Linda B. Myers, Author

Linda B. Myers is vivid, approachable, snarly, joyful.
And, oh yes, an author.

Now part of the Old Growth in the Pacific Northwest, this opinionated novelist turns her vision and voice to poetry in her first chapbook collection:

Load-Bearing Walls

Available Spring 2026.
Finishing Line Press

Achieving old growth status has its rewards. I’m tougher now. Willing to say the unsayable. My poetry isn’t always an easy read because life isn’t always an easy occupation. I hope it resonates with you. We need to be load-bearing walls for each other.

WHAT POETS SAY ABOUT LOAD-BEARING WALLS

Linda B. Myers’ poems in Load-Bearing Walls are a testimony to aging: her deteriorating body, friends suffering from dementia and cancer, and the ache of mourning those lost to her. With irony, wit, and an open heart, she invites us to accompany her on this rocky journey. In the title poem, Myers admits: “So here I sit shunted to the side of the road,” but acknowledges how we widows are “load-bearing walls for each other.” The two old farmers who drive school bus to enhance their income make a difference in children’s lives. After a wildfire, she listens “for hearts, sprouts, spoors, fireweed,” acknowledging the balance hope brings to our lives. When I offered a community workshop a few years ago, Linda’s poems and her serious ambition stood out. These poems confirm my faith in them.

Poet Alice Derry

With lovely assonance, amid grumbles and blessings—sometimes bitter, often melancholy—the poems in Load-Bearing Walls, are “caught between expectation exasperation exaltation.” With a touch of anger (“I still ignite like a bonfire”), but not lacking in joy, Linda B. Myers describes a fully-lived life, now edging towards a close in a “sanctuary for old women.”

Poet Risa Denenberg

The poems in Load-Bearing Walls speak plainly, without performance. Some walk through a town the poet knows well. Others feel like letters she never sent. A few carry a kind of music, while others hold a meditative ease that sometimes reminds me of Billy Collins, only with sharper edges and less need to smooth things over. A few leave you with no way to unsee what they’ve shown. The truth sits there and won’t move. Hers is a lived voice, one that moves through anger, memory, and the quiet wreckage of everyday life. It carries traces of the women she came up with, the ones who endured more than they were promised and kept going anyway. There’s humor here too, and a kind tenderness that doesn’t need to name itself. Linda B. Myers writes from an often overlooked perspective, one we need more of, and her poems carry on the work those women began. They bear weight, make room, and hold each other up.

Poet John Victor Anderson

EXCERPTS FROM LOAD-BEARING WALLS

An Unkindness of Words:

“You’ve seen the last of me.”
Not quite. You forgot snot rags wadded on the counter,
towels damp with your scent, crusted toothpaste tube.
You left your detritus like mini-suicide notes
for me to discover and place in the trash.

Island Aunties:

How you loved to barter for a priceless
black pearl or last season’s muumuu.
It mattered not. What mattered
is how I sidekicked in your shadow
led astray by a six-foot-two Pele lookalike.

Load-Bearing Walls:

….and in the oddest place, I find it.
Sanctuary for old women.
Load-bearing walls for each other. We listen,
take strength from those overcoming damage
as we overcome our own.
We pluck out time-worn troubles
like tick heads yanked with tweezers

Winter Farmers:

Solemn men, Great Uncle Jim and Grandpa, bodies stiff muscled
rise in the drear to milk before dawn. After udders they jumpstart
one Laidlaw from another where the buses huddle in the equipment shed.
Farmers drive yellow tin cans when fields yield nothing but snow.

Peninsula Currents:

My husband has gone to sea.
I stood alone the last place we stood together
bid him good-bye scattering ashes riverward.

VIEW FROM THE BACK NINE

Opinions of Linda B. Myers appeared monthly in the Sequim Gazette for eight years in the form of rants, farcical to poignant. Here are excerpts from a few.

LIFE SEGMENTS:

When a spouse dies, a new Life Segment probably begins for you. It might be little obligations that get you through from one  to the next. The kitchen still needs to be cleaned, the African violet on the window sill still needs to be watered, and the utility bill still needs to be paid. A trick I found for the long haul: I look at current events from his point of view as well as my own, even though he is long gone. We continue to agree or squabble. It keeps him part of my present.

ROAD TRIPS:

Nothing in the world could make me sleep on the ground ever again. I am no longer spry enough to launch myself away from a wolf spider or banana slug paying a visit to my sleeping bag. Even without attack by nature, I’d suffer months of follow-up chiropractics from the crick in my neck when the air mattress collapsed.

CHIP SHOTS TWO:

Speaking of euphemisms. When a restaurant says ‘field greens’ it means ‘weeds.’ I don’t want weeds in my salads. Gimme iceberg or romaine or leaf and leave the rest of that stuff out with the cowpies where it  belongs.

AND THE WINNER IS …

Maybe the human species has gone as far as it can go. This Big Blue Marble is in a helluva mess. AI is less scary than the faulty old programs that made our own brains functional … we seem to have passed their use-by date. Maybe it’s time for newly evolved Adams and Eves, models with face flaps and no need for water and little fear of change. If they fear change these days, they’d never leave the garden, and what help would that be?

GLAD TO MEET YOU

I won my first creative award in the sixth grade. College, marketing career, and widowhood have not managed to knock the writer out of my soul. One unforgettable day I traded snow boots for rain boots and moved from Chicago to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. I’ve been planted ever since in this magical place (along with a never ending line of rescue dogs).

I’ve published ten books and am a co-founder with my great friend Heidi Hansen of Olympic Peninsula Authors, a group devoted to promoting the many fine authors out here in the wild. Just lately, poetry has turned my head. I’ve had brilliant mentors plus a kickass group of poet friends who tell me when my scribbles need another think or two.

WHAT’S UP WITH ME

  • WHAT IS A CHAPBOOK?

    Ask Google, and you’re likely to be told something like: A chapbook is a small, concise collection of literary work, often poetry, essays, or short stories. It’s a format used by small presses to showcase emerging talent or focused themes.

    In the case of Load-Bearing Walls, twenty-three of my poems deal with people, places and events that have supported me, for better or worse, through many years.

  • SAFE HOUSE       

    Wedge verses under the door.
    Caulk walls with words.
    Poetry keeps the spiders out
    lets salvation in.

    © Linda B. Myers

more…

CLICK TO SEE ALL LINDA’S BOOKS

PHOTOGRAPHY of old-growth tree, green heron, and feather among leaves provided by Carol Rich.