Nevada short fiction writer Laura Newman—awardee of the 2024 Nevada Writers Hall of Fame Silver Pen Award—grew up in Lake Tahoe and moved to Reno when she was in high school in the mid-’70s.
Although she has never lived outside of the Reno-Tahoe area, she’s traveled extensively, which has inspired her to write about characters from all walks of life, in settings across the globe. Of her second book, The Franklin Avenue Rookery for Wayward Babies, Newman said, “It goes all around the world. The stories are far flung.”
Newman’s latest book, Darling of the Black Rock Desert, released in March, is a collection of three stories set closer to home in locations across the West, including Reno, Genoa, the Black Rock Desert, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Death Valley.
“I concentrated more on where I’m from,” she said. “I wanted to do a deep dive into that. In every story, I start with the location. It’s almost never the plot or character—it’s the location.”
The first story, from which the book gets its title, “The Darling of the Black Rock Desert,” is set in the 1960s in Reno and the surrounding Great Basin. Howi is a man who grew up in the Dakotas as part of the Sioux Nation and lives on the “Pyramid Reservation” with his family. Julia is a Black woman whose father moved her family from Louisiana to Genoa, a small town south of Carson City, to work as a ranch hand, eventually buying the family their own “good green piece of land” and starting a ranch.
A romance begins when Julia picks up Howi as a hitchhiker and agrees to drive him out to Empire, despite it being 70 miles in the opposite direction. They fall in love, accidentally get pregnant and try to make a living and a life with their daughter, Nia, who is born with a physical disability. The story begins in the first-person point of view from Julia’s perspective, but when a tragedy rips the characters’ lives apart, the point of view jumps from character to character, and we get a peek into each of their interiorities, revealing the differing ways in which they handle grief and attempt to heal. Though short, the story unfolds into a rich mosaic that shows how their lives, and the lives of all humans, are tangled together.
When asked about characters from different cultural and racial backgrounds than her own, Newman said she does extensive research and tries to resist perpetuating stereotypes. “We’re all human,” she said, “What am I going to do, only write about old white women? I’m going to write about whatever I want. It’s fiction.”
The book’s second story, “City of Angels,” is set in Los Angeles in 1986, and sprung from Newman’s interest in that year’s Los Angeles Central Library fire; she was intrigued when she read a nonfiction book about the event.
“It’s the biggest fire to ever take place in a United States library,” she said. “I went down, and I explored that library. It’s amazing—built in 1926 with incredible murals and gorgeous architecture.”
After deciding on the setting, Newman dreamed up the characters: Lenny, a Vietnam vet with severe PTSD in his late 30s who takes refuge in the library because it’s quiet, safe and free to access, and Simone, a young artist in college with a bit of an edge. The pair strike up an unlikely friendship before the disastrous fire rips the library apart. The story does have a happy ending, though, as the fire helps Lenny “find his way out of the library” and move forward in his life.
While Newman decided she wanted to be a writer when she was 8 years old, as an adult, she had kids, got married, had a house payment, needed to make a living and didn’t have much time to write a lot. What Newman did have the time to write were 95-word stories for the Reno News & Review’s micro-fiction contest, held annually before the pandemic; that contest is where she got her start in publishing.
“I would enter that every year,” she said. “Because I do think I can write a good sentence. I always did really well with the News & Review contest—winning, placing, having several of them published. One editor called me the Tom Brady of 95 words.”
Newman’s granular attention to detail is apparent in her short stories. Her writing is lyrical, humorous and intentional in the way each sentence and word moves the story along. All of her 95-word stories are available to read on her website, lauranewmanauthor.com/the-writing.
After her kids grew up, and she retired from her career as a general sales manager at KOLO TV, Newman finally had the time to devote to her writing. In 2013, she published her first book, Parallel to Paradise: Addiction and Other Love Stories, with local independent publisher LeRue Press.
“Although that was really cool, and I love the cover, they had no distribution abilities,” she said. “My husband and I had this joke that I spent more money on the dress I bought for the book-signing than I earned from book sales.”
She took a different approach with getting her second book, Franklin Avenue Rookery for Wayward Babies, into print. Using her PR and marketing experience, Newman worked persistently to secure an agent. Out of the 75 she propositioned, she heard back from three. One publisher, Delphinium Books, accepted her manuscript and agreed to publish the book. Darling of the Black Rock Desert is also published by Delphinium and is available for purchase and at the Washoe County Library.