My name is Linda Lear.

I’ve been writing full time (as my day job) since 1994 when I stepped away from being a history professor to finish writing my first biography, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature thanks to a Smithsonian Institution Fellowship. Although I’ve continued to teach American Environmental History at George Washington University and at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, my passion lies in being a writer and in “telling lives.”

For the last fifteen plus years I’ve been writing biographies. The most recent is Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, which was published first in the UK by Allen Lane (Penguin) in 2007 and then in the US by St. Martin’s Press. I have written scholarly articles and popular essays for newspapers and literary journals. And I have been invited to speak all over the United States and in England . My biography of Rachel Carson has brought international interest. Published in 1997, it was reprinted in 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I was awarded an honorary doctorate in humane letters for my work on women and the environment by Chatham University in 2008.

In 1998 my Carson biography was published in the UK and I was invited on book tour in London. Quite by accident while there, I discovered that Beatrix Potter, the famous children’s writer and illustrator, had been a keen student of natural science, especially in mycology, (the study of mushrooms). I learned that she had spent the better part of her adult life as a sheep farmer in the Lake District of England and that her wonderful children’s books were only a small part of her fascinating life. Here was another life in nature that needed telling, and so began my latest decade long sojourn in writing the life of a 19th-century creative woman scientist whose life centered in the natural world.

I am a graduate of Connecticut College and am honored to serve on its Board of Trustees. My great dream was to make my research papers on Carson and Potter available to students and scholars. Last year we opened The Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives in the Shain Library, where my research collections are part of a large and flourishing collection of manuscripts and books on the natural world and the environment.

My husband, John Nickum, who centers my life and work, is retired and an active garden railroad designer/builder and historic ship modeler. We live in Bethesda, MD, with four terriers: three Norfolks and one Westie. John is an avid gardener as well. In 2001 we bought a home in Charleston, South Carolina, where we spend part of the year (the cold part) with yet another garden, and where I have discovered many more lives to tell and plants to love.

“TELLING LIVES”

I believe that the subject chooses the author. As a writer I know when that “moment” has come and when another life has touched and fascinated me to the point that I cannot leave it alone. But within both huge research projects of the last fifteen years, I have encountered hundreds of lives that merit telling. These attendant lives orbited around Potter, the Victorian writer and artist, and around Carson, the 20th-century environmental writer and ecologist. They deserve a “telling”.

I am not a biographer interested in “the life and times” but rather in telling a life in time. We cannot ever get the truth of another’s life, but we can try to catch at its creative spirit and the varieties of a life lived. “Telling Lives” is my record of some of these people who have caught at me, and whose creativeness touched the natural world. Some of them you will know, many you will probably not know, but I hope you will enjoy being introduced. I am deeply interested in the intersection between the creative process and the natural world – not only as a writer but as someone deeply concerned about the future of our earth and the interconnectedness of all life.