ÿþÿþÿþÿþÿþÿþ<html> <head> <title>Nancy Means Wright - Nancy's Backstory</title> <meta name="keywords" content="Nancy Means Wright, author, mystery writer, Ruth Willmarth, Mad Season, Harvest of Bones, Poison Apples, Stolen Honey, books, mysteries"> <meta name="description" content="Nancy Means Wright is the author of the Ruth Willmarth series of mystery books which include: Mad Season, Harvest of Bones, Poison Apples, and Stolen Honey."> </head> <body link="#008000" vlink="#808000" alink="#FFFF00" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> <table border="0" width="700" cellpadding="5"> <tr> <td valign="top" background="images/stratus.jpg" rowspan="3" width="120"> <table border="0" width="100%"> <tbody> <tr> <td width="100%"><font color="#808000"><img src="images/cow.gif" align="left" border="0" height="59" width="42"></font> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#008000"><a href="index.htm"><b>Mary<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Wollstonecraft<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Series</b></a></font> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><p><font size="1">&nbsp;</font></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><a href="index.htm#events">Nancy's Events Calendar</a></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#008000"><a href="index.htm#questions"><b>Discussion<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Questions for<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Midnight Fires</b></a></font> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><p><font size="1">&nbsp;</font></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><a href="backstory.htm">Nancy's Backstory</a></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><p><font size="1">&nbsp;</font></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><a href="willmarth.htm">Ruth Willmarth<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Series</a></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><p><font size="-4">&nbsp;</font></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font color="#008000" face="Arial" size="2">Nancy's Books:</font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font color="#008000" face="Arial" size="2">Fiction</font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><i><a href="madseason.htm">Mad Season</a></i></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><i><a href="harvestofbones.htm">Harvest of Bones</a></i></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><i><a href="poison_apples.htm">Poison Apples</a></i></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><i><a href="stolen_honey.htm">Stolen Honey</a></i></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><i><a href="fire_ice.htm">Fire and Ice</a></i></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><i><a href="mad_cow_nightmare.htm">Mad Cow &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Nightmare</a></i></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#008000"><i><u>Runaway!</u></i></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#008000">The above novels in print, and now<br>e-books (Belgrave House/Kindle).</font> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#008000"><i><u>The Losing</u></i></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><p><font size="1">&nbsp;</font></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font color="#008000" face="Arial" size="2">Nancy's Books for Children:</font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><font color="#808000" face="Arial" size="2"><b><i><a href="peasoup.htm">The Pea Soup<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Poisonings</a></i></b></font><br><font color="#008000" face="Arial" size="2">Agatha Award 2006<br>Best Children's/YA Novel</font> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><i><a href="strings.htm">Down the Strings</a></i></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><i><a href="circus.htm">The Great Circus<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Train Robbery</a></i></font></b><br><font color="#008000" face="Arial" size="2">Agatha Finalist</font> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><p><font size="1">&nbsp;</font></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font color="#008000" face="Arial" size="2">Nonfiction</font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#008000"><i><u>Make Your Own<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Change</u></i></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#008000"><i><u>Vermonters at<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;their Craft</u></i></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><p><font size="1">&nbsp;</font></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><a href="where_to_buy_books.htm">Buy Books</a></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><a href="agent.htm">Find an Agent</a></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><a href="links.htm">Links</a></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><a href="originality.pdf" target="_blank">Originality in<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Crime Fiction <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;panel</a></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><a href="how_i_write.htm">How I Write</a></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><a href="http://calitreview.com/68" target="_blank">An Interview with<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Nancy </a></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><a href="http://writethebook.podbean.com/2008/06/28/write-the-book-14-nancy-means-wright-interview-62808/" target="_blank">Another Interview<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;with Nancy</a></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><a href="bio.htm">Brief Bio For Busy Librarians (and other readers)</a></font></b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"><a href="mailto:nancymeanswright@gmail.com">Contact Nancy</a></font></b> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p><img src="images/clear-dot.gif" width="120" height="1"></p> </td> <td width="580" valign="top"><img border="0" src="images/nancy_means_wright.gif" align="right" width="371" height="41" alt="Nancy Means Wright"></td> </tr> <tr> <td width="580"> <table align="right" border="0" width="210"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <p align="center"><a href="wollstonecraft.htm"><img src="images/midnight_200w.jpg" height="306" width="198" hspace="5" alt="Cover photo of Midnight Fires"></a></p> <p align="center"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-1">Published April, 2010, by Perseverance Press</font></p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p align="left"><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif">Inspired by Nancy Drew, Wright's first novel, written at the age of nine, was a mystery about the kidnapping of a particularly obnoxious older brother. But, dismayed at what she considered an incipient criminal career, her mother destroyed it. So Wright gave up writing mysteries, but went on, through secondary school and then Vassar College, to write stories, poems, and the opening chapters of depressing novels.</font></p> <p align="left"><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif">A Bread Loaf Writer's Conference Scholarship helped launch her first published, autobiographical novel (1973) <b>The Losing</b>, about a young woman trapped in a boys' school who slowly anesthetizes herself with sherry. The cover depicted a hairy hand pulling back a diaphanous shower curtain&#151;a scene created by the illustrator, not the writer! Embarrassed. she sent her husband and oldest child back and back to the local bookstore to buy up copies, and the bookseller only ordered more&#151;he thought he had a best seller.</font></p> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif"><img src="images/nancy_and_cat.gif" width="244" height="168" align="left">After that came more children (four in all) and more books&#151;all written with one foot in the diaper pail: in '82 a YA, <b>Down The Strings</b>, engendered by a slumber party to which her daughter invited twelve kids but got 200; <b>Make Your Own Change</b>, a humorous family memoir; <b>Vermonters at Their Craft</b>, exploring the creativity of Vermont craftspeople, co-authored with daughter Catharine; two chapbooks of poems and short stories in <i>Yankee, Redbook, Seventeen, American Literary Review</i> and other magazines, the kind that pay in copies.</font></p> <table align="right" border="0" width="212"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <p align="center"><img src="images/nancy_reading.jpg" border="1" height="320" width="213" hspace="5"></p> <p align="center"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-1">Nancy: Published in "Seven Days," '08<br>(Photo by Angela Jane Evancie)</font></p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif">&quot;Can you eat copies?&quot; complained her seventh generation-Vermonter husband By this time they were living on a tree farm in Cornwall, Vermont. Wright was running a craft shop in the barn and pushing a pen in between customers and plumbing breakdowns (for the first five years in that creaky 1795 house, there was <i>no</i> plumbing, <i>no</i> electricity; Wright wrote by kerosene light).</font></p> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif">In 1990 came the upheaval&#151;and the new career. A divorce, and then that catalytic news clipping about the assault on the farmers (no, her real life husband didn't run off with an actress&#151;it was an amicable split). And with <b>Mad Season, </b>Wright entered a second career in mystery writing–&#151;no one now to destroy the manuscript. She read Dorothy Sayers, she read Agatha Christie. She plunged in: no outline, no notes, not the foggiest idea of &quot;whodunnit.&quot; She hung out with cows and learned how to milk them; she read old town histories and dug up family secrets. Every chapter held a new surprise! Characters setting fires, kidnapping young boys... And all those fractured relationships to piece back together in <b>Harvest of Bones</b>, and then <b>Poison Apples</b>, <b>Stolen Honey</b> and <b>MAD COW NIGHTMARE</b>, out in April, '05.</font></p> <p align="center"><img border="0" src="images/cow_tug.gif" alt="Nancy and a reluctant cow" width="323" height="219"></p> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif">Well, dear reader, Wright remarried: an English teacher she'd gone with back in her Vassar daze&#151;he wouldn't change his name, but promised to read her manuscripts; he became an insightful critic, along with her grown sons and daughters. He welcomed her small grandchildren, despite getting smacked on the nose, at first meeting, by a flying bottle.</font></p> <table align="right" border="0" width="220"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <p align="center"><img src="images/nancy_hp.jpg" border="1" height="203" width="200" hspace="5"></p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif">It wasn't the flying bottle that ended this marriage after ten years, but sadly, her husband's losing fight with prostate cancer. Wright returned to her 1825 house on a dirt road in Cornwall, Vermont, to her seven young grandchildren, and to the manuscript of Stolen Honey. Three years later a six-foot-two engineer named Llyn Rice, whom she'd met in her local Unitarian Universalist church, came to help her resolve a dozen computer glitches, rehang doors that had refused to open with the shifting of the old house&#151;and stayed on as friend, reader, and helpmate. She has dedicated <b>Mad Cow Nightmare</b> to him.</font></p> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif">So, dear reader, the writing goes on. In 2010 from Perseverance Press, <b>MIDNIGHT FIRES</b>, using the persona of the fiery 18th century feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, a woman labeled by jealous contemporaries as &quot;hyena in petticoats, Amazon, revolutionary.&quot; If her name isn't familiar, think of her daughter Mary, who married the poet Shelley and later wrote <b>Frankenstein</b>. And in September, 2011, a sequel, <b>The Nightmare</b>, set in 1792 when Wollstonecraft wrote her groundbreaking A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. A third will follow, set in Paris during the French Revolution, where she lost her head (metaphorically) to a feckless American.</font></p> <table align="left" border="0" width="210"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <p align="center"><img src="images/circus_train_robbery_200w.jpg" height="303" width="200" hspace="5" alt="Cover photo of The Great Circus Train Robbery"></p> <p align="center"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-1">Agatha Award Nominee for<br>Best  08 Children s/YA Novel</font></p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif">Out in June '06, &nbsp;<b>THE PEA SOUP POISONINGS</b>, a humorous juvenile novel, from Hilliard & Harris: A young girl's grandmother dies after eating pea soup laced with insecticide&#151;and young Zoe, with the help of neighbor Spencer, brings the perpetrators to justice! And in  08, a sequel, <b>THE GREAT CIRCUS TRAIN ROBBERY</b>.</font></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif">Please check out <i>Amazon Shorts</i> at amazon.com for Nancy's short stories, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000EBDHUU/qid=1139073702/sr=1-10/ref=sr_1_10/104-5894817-2507938?s=books&v=glance&n=551440" target="_blank">"The Outpost"</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000GCFQJC/ref=dp_bib_1/002-7656321-4943220" target="_blank">"The Great Hunger"</a>&#151;not mysteries, but you might have a few laughs. Only 49 cents each to download! </font></p> <img src="images/quarry_200w.jpg" align="right" alt="Quarry: Crime Stories by New England Writers" hspace="5"> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif">And in a copy of the anthology Quarry (Level Best Books), out in November '09, you'll find Nancy's story <b>IVORY</b>, about a Vermont pianist who tries to smuggle forbidden ivory (keys) through US Customs. Lots of other great stories in this collection! <b>"BOX CAR,"</b> set in the 1930s, came out in the February '10 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.</font></p> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif">And the poems keep flying out of her head and onto paper: </font></p> <ul> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif">The victim-protagonist of <b>Harvest of Bones</b> came out of my poem: <a href="aunt_beulah_wont.htm"> &quot;Aunt Beulah Won't Take a Walk at Waterbury.&quot;</a></font></p> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif">And then I had an experience with a poison apple of my own recently when my doctor found a lump on my breast (though all is well now) and this poem, <a href="apple_doctor.htm">&quot;Apple Doctor,&quot;</a> came out of it.</font></p> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif">Check out two more <i>mysterious poems</i> about the Wright/Willmarth family secrets: <a href="grandmother.htm">&quot;My Grandmother's Bust&quot;</a> and <a href="plant.htm">&quot;The Plant.&quot;</a></font></p> </ul> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif">More poems: </font></p> <ul> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif"><a href="shady_sisters.htm">&quot;The Shady Sisters&quot;</a></font></p> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif"><a href="before_the_freeze.htm">&quot;Before the Freeze&quot;</a></font></p> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif"><a href="getting_to_know_you.htm">&quot;Getting to Know You&quot;</a></font></p> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif"><a href="close_encounters.htm">&quot;Close Encounters&quot;</a></font></p> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif"><a href="love.htm">&quot;Love&quot;</a></font></p> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif"><a href="escape.htm">&quot;Narrow Escape&quot;</a></font></p> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif"><a href="acrophobia.htm">&quot;Acrophobia&quot;</a></font></p> <p><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif"><a href="anna.htm">&quot;Anna's Goat&quot;</a></font></p> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> </td> </tr> <tr valign="bottom"> <td width="580"> <p align=center><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-1">&copy; Copyright 2001 - 2011, Nancy Means Wright. All rights reserved.</font></p> <p align=center><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2">This site maintained by<br> T.D. Bennett Group, Inc.</font></p> </td> </tr> </table> <!-- Start of StatCounter Code --> <script type="text/javascript"> var sc_project=5224433; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_partition=59; var sc_click_stat=1; var sc_security="436096da"; </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.statcounter.com/counter/counter.js"></script><noscript><div class="statcounter"><a title="website statistics" href="http://www.statcounter.com/" target="_blank"><img class="statcounter" src="http://c.statcounter.com/5224433/0/436096da/1/" alt="website statistics" ></a></div></noscript> <!-- End of StatCounter Code --> </body> </html>