Nancy Plain: Hello, my name is Nancy Plain. I am the second writer in my family with the last name Plain. The first was my mother, the novelist Belva Plain, who wrote the novel Evergreen, and more than 20 others. So I feel that I'm carrying on a family tradition, but in my own way with non-fiction instead of fiction. My parents told me that our name was originally Russian and spelled P-L-E-H-N. But when my father's people emigrated from Russia to America, the spelling got changed at Ellis Island, that's how it became P-L-A-I-N. You can remember it as the opposite of fancy.