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 THE SCENE BOOK, my craft book for writers, published by Penguin. Sandra's papers are held by the Southwest Archives at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. Sandra Scofield grew up in a fragmented family in West Texas, and though she lived in Oregon for 30 years and recently moved to Montana, she says, “I look out my windows at beautiful foothills, but when I sit down to write, I see plains and a vast sky. I never felt at home in Texas, but in some ways I still live there.” She grew up in a world of women; men were unreliable. She lived years of her adolescence with nuns, relied on a grandmother and aunt through childhood and after her mother’s death, then zigzagged through young adulthood coast to coast. At 29 she had a daughter, “the real start of my maturity,” and soon after entered her second, lasting marriage. Her work history was quixotic until she settled down at 40 to write her first novel. In some ways, she’s never looked up. It’s understandable, then, that Scofield’s books involve ordinary folk with no special advantages who grind out small personal victories against hardscrabble backdrops. Four of her seven novels are set in Texas, and the two novels set in Mexico have Texas characters living out of place. Still, she thinks of her work as a reflection of ordinary contemporary American life; the National Book Award 1991 committee said that her “precise prose holds the reader in the grip of the commonplace rendered fresh.” In other words, you will probably recognize the people in her fiction, but you will learn things about them that you didn’t know, or couldn’t articulate. Her first novel, Gringa, about a young Texas woman in Mexico, won a New American Writing Award; her second, Beyond Deserving, was a 1991 finalist for a National Book Award; A Chance to See Egypt, her most romantic novel, won a Best Fiction award from the Texas Institute of Letters in 1997. She received an NEA fellowship in 1991. Scofield’s apprenticeship began as a child, when reading and writing were already at the center of her life.Now, as always, she learns by reading and engaging in what she thinks of as ongoing secret dialogue with authors. She buys about 100 books a year, most of them by new or under-appreciated writers, many from small presses. |
 Photo of the author. COPYRIGHT Mary Economidy YOU CAN WRITE ME!! readermailATsandrascofield.com (replace AT with appropriate symbol; keep spam away!!) Send me your responses and questions. I love to hear from readers. You may also order OP books from me directly. Most are about $12.00. The craft book and memoir pb are widely available. ____________ I am presently working on two projects. One is a nonfiction book, WHAT WE LOST TO GRIEF. It concerns my childhood relationship with my grandmother, Frieda, and the ways (I see now) that her grief and anger shaped our family. One of the essays, "Under the Apricot Tree" was published in America and is included in the Best Catholic Writing 2006 anthology. Another essay, "Anger," was published last year in the journal IMAGE. The other evolving book is OH BABY OH, a collection of linked long short stories set in the sixties. Praise for Occasions of Sin "All this is to say that the events...have been churning in Scofield's imagination and ideation for a lifetime, and they moved her primally. We are graced as she attempts to confront their meaning, for she has insight and language strong enough to bring us along." Art Winslow, former literary editor of The Nation writing in the Chicago Tribune 
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