THE GEOGRAPHY OF DESIRE by Linda Gambill - Spotlight

 


It's 1978, and twenty-four-year-old Linda Gambill is stuck with a dead-end job, a nightly marijuana habit, and a troubled relationship with a former professor. Desperate to explore the world and find her place in it, she makes good on a long-held dream. She joins the Peace Corps. 

A year later, she arrives in Medina, a devout Muslim village in The Gambia, West Africa. She's tasked with teaching health and nutrition to the village women, but they have no confidence in a young white woman trying to change their ways. Instead of finding a sense of belonging, Linda becomes so depressed she can barely leave her hut. 

When tragedy strikes, her perspective shifts from self-absorption to service. She learns the local language, forges friendships, and begins to make her mark on the village, all the while falling in love with two very different men. 

But it is only when violence erupts that the course of her life becomes clear. 

Richly sensual and poignant, The Geography of Desire is the story of one woman's transformative journey amidst the challenges and beauty of West Africa, showing how the people we set out to change, in the end, change us.


Linda Gambill has been a therapist at a state psychiatric hospital, a Peace Corps volunteer, a nationally exhibited photographer, and an ESL teacher at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga.

Her writing has appeared in Persimmon Tree and Parhelion Literary, and is forthcoming from Allium: A Journal of Poetry and Prose.

The Geography of Desire: A Memoir of West Africa is her first book.

She lives in the South with her husband and their overly talkative rescue cat.

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