About
“‘What do you fear, lady?’ he asked.
‘A cage,’ she said. ‘To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.’
”
Lynn Stansbury started telling herself bedtime stories as a little girl left alone in the dark and haunted by pictures in Life magazine of Nazi concentration camp victims. All of her fiction reaches back to these origins: the need to find—and give—sanctuary even in the simplest things and to face evil in the world, even when the worst is in ourselves.
Lynn served in the Peace Corps in Guatemala in 1968-69 just as that country was sinking into what would be stretch into thirty years of genocidal civil war. Her short story collection, Not All Dead Together, grew from that time and the people she knew and loved there. She finished a BA in art history in 1970, helped start community clinics in California, went on to public health and medical training in Hawaii, and then to live and work all over the US and the Pacific rim. Her first two mysteries, The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, (iUniverse, 2000) and A Bird in the Hand (iUniverse, 2006), are set in American Samoa, where she and her husband worked for several years during that territory’s emergence from 60 years of colonial rule amidst the tragi-comic disentangling of US official and traditional Samoan culture. Their next post was North Dakota’s Standing Rock Sioux reservation—the same now resisting the Dakota Pipeline—and then four years in Denver, Colorado, after her husband rejoined the Army and Lynn got a job as the Colorado Coal Miners’ Pneumoconiosis (Black Lung) program. (That is, her, a VW Rabbit, a spirometer, and a lot of maps of Colorado.) A time they were also involved in the Central American underground railroad, helping political refugees get across the US to sanctuary in Canada—experiences that formed the basis of Lynn’s third mystery, Loose Cannon (iUniverse, 2011) and her fourth novel Crossing the Divide (iUniverse, 2020).
After the Army transferred her family to San Francisco in 1986, Lynn spent seven years as a primary care physician for a farmworkers clinic in the Sonoma wine country and then, when the Army moved the family to Washington DC in 1993, eleven years at the NIH before joining the research group at Maryland Shock Trauma. In 2013, she and her husband escaped west again to the Gray Havens, AKA, Seattle. Their jointly authored medical textbook, Massive Transfusion, was published by the AABB Press in 2019. Lynn holds master's degrees in creative writing from Johns Hopkins and the University of Washington, remains active in trauma research at the UW Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center, serves as a regular reviewer for the medical journal Transfusion and a fiction editor for The Baltimore Review, and keeps track of grandchildren in New Zealand and Wisconsin.