Meet the Author at Paragraphs - "The Paragraph Ranch"

Lubbock authors, Kay Ellington and Barbara Brannon, have collaborated on a series of joyful, realistic, and humorous novels set in West Texas on the fictional Paragraph Ranch. Both women are familiar in Texas literature circles and are creators of The Working Writer blog. They appear frequently at writer’s workshops and have lived parts of the story told in “The Paragraph Ranch”–and imagined lots more of it.

We are pleased to welcome Kay and Barbara to Paragraphs to read from and discuss their novels.
“The Paragraph Ranch” in its determination to be authentically Texan and its emphatic devotion to a very specific setting, will give Texans a kick out of recognizing themselves and being able to nod their heads and say, “I know exactly what they’re talking about.”” (The Texas Book Lover)

“The Paragraph Ranch” — Every writer knows you can’t go home again. But that’s just what is required of West Texas expatriate Dee Bennett-Kaufmann when her mother is badly injured in a mysterious car accident. Single-again “Dr. Dee” has never been on the “A-team” in her trendy East Coast MFA program. When a prestigious summer fellowship gives her the chance to finally finish her book, salvage her career, and spend some quality time with her college-age daughter, Dee’s certain her luck is about to change. Returning to care for her irascible, widowed mother threatens all of that. With so much at stake, Dee engineers a series of unorthodox strategies and creative tradeoffs to keep her options in play—and despite herself finds friendship, love, and the power of words in the unlikeliest of places.

“A Wedding at the Paragraph Ranch”, the second book in the series is also available. As new owner of the falling-apart family homestead in West Texas, Dee Bennett is wrangling ways to earn a living, mend fences with farm and family, and manifest her dreams as a writer—all while nurturing the budding relationship with her beau, outdoorsy photographer Max Miller. But when a drop-dead-gorgeous, high-powered handler for a candidate in a key statewide election blows into Claxton, rivalries bigger than politics and football develop. With stakes running high on the campaign trail, as well as in publishing dreams and love lives, a Bennett family wedding must be attended to. And Dr. Dee, with the assistance of her motley writing-group protégés, must search her soul and fend off a host of challenges to live the life she just might learn to love.

Kay Ellington, a native West Texan and an alumna of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, has worked in newspaper audience and content development for thirty years from New York to California to the Carolinas and back again to Texas.

Editor and travel writer Barbara Brannon, author of The Ferries of North Carolina: A Guide to the State’s Nautical Highways, has spent most of her career in book publishing and led the groundbreaking Publishing Laboratory at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.