Sandra Scofield

Sandra grew up in Texas and was educated in Catholic schools. After college (University of Texas) she traveled and lived in Mexico, NYC, the San Francisco area, and Chicago. Later she did graduate work at Cornell, Northern Illinois University, and University of Oregon. She settled in Southern Oregon for twenty years, and has lived in Montana for a decade. She was a public school and college teacher for ten years, and since then has devoted herself to writing and teaching writing (Iowa Summer Writing Festival; Lasell University's Solstice MFA Program), and to painting, an endeavor that developed after her move to Montana. Sandra's first published writing occurred in a Catholic newsletter when she was seven: "I'm a Texan, tall and strong..." and writing has nourished her her whole life. Her archives are housed at Texas Tech University's Sowell Library. As you would expect, she is an avid reader. Favorite authors include Mavis Gallant, Sybille Bedford, Tove Jansson, Shusako Endo, Claire Messud, Oliver Sacks; the poets Lisel Mueller, Emily Dickinson, and Billy Collins... the list goes on! She loves to watch European movies and mysteries on TV. Sandra has been married to Bill Ferguson, a Montana native and retired teacher, since 1975. She has a daughter and granddaughter. Some of her wonderful past students: Sarah McCoy, James Anderson, Anita Amirreszvani, Deborah Taffa. She has compiled her teaching files--resulting in THE LAST DRAFT: A NOVELIST's GUIDE TO REVISION, a companion book to the perennial THE SCENE BOOK: A PRIMER FOR FICTION WRITERS, both from Penguin, and is working on a 9th novel, based on her years as a child in Texas convent boarding schools. She loves books from New York Review Books, revisiting such wonderful classic authors as David Plante, Henry Green, Jean Giono, Elsa Morante, and Elizabeth Taylor.