A Literary Love Story
On his last day of fifth grade, a buzzard portentously casts a shadow over Moses Thomas, prompting his grandma, Boo Nanny, to warn: “[Y]ou happiness done dead.” Moses lives with Boo Nanny, a former slave who takes in white people’s laundry, and his Daddy, a reporter and business manager of the Daily Record, “the only Negro daily in the South.” Daddy ardently believes in the power of education. In contrast, Boo Nanny thinks her protected grandson “needs to learn by living.” When a mob of white supremacists burns the newspaper office and arrests his father, Moses becomes dangerously involved and discovers what it means to be his father’s son. Relying on historical records, Wright deftly combines real and fictional characters to produce an intimate story about the Wilmington riots to disenfranchise black citizens.
“An intensely moving, first-person narrative of a disturbing historical footnote told from the perspective of a very likable, credible young hero.” Kirkus
“An exceptional novel about the power of memory and desire.” –URSULA HEGI, author of Stones from the River
Virginia Mendenhall, a Quaker from North Carolina, is 33 years old when she travels to the arid plains of eastern Colorado in the mid-1930s to marry Alfred Bowen. They have met only twice and have come to love each other through letters. Now, on an isolated ranch in the Dust Bowl, they must adjust to the harsh ranching life and the dangers of an untamed landscape, as well as the differences between them.
With an extended drought worsening the impact the of the Depression, neighbors turn against neighbors, and secrets from Alfred and Virginia’s past come back to haunt them. But it is the arrival of Virginia’s troubled bother that sets off a chain of evens with life-and-death consequences for them all.
Plain Language is a beautifully told tale of a man and woman fighting against tremendous odds for their land–and their love.
Eighteen-year-old Jay Winbourne has gotten pretty good at taking care of her father, a widower. She barely knew her mother, and never really learned to take care of herself. She and her father live together in a ramshackle Denver house, struggling to make ends meet. Or, rather, Jay struggles. Her father, once a promising playwright, now takes wild chances in the stock market, hoping to strike it rich quick.
When everything goes to pieces, she flees to New York to see if she can make it on her own. But what kind of life can a young woman with no skills, who thinks she’s mostly worthless, find for herself there? And what happens when she falls in love with a struggling musician too much like the father she ran away from?
“Through Wright’s understates and softly poetic prose, Jay’s resolute character, with all its ragged edges, comes easily to life. Equally impressive is Wright’s ability to describe simply and believably the emotional intricacies of developing relationships.” –Publishers Weekly
Barbara Wright is the author of Anny in Love, Crow, Easy Money, and Plain Language, which won a Spur Award from Western Writers of America. In her spare time, she likes to play tennis and jazz piano. She lives in Denver, Colorado, with her husband Frank Gay.
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Because it gives my life meaning. Writing is frustrating, bedeviling, fascinating, and at times magical, but it is never boring. Writing is a process of inching forward and looping backward, again and again, in the messiest way imaginable.
I don’t outline. I write until I figure out what the story is about. The writing needs to be unexpected to keep me engaged. Along the way there are serendipitous turns, unanticipated challenges, and numerous risks. But when I reach that moment of astonishment at having pushed myself beyond what I thought possible—there’s nothing like it.
To paraphrase someone wiser than me: “There is only one rule for writing a successful novel, but nobody knows what it is.” My experience has been that you teach yourself to write by doing it. So do it regularly and often. No one has produced a novel by talking about it or avoiding it.
My novel CROW about the 1898 Wilmington, NC massacre probably would not be published in the current political climate. Would I write it today? Probably not, and therein lies the problem. Self-censorship is deadly. I think of all the great works by African-American writers that were never written because the publishing opportunities did not exist. But there are also books that will never be started by white authors about minority groups. There is only one question that matters—not the color of the author’s skin, but the worth of the novel. Is it good? Is it convincing? Is it authentic? And that can only be determined by reading the book and deciding for yourself.
A middle-grade novel about the polio epidemic in Asheville, NC in 1948 before a vaccine was available. There are many similarities to the Covid pandemic—the fear, the panic, the helplessness, the restrictions. But because polio affected mainly children, the epidemic was more heart-wrenching.
