Nina McConigley was born in Singapore in 1975, but her family moved to Casper, Wyo., when she was an infant. She grew up in Casper with an Irish father, a geologist, and an East Indian mother, a journalist and politician.
There aren’t a lot of East Indians in Casper.
“I made my first trip to India when I was 23,” she said. “For the first time in my life, I wasn’t a minority.”
But McConigley was thoroughly Americanized (although she holds dual American and Irish citizenship).
“I was terrified by the noise, honking, bodies (in India),” she said. “I was more comfortable at a bar in Medicine Bow than in an Indian city.”
McConigley made these remarks at the Lyons Community Library on Tuesday night, where she was invited to give a reading and discuss her new book, “How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder,” and her earlier collection of short stories, “Cowboys and East Indians.”
The community room at the library was full, and McConigley, who lives in Fort Collins and teaches at Colorado State University, was peppered with questions before people lined up to have her sign copies of her book.
McConigley earned English degrees from St. Olaf College and the University of Wyoming, and her master’s in creative writing from the University of Houston.
It’s fair to say she didn’t want to write about Wyoming.
“Growing up was weird in Wyoming,” she said. But that’s where she had her life experience.
“I didn’t have expertise in New York, India, or marriage,” she said. “I kept coming back to (writing about) Wyoming.”
The result, after several failed attempts at both writing and living in other countries, was the short story collection “Cowboys and East Indians.”
She describes the stories as “weird and strange,” about cross-dressers and kleptomaniacs.
The West that she is familiar with is not a Hollywood version of life on the range with cowboys and horses. She is more at home with the boom-and-bust life that comes with oil and gas exploration. Pumpjacks dot the fields, not necessarily cattle. Her men wear ballcaps, not cowboy hats.
“I push back on what people want from a Western story,” she said.
McConigley won a PEN award for her non-traditional collection. “Cowboys and East Indians” was adapted for the stage and ran at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts from January to March of this year. It is moving to theaters in Arkansas and Texas later this year.
And this fall, she will teach a drama class at CSU.
McConigley taught at the University of Wyoming for 13 years and moved to Fort Collins three years ago with her young daughters, Juniper and Marigold.
“I love Lyons,” she told the audience. But she was very disappointed to find that the Marigold restaurant in Lyons is closed on Tuesdays, so she couldn’t take her daughter to dinner before her reading.
“How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder” features two East Indian sisters living in a fictionalized Casper in 1986. The book is fiction but reflects much about McConigley’s adolescence, too.
The girls do commit murder.
“I wanted the girls to have justice and agency,” she said, reflecting in part on how poorly women are treated in India.
McConigley was asked about her writing routine, which she admitted was not very disciplined.
“I can’t do a (writing) residency, because I can’t leave my girls,” she said. “Sometimes I go to a motel for two or three days, and I get a ton of work done in those days.”
McConigley said she was a grown woman before she read E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India.” In it, she found a phrase that nearly perfectly described a person with her type of parentage: “(I was) beset by opposite currents in my blood.”
She said her parents met in India, where her Irish father worked for the Peace Corps. Her mother was a journalist and later a state senator in Wyoming.
When it was time for her to go to college and graduate school, her parents were happy for her to major in English. But they were dubious about her desire to pursue a master’s in creative writing.
Fortunately, McConigley followed her own path and wrote from her heart about what she knew. It just happened to be a weird slice of Western life.
Her question-and-answer session at the Lyons Community Library ended with audience members swarming to a table where she signed copies of her books. And, yes, she is at work on a new novel.
To keep up with her works of fiction and nonfiction, visit her website, NinaMcConigley.com.