When Victoria Wright began writing books instead of corporate financial marketing text, she thought she didn’t have anything to say.
That was 13 months and four self-published books ago.
Just before the pandemic, Ms. Wright, a member of the Wampanoag tribe who grew up on the Vineyard and is now based in Colorado, left her marketing position in corporate finance. She had worked for Native American-focused nonprofits, graduated from Suffolk University Law School and segued into working in finance. After 20-plus years, she had hit a ceiling at the senior vice president level and felt her career was stalling. But she had an instinct that there were other possibilities.
“It was my spiritual awakening,” she recalled in a recent phone interview with the Gazette.
She began listening deeply to her own instincts and interests, propelled by a strong sense of spirituality that she trusted was guiding her self-exploration. “I was journaling and I was asking questions and being answered in my journal. That became my first book [Healing Words],” she said.
In the triology she just completed, the main character Evie Prince bears some resemblance to the author — a survivor of the financial world following her artistic instincts after a spiritual awakening.
“Everyone gets inspiration from somewhere,” Ms. Wright said. “I just say . . . you are finally listening to the voice you hear inside your head.”
At 5 p.m. Tuesday, Ms. Wright will discuss her latest work in an online author talk hosted by the Aquinnah Public Library.
The call to writing wasn’t the first time Ms. Wright followed an instinct that led to an unusual choice. A few weeks after she left her job, she saw the microphones in a friend’s home studio setup and was inspired to become trained in voiceover work. “It’s the most random thing in the world. I never thought I would do something like this. But I’ve got 15 books up on Audible now,” she said.
Ms. Wright calls the Vineyard home and has spent every summer except two in the Aquinnah neighborhood her family moved to when she was eight years old. She fondly recalls growing up in a place that felt like a village, full of aunts and uncles who raised her as much as her mother Beverly Wright and father Gordon Wright did. Her parents divorced when she was 12, and her mother moved to Oak Bluffs with Victoria and her brother. She enjoyed active years at the regional high school, playing field hockey, running track, playing in the band and singing in chorus. She also worked at her family’s shop at the Gay Head Cliffs.
She sees ties between the Native American way of listening to nature and her own awakening. “When we have truly listened to nature, to that which is around us, listened to ourselves, we knew what we needed to do,” she said. “You knew when you had to move from one camp to the other, when you could hunt, you knew to take only what you needed. You knew that this was not your land, that you were keeping it for your next generation and the generation thereafter.
“Everyone has that ability: the power to create it. But you have to continually take leaps of faith. You have to trust the process and trust yourself.”
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