Nina McConigley writes about a different kind of West
June 28, 2026
Elisabeth Sherwin -- ensherwin@gmail dot com
Columnist
(LYONS,CO.) -- 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 to 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 citizenships).
“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 June 18 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 got English degrees at St. Olaf College and University of Wyoming and her MFA in creative writing at 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 ball caps not cowboy hats. And she won a PEN award for her non-traditional collection.
“I push back on what people want from a Western story,” she said.
“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 class in drama at CSU.
She taught at 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 who live in 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 on 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 near 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 to have her major in English. But they were dubious when it came to her desire to get an MFA 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, go to her website at NinaMcConigley.com
-- Reach Elisabeth Sherwin at ensherwin@gmail.com
For More Information, Visit These Links:
www.NinaMcConigley.com
|
