I met Nancy Means Wright when we were both panelists for a Sisters in Crime discussion at a library in Vermont. Maybe it was a shared love of the mountains that nudged me to take a shine to this blunt and eloquent woman. Once we started talking, my upbringing on a dairy farm sparked her interest to tell me about her mysteries set on a dairy farm in Vermont. Then the talk went on to burning barns, and, well, the rest is history.
THE IRREPRESSIBLE VERMONT WOMAN by Nancy Means Wright
Vermont has always seemed an Eden, a land of milk and honey, a place for
healing and quiet meditation. A land that, early on called itself a Republic, a
self-governed country that coined its own money and broke the rules it didn’t
care for. Like the biblical Eden, there is always a snake in the garden. A
decade ago I saw that small independent farmers were losing their farms, and
that harmful drugs were infiltrating our paradise, poisoning our youth. I felt compelled
to write in defense of those children and their parents.
When a pair of elderly famers
were assaulted back in the ’90s, I began a novel, knowing only that I would set
it on a hardscrabble farm run by a female farmer whom I’d call Ruth after a
resourceful relative of mine. She would be tough and resilient, yet vulnerable
as women often are, and angry at anyone who would harm her kids or do any kind
of injustice to a neighbor. Since it was March and my driveway a mud bath, I would
set the novel during mud season and call it MadSeason. A Boston Globe editor who’d liked one of my books said that locale
should be “a reason, not merely setting” for a plot, so I tried to make the
fictional town of “Branbury” a virtual character. Vermont is, after all, a land
of extremes: ice, snow, heat, mud. In winter we huddle beside our woodstoves; when
claustrophobia sets in, tempers might explode. The crime rate in Vermont is
low, but when a murder occurs, it can be violent–and usually domestic.
My fictional Ruth Willmarth (a family surname)
would have thirty cows on her farm, which she’d name after famous or literary
women like Jane Eyre, Oprah. She’d be like myself as author, fumbling and
bumbling and trying to find out whodunnit and why—especially why. Since I was going through a divorce
at the time, I would make her a single mother of three whose husband has run
off with another woman (that snake in the garden again). When Mad Season came out from St Martin’s Press
(I lucked out, using my husband’s name as agent), The Philadelphia Inquirer called
Ruth “earthy, funny, hot-tempered, and sexier than she knows—the glue for this
admirably crafted first novel.”
I wrote four more before the
series came to an end (Harvest of Bones,
Poison Apples, Stolen Honey, Mad Cow Nightmare with Belgrave House).
By now I had a number of other
published books, along with four grown children, and for their sake I began to
research my forebears. At the turn of the 20th-century my Scottish grandmother
took ship to NYC, alone, at the age of seventeen. Her half-sister had married
an American, died in childbirth, and my granny had to give up a chance at
university to be nanny to that sister’s brood of seven children. In time, she
married her middle-aged uncle, gave him six more babies and ultimately moved to
Vermont. I soon discovered in the Edinburgh, Scotland archives that she was
illegitimate! It took a few scotches for me to digest this stunning news. But,
I had to tell her story, along with the story of her oldest child, my mother
Jessie.
I would put these women in a
novel rather than memoir because in fiction one can make changes and write the
story “slant.” After all, I had only the basic facts, along with family legends,
doubtless altered with the telling, like the fictional tale of my grandmother’s
journey to America, published in Seventeen Magazine. I would set the novel in
the machine tool town of Springfield, Vermont, which was on Hitler’s list
during World War II. I created a love affair between my heroine, Jessie, who teaches
English to foreigners, and a young Polish poet, of whom her pious uncle
bitterly disapproves. As far as I know, my grandmother was never in love with a
young Pole, who despite his pacifism, fights for his new country in WW1, but
like my proud mother Jessie, who never revealed her illegitimate origins (if
indeed she knew) my granny stored her secrets deep inside.
Since my novel (Queens Never MakeBargains, published by Wind Ridge Books) tells the story of three passionate
Vermont women who carry on their lives through two world wars, a pandemic and a
Great Depression, I write from three different points of view. In Part 3, for
instance, I’m in the head of rebel Victoria, the youngest of Jessie’s charges,
who is hopelessly in love with a married professor and with the Spitfire
airplane she ferries during WWII.
But, it’s Jessie who holds the family—and the book— together. Jessie, based
on my own mother who nourished four children through two wars and endured the early
loss of a husband with no money for health or life insurance. I was the
youngest and she took me with her into a girl’s boarding school so I could have
an education while she worked.
For me, Jessie is the quintessential tough, creative, irrepressible
Vermont woman.
BIO:
Nancy
Means Wright has
published numerous books of fiction (mystery and mainstream), with St Martin’s
Press, Perseverance Press & elsewhere, including two historical mysteries
featuring 18th-century Mary Wollstonecraft. Her most recent historicals
are Walking into the Wild (Prince and
Pauper Press), and the multi-generational novel, Queens Never Make Bargains (Wind Ridge Books). Short stories appear in American Literary
Review, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Level Best Books, et al. Her children’s
mysteries have received an Agatha Award and Agatha nomination. Nancy
Next week my guest will be attorney and author V.S. Kemanis. If you are in New York on December 19, join V.S. and other
mystery writers at the KBG Bar for the Mystery Writers of
America Crime Fiction Reading. V.S. will be reading an excerpt from her upcoming novel, Forsaken Oath.
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FRIDAY FEATURES is a steady presence on Out of the Fog where I explore the concept of "strong women." Who are they? What makes them strong? How do we see them in writing and/or in business? If you're an author, what is their place in the world of thrillers of mysteries? If you're in business, how is the working environment impacted by the presence of a "strong woman" and how are they seen as leaders and team members? If you're an emerging strong woman, tell us about your journey. Have other questions you find compelling? Ask away and I'll post the answers here.
If you have something to say about the topic of
strong women, contact me on Twitter:
@conniehambley.
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