{"id":2550,"date":"2026-10-18T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-18T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/?p=2550"},"modified":"2026-10-17T16:50:54","modified_gmt":"2026-10-17T23:50:54","slug":"tell-me-your-story-steve-lindstrom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/?p=2550","title":{"rendered":"Tell Me Your Story : Steve Lindstrom"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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My incredibly inspiring guest for October is Minnesota author Steve Linstrom. (https:\/\/stevelinstromwriter.com<\/a>) Always a voracious reader, Steve envisioned becoming the next Ernest Hemingway (except for the part about being a jerk to women), but just never found a way to get started. After college, he worked for a national food company in the Midwest, eventually rising to Regional Vice President. Steve retired from the corporate world and started a writing career at age 52, eventually going back to school and earning a Master\u2019s Degree in English Studies, publishing several short stories and two novels.\u00a0After fully retiring as an Adjunct English Instructor at Southwest Minnesota State University, Steve joined a writing group at the Riverview Library in St. Paul, providing him a wonderful prompt to revive old projects and put out new material. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tell Me Your Story
Steve Linstrom<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My writing story begins in a doctor\u2019s office, holding my wife Molly\u2019s hand.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m afraid it\u2019s cancer,\u201d the doctor said. \u201cStage Four.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d done my research and knew what that meant. Molly\u2019s cancer had an average five-year survival rate of 10% to 15%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was over twenty years ago, and I can still feel my guts hardening to stone. We both knew at that specific moment that neither of our lives would be the same again. I was 46.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We went through a great deal over the final years of Molly\u2019s life, most of which I won\u2019t cover here. Suffice to say, she met the challenge with grace, courage and dignity and beat the odds to live with the cancer for four years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I still don\u2019t have it in me to write that story. Perhaps I never will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that day at the doctor\u2019s office is what made me a writer. Up until that point, I\u2019d never written any fiction of any kind. I\u2019d always been a voracious reader, scouring our house for any book I could find and haunting the library. Like many addictive readers, I had dreams of living the life of Ernest Hemingway (except for the parts about being a jerk to women). However, after reading one of his stories, I\u2019d get all inspired, scribble out a paragraph or two and then hold them up to next his. They didn\u2019t appear to even be in the same language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I adopted the \u2018maybe someday\u2019 attitude about writing. Facing mortality makes you realize that someday needs to be today because you never know what you\u2019ll face tomorrow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem was that I never talked to anyone about reading or writing literature. I\u2019d been a successful high school and collegiate multi-sport athlete in the small pond that is South Dakota and I was terrified of not being good at things. I never took a creative writing class. I stepped away from my studies in economics and mathematics to take a few required literature classes but rarely spent any time discussing them. Jocks don\u2019t talk about books in locker rooms, at least not in 1970s South Dakota.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I entered the workplace and created careers in state government and then the corporate world, I ran into much the same issue. I recall a fellow member in my corporation\u2019s Senior Executive Development Program proudly proclaiming that he hadn\u2019t read a book since he graduated from college.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It took the gut punch of my wife\u2019s cancer to finally break something loose in me. I filled the incredibly boring times under the fluorescent lights in doctor\u2019s office waiting rooms and sitting on the cold hard chairs in chemo infusion rooms by scribbling out stories to bring a smile to Molly\u2019s face. I wrote a little about anything and everything. Everything but cancer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I quickly recognized the need to learn craft and took some online courses. My writing began to come to life. I also got a chance to share with other writers and to comment on their work. I found that my writing wasn\u2019t half bad and enjoyed the challenge to get better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time cancer took Molly from us, I\u2019d kind of lost my taste for the corporate world. I realized that every great idea, every innovation, every success that I\u2019d put in place to make a name for myself, was slowly being altered, adjusted, and replaced by nerds just like me who were trying to make a name for themselves. My stories, however, were mine and whether they were good, bad, or terrible, they were mine forever. Mortality forces you to consider legacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I left the corporation at age 52 and decided to get serious about becoming a writer. I clearly had a great deal to learn and decided to get a master\u2019s degree. My economics and mathematics training did not provide sufficient background to get into the program I\u2019d chosen, so I had to take some undergraduate classes at the regional state university in the town where I lived. As I sat in class with kids younger than my youngest son, I noted a two seat buffer zone around the old guy sitting in the middle of the classroom. In the course of the semester, I was able to eliminate the buffer zone, participate in after class discussions and even got invited into a study group. They did not invite me to go to Florida on Spring Break, but that\u2019s probably for the best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By this time, I was ever so fortunate to have become remarried to a loving and supportive woman, Steph, who continues to put up with my journeys into literature nerdom with minimal eye rolling and always a supportive smile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started my graduate work a large university 200 miles away, commuting once or twice a week. They had programs supporting both a Master of Arts in Literature and a Master of Fine Arts and I got accepted to both. I chose to get the MA though I took courses from both programs. I am a firm believer that the study of literature improves creative writing and vice versa. I wrote my thesis on the \u201cIntegration of Literature into the Online Creative Writing Classroom.\u201d To this day, whenever I find my writing getting stale or generic, I invoke the Bradbury Challenge for a few weeks, reading a short story, a poem and an essay daily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Upon graduation I was successful in getting some short stories published and then found a small press publisher for my first novel. I added a second the next year and found moderate success as a regional small press author. My work got enough attention that if I possessed that elusive, undefinable, special sauce that differentiates bestselling authors from the rest of us, someone would have noticed. I think it\u2019s kind of like the ability to hit a major league curveball. You either have it, or you don\u2019t. But if you don\u2019t get into the game seriously, you\u2019ll never know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I took a position teaching writing at the regional state university that I had attended just a few years before and was surprised how much I enjoyed it. Unfortunately, it did not leave much time for (or I didn\u2019t put much time into) my own writing. Like many things, Covid took all of the fun out of teaching and I retired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steph retired as well, and we downsized and moved to the city. I happened upon a writers group starting up at a little local library. The group has reinvigorated and restored my interest and love of writing. I\u2019m getting two or three stories published a year and am writing better than ever. I\u2019ve revived many of the old projects that I\u2019d abandoned and will be putting out a second book of short stories and a third novel in the summer of 27.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes I wonder if I\u2019d had the courage and initiative to pursue being a creative writer earlier, my writing life would have been different. Perhaps that hard right turn forced on us in the doctor\u2019s office over twenty years ago was the only thing that could jar my creative writing abilities. Regardless, the important message is: if you have the desire and passion to create, it\u2019s never too late to start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing is fun again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My incredibly inspiring guest for October is Minnesota author Steve Linstrom. (https:\/\/stevelinstromwriter.com) Always a voracious reader, Steve envisioned becoming the next Ernest Hemingway (except for the part about being a jerk to women), but just never found a way to get started. After college, he worked for a national food company in the Midwest, eventually […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[433,434],"class_list":["post-2550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-steve-lindstrom","tag-the-last-ram"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2H58s-F8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2550"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2554,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2550\/revisions\/2554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}