Nancy Harris McLelland, Writer

 

Nancy Harris McLelland did not just fall off the turnip truck. She realized quite a while ago that online publishing was more fun and less painful than papering a bathroom wall with rejection slips from literary journals and publishing houses.

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An Elko County native, Nancy grew up on ranches along the flank of the Ruby Mountains–from a small cow calf outfit in Lee, to the showplace 71 Ranch in Starr Valley, and the Marble Ranch headquarters in Deeth.  A graduate of Elko High School, she has a B.A. in English from the University of Nevada, Reno and an M.A in Language Arts and Literature, from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.  

 

Nancy taught creative writing, composition, and literature for over twenty years at Mendocino College, a small rural community college in northern California. For many years she maintained a “dual residency” in  northern California and her heart’s home in northeastern Nevada.  At present, home means Nevada, dividing her time between Carson City and her perennial fixer-upper in Tuscarora.

 

A seasoned and “user friendly” writing instructor, McLelland has conducted writing workshops for the Western folklife Center, Great Basin College, and the Great Basin Writing Project, as well as at her place in Tuscarora.  

 

McLelland has presented her “Poems from Tuscarora” at both daytime and evening events at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko. Her essay, “Cowboy Poetry and the Literary Canon” is in the anthology Cowboy Poetry Matters. She is a contributor of poetry to the Nevada Humanities Heart-to-Heart: Our Pandemic Stories. She’s not very good about submitting to literary journals, but she is pleased to have poems in the UNR Brushfire; New Mexico Magazine; Edge, Tahoe Writers Works; and numerous poems in the Writers of the Mendocino Coast annual anthologies.