183: Linda MacKillop- Author of The Forgotten Life of Eva Gordon

Our guest this week is Linda MacKillop (The Forgotten Life of Eva Gordon, Kregel Publications May 2022). Linda took a rough draft she’d worked on for years into her new MFA program and emerged with a polished manuscript, including a central character often likened to Olive Ketteridge. We discuss what it’s like when your protagonist is both difficult and suffering from memory loss, (which of course makes her unreliable) and how switching from first person to third person close made that task more manageable. She also shares marketing tips about interfacing with local community resources and how she didn’t avoid, but embraced using her faith to enrich the story’s themes.  Linda MacKillop writes fiction for both adults and young people, and creative nonfiction. Her articles and essays have appeared in books, magazines, and literary journals such as Under the Sun and Relief Journal. The Forgotten Life of Eva Gordon is her first novel. Hotel Oscar Mike Echo, her middle-grade novel, releases in June 2023. She earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, Washington. As the mother of four adult sons, she and her husband live in an empty nest outside of Chicago. To learn more about Linda, click here.