loss of wilderness and community.

What happens when a writer runs out of words? This meditation on ambition and despair tracks Linda's ascent from rock bottom, the wordless place. "English has failed me. Body is the only way out. But how do you speak Body?"

Her best teacher is a fallen stone wall on her Maine homestead. Rebuilding it, she learns how physics magnifies strength, and how language is another way to move things. "The impossible is only a name for what we haven't yet accomplished," she says. Change the definition of failure and loss. Use obstacles as leverage. Take matter into your own hands, and speak Body English.

Recipe for a Young Woman’s Coming of Age: Open to Paris, 1969, one year after the French student uprising. Drop American graduate student Naomi Weiss into a broth of medieval history and contemporary political turmoil. Flavor with a slice of the twelfth-century love affair between philosopher Pierre Abélard and his pupil Héloïse. Tie a hidden manuscript, dated 1137, into a bundle with a failed librarian who begs Naomi to transcribe his treasure, and an eminent professor who traded Jews to the Nazis for valuable books. Throw the bundle into the broth with a mysterious woman who can’t remember her own story. Sprinkle with two French feminists who dream of starting a farm for women. Turn up the heat and cook for one semester.