Linguistics Professor Linda Lombardi Quits Job, Joins Zoo

“I threw away a tenured professorship to work at a zoo and pick up animal [poop],” Linda Lombardi told me on the phone last week. Then she launched into a winding tale of her search for a fulfilling work life that began with a fascination with Medieval music and ends with the publication of a murder mystery. Here’s how it unfolded.

When she was in junior high, Linda decided that she wanted to be a musician. “I wanted to specialize in early music,” she recalled, referring to the music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But there was one problem: Linda didn’t play any instruments. “I came to this later in life than most people,” she said, “but I decided I wanted to be a singer, which is one thing you can decide to do later in life and be OK.” So she talked to a teacher about her dream, telling him she wanted to sing and learn to play the recorder. He responded, “That’s good, someday you might sell out a phone booth.”

“Which, I have to say, was very prescient,” Linda said, “because my whole career has been doing things that have a very small audience.” She did learn the recorder and continued to study music, and around that time she stumbled upon a PBS series by Leonard Bernstein. “He took the Noam Chomsky generative language forms and he applied that to classical music. So I was watching this series because I was interested in music, and I got all excited about language, so I went to the library and started reading about linguistics.” And she fell in love.

When it came time to choose a college, Linda applied to schools that had both good music programs and good linguistics programs, and she “ended up at a place where you couldn’t really do either one well.” She also learned exactly how rigorous studying music could be. “You don’t double major in music and something else – not if you want to be a musician.”

“After about a year into college, I realized I was making no progress in either direction, so I dropped out,” Linda said. She worked a few odd jobs and then returned to school at another university, majoring in “linguistics with a lot of psychology.” After finishing her undergraduate degree, she worked in a research lab with a woman who did psycholinguistics research for a while before applying to graduate school. She obtained her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and took a temporary job at the University of Toronto before finding a permanent job in Maryland.

Linda describes being an academic as “almost like being a sports star, you have to have such a passion for it you can’t see yourself doing anything else.” Professional academics have almost no choice over where they live – they have to go where the jobs are – and competition is fierce. There might be three or four job opportunities for a psycholinguist in the whole country each year, and hundreds of applicants for each. “You have to have such a lust for knowledge that it’s the only way to satiate it…You know what lust is like, you can’t think straight and you make ridiculous decisions.” So she moved to Maryland and, in an effort to meet people in her new city, starting volunteering one day a week at the National Zoo.

Linda was thrilled to have her academic job at first. She was hired to build a program in her area of study for the university, but “after one thing and another it didn’t happen, so I was isolated in a department where nobody really cared what I was doing. There was nobody in my department or even nearby to share ideas with, and I was settled in the area and it wasn’t that easy to move.” Finally, after ten years, Linda decided she wanted out.

“When I got sick of it, I said to a friend of mine, you know what I want to do, I want to write mysteries. I really want to set a mystery in Venice Calif, which is where she lived, and where I wanted to live…and I thought I could vicariously live there through the book. And she said to me, you idiot, you should set a mystery at the zoo.” So Linda started drafting the first version of what would become The Sloth’s Eye and began to see her part-time volunteer position at the zoo with new eyes.

One day at the zoo, one of the permanent employees asked Linda to do “some nasty and strenuous job, and she said, ‘I kind of hate to ask you to do this.’ And I said, ‘I’m thinking of trying to do this for a living, so I should probably try and find out what the worst parts of the job are really like.’ She stopped and stared at me, and I think she really said, ‘Wait here, I’ll be right back.’” The zookeepers knew Linda as a committed volunteer, “somebody who had been doing this for ten years, who had been doing this as a hobby on the side of having a regular job.” So whenever a new full-time position opened up, they didn’t even mention it to Linda because they thought she’d be insane to quit her “real” job at the university to clean up after animals.

And yet, that’s exactly what Linda was considering. The zoo had an opening for a temporary keeper, which was supposed to last three months, “so I took a leave from my job at the university, and it was the most fascinating thing I had ever done. I not only never called in sick from the job, I would hope that they would call me in on my day off so I could work. It turned out they needed someone for more than 3 months, so I decided I would stay. So I asked for another semester off, and my academic department started giving me a hard time, which was all bullshit. I had tenure, I could have strung them along for as long as I wanted. But it looked good for my job [at the zoo] becoming permanent, and there was a lot of Woe and Intrigue going on, so I decided to throw caution to the wind and resign my job at the university, because I wanted out.”

The position at the National Zoo position expired a few months later, leaving Linda without a job of any kind, supported by her husband, who she affectionately refers to as “the Technical Staff.” Not the housewife type, Linda continued to pursue her dual-purpose career as a zookeeper/writer. “For the next couple of years, I was trying to write the book, trying to get the book published, and at the same time I was trying to get other zookeeper jobs…Whenever I was thinking of grabbing an opportunity to do something, there were both things going on: ‘oh, this will be really good for my zookeeping résumé,’ and ‘this will be really good in the book.’”

Linda worked for the zoo in Baltimore, a guy who kept poison dart frogs, another frogkeeping job, and again at the National Zoo. “I came away with a lot of reasons where people at the zoo would want to murder each other. It was a good setting, but there was a lot of interpersonal stuff that I never would have known about if I hadn’t worked there.” Meanwhile, writing became a more important part of her career as she also pursued non-fiction. “There was a point where I could have gotten another permanent job at the national zoo,” Linda recalled, “and I said, ‘No I’m trying to do this freelance writing thing.’ I had just sent a bunch of queries and got some really good responses, and then the economy crashed and it turned out to be the worst time ever in history to try and become a freelance writer.” Linda did write for a time as the pets correspondent for the Associated Press, all the while continuing to work on getting her novel finished and published.

The end result was The Sloth’s Eye, which was released last week by Five Star Press and is now available on Amazon.com. It’s a tale of intrigue, murder, and romance that takes place in a large zoo, full of creatures (and minds) great and small. (You can also read a preview of the first few chapters at Linda’s web site, http://www.lindalombardi.com/books/.) And if you’re interested in writing fiction as a career, Linda also has some thoughts on writing novels in general.

Linda stressed the importance of intensive research. “I’m very hesitant to write about anything that I haven’t done. I would never have written about the zoo if I hadn’t worked there. That’s one of those things about being an academic that carries over into the fiction writing, I have a very high standard for how much research should go into writing about something. I actually lived this, there’s a lot of day to day detail in it, and that adds to the plot and character development. I won’t even write about a species of animal I haven’t worked with, because once you know all the details you know how easy it is to get them wrong.”

Think the story’s over? Not by a long shot. Linda has a nonfiction book based on her blog that is due out this fall. Tune in a few months from now to see how her nonfiction career developed on a parallel, but surprisingly separate, path.