The thrill of discovery faded fast. <\/p>\n
Portland booksellers now knew who Sandra Scofield was, but even after news of the National Book Award finalists spread, sales of \u201cBeyond Deserving<\/a>\u201d remained underwhelming. Few people showed up at her readings.<\/p>\n She quickly slipped back into obscurity.<\/p>\n Thirty-four years later, Scofield remains little-known, despite half a dozen more novels, the most recent arriving last year.<\/p>\n Is there some reason the former Ashland teacher, now 82 and living in Montana, never broke through to a wide audience?<\/p>\n \u201cI did sort of wonder, \u2018Why? What\u2019s the difference?\u2019,\u201d she recently said of the period in the 1990s when \u201cBeyond Deserving\u201d and its immediate follow-ups, \u201cWalking Dunes<\/a>\u201d and \u201cMore Than Allies<\/a>,\u201d scored critical acclaim but tepid sales. \u201cThough it never bothered me deeply. I just shrugged and kept on with my life.\u201d<\/p>\n Scofield always has been dedicated to the pursuit of complete honesty about herself. It\u2019s been the driving impetus of her writing, shown most clearly in her lacerating 2004 memoir, \u201cOccasions of Sin<\/a>,\u201d which documents her unstable childhood and shattered teenage self-esteem, the sexual assault she survived \u2013 barely \u2013 in college, and her lifelong struggle to come to terms with her mother\u2019s premature death. <\/p>\n So an hour after she told The Oregonian\/OregonLive that she\u2019d shrugged off her stubborn low profile among the reading public, she sent off an email:<\/p>\n \u201cI lied. I grind my teeth wondering why I fell between the cracks. There. But only once in a while!\u201d<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Portland booksellers back in 1991 may have wondered who Sandra Scofield was, but they weren\u2019t the first. Scofield herself had wondered for years.<\/p>\n She thought the answer could be found by figuring out the secrets of her late mother\u2019s life.<\/p>\n She could vividly recall what was supposed to be a turning point for Edith Hambleton. Scofield was a little girl sitting in a rundown car, her mom about to climb in.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s my life, Mother!\u201d Edith yells at the figure standing in the doorway of the house. Edith steps into the car and slams the door, the sound so loud and shocking there\u2019s no doubt it means the end of something, maybe of everything.<\/p>\n Up until then, young Sandra Jean\u2019s life had been tension-filled but predictable, living in her grandmother\u2019s small house on a dirt street in Wichita Falls. Edith, a high-school dropout who became pregnant at 16, worked as a carhop at a drive-in restaurant called The Pig Stand. Her grandmother packed flour at a General Mills plant.<\/p>\n Edith was an odd duck in the small, conservative West Texas city, reading literary novels, raging at Sen. Joe McCarthy\u2019s communist-hunting hearings on the TV. She doubled-down on her outsider status by converting to Catholicism.<\/p>\n As a first-grader, she later insisted, Scofield understood how her coming into existence had upended her mother\u2019s life, that Edith \u201chad lost something important because of me, a chance to choose a better path, and I vowed right then to make it worth her while to be my mother.\u201d<\/p>\n It was a promise she couldn\u2019t keep.<\/p>\n Her mother tried to strike out on her own and create a life for herself, but before long she fell ill. Edith had a hysterectomy, then contracted hepatis in the hospital. A debilitating depression followed. Soon \u2013 increasingly dependent on drugs, her body betraying her \u2013 Edith found herself in a mental ward.<\/p>\n Scofield has worked through these and other memories, in one way or another, in all of her books.<\/p>\n Her memoir opens on an unexpected scene: Edith, hollow-eyed, posing nude in her bedroom for a photographer, a neighbor, just weeks before she died at age 33. <\/p>\n Scofield found the photo proofs not long after Edith\u2019s death. She would surreptitiously return to them over and over, trying to get a bead on the mother who left her far too soon.<\/p>\n \u201cHow many times I have studied those pictures, trying to guess what she was thinking,\u201d Scofield writes. \u201cDid she like showing her body to the camera? To the man [taking the pictures]? To those of us who would see it later? Was she remembering her youth, or did she think she still had that special something? She does not look like a woman anticipating death.\u201d<\/p>\n When her mother died, the teenaged Sandra Jean began to spiral, convinced she wasn\u2019t a good person, that she too was doomed. The nuns at her Catholic school told her that, to have any hope of being saved, she had to abandon pride and \u201cblow away your fancies.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I did,\u201d Scofield would recall, \u201cfor years and years, until long after I stopped praying for anything else at all.\u201d<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Scofield turned to books as an escape. <\/p>\n At last she had found something that could take her out of her grief and fear \u2013 and ultimately out of her constricting circumstances.<\/p>\n She landed at Odessa Junior College, and she rode her academic momentum to the University of Texas. But her progress was derailed after she got drunk for the first time while hanging out with a group of frat boys. She passed out \u2013 and then suddenly \u201cwoke to the sensation of suffocation,\u201d she wrote years later. She was naked, and one of the boys was on top of her. The others would follow suit.<\/p>\n Scofield blamed herself. She never told police or college officials. <\/p>\n She left school and traveled, through Europe and Mexico, trying to forget what had happened. But eventually she returned home, earned a bachelor\u2019s degree and then attended graduate school in Illinois and New York.<\/p>\n She ended up in Eugene with a husband, Allen Scofield, and a young daughter, Jessica. She completed a Ph.D. at the University of Oregon, pulled the plug on her youthful marriage and began a career in educational research. <\/p>\n Through her work she met Bill Ferguson, then a teacher and education administrator in Montana, and fell hard. He did the same.<\/p>\n In 1975 she and Ferguson married, and the couple and Jessica moved to Ashland. Finally, Sandra Scofield was happy, comfortable in her own skin.<\/p>\n But her past, her long-gone mother, still haunted her.<\/p>\n At 40, even though she hadn\u2019t published a book and didn\u2019t have a literary agent, she decided to concentrate on her writing, giving up the grade-school and high-school teaching she\u2019d been doing.<\/p>\n \u201cBill was solid as a rock, so I could flit a bit,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n But she didn\u2019t flit. She worked hard. She published short stories and poetry, winning a Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and hashed over her personal history in endless drafts.<\/p>\n She began to view herself as a character, thinking that she \u201clived in a story.\u201d<\/p>\n She wrote in the middle of the night while her husband and daughter slept, and after five years she had a manuscript.<\/p>\n That first novel \u2013 \u201cGringa<\/a>,\u201d about a traumatized American woman trying to find herself in Mexico \u2013 hit bookstore shelves in 1989. Scofield gave tandem readings in Portland with another unknown Oregon author, Katherine Dunn<\/a>, who was hawking her new novel, \u201cGeek Love.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGeek Love\u201d took off. \u201cGringa\u201d didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Then, two years later, came \u201cBeyond Deserving,\u201d a family drama set in a fictional version of Ashland and dedicated to Bill and Jessica, as well as to her ex-husband, Allen, who had died in a car crash. The accolades rolled in.<\/p>\n The New York Times called it \u201can intelligent and observant novel.\u201d The National Book Foundation, in naming its award finalists, described the book<\/a> as \u201coften funny, sometimes sad, always wise.\u201d <\/p>\n But \u201cBeyond Deserving,\u201d like \u201cGringa,\u201d remained an aficionado\u2019s taste only, selling just 6,000 copies in early printings. And it didn\u2019t win the National Book Award. (The prize went to Norman Rush\u2019s \u201cMating.\u201d)<\/p>\n It didn\u2019t matter, Scofield told herself. Writing had saved her. <\/p>\n She had many regrets, an endless array of regrets from her youth and beyond, but now she didn\u2019t stew over them like she used to. Writing released them, so she could \u201ccelebrate the good luck I\u2019ve had in life \u2013 and focus on living another day.\u201d<\/p>\n She poured out novels, short stories and essays throughout the 1990s and into the new century, while also leading creative-writing workshops. Her latest novel, 2024\u2019s \u201cLittle Ships<\/a>\u201d \u2013 also set in Ashland, where she and Ferguson lived for nearly 30 years \u2013 was published by a small press in Denver. <\/p>\n Kirkus Reviews has called her work<\/a> \u201cpotent \u2013 it could bring tears to your eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n The New York Times wrote that she \u201cis one of those writers who are as good at not saying things as they are at saying them.\u201d<\/p>\n But that didn\u2019t mean her books were easy to read. They required emotional fortitude. Her characters \u2013 real as well as imagined \u2013 were always working out entrenched trauma of one sort of another. <\/p>\n In a magazine essay, Scofield wrote about how she began screaming when she went into labor with her daughter \u2013 and unexpectedly found succor in the vocal release. \u201cOnce I started \u2013 it was easier than I anticipated \u2013 I could not stop.\u201d<\/p>\n In her 1998 novel \u201cPlain Seeing<\/a>,\u201d about a self-destructive woman and her mother who died young (and which features a photograph of Edith on the cover), her fictional alter ego \u201cthought there was only pain, that it lasts forever, that she couldn\u2019t give in, or show it to anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n Though bestselling success continued to elude her, Scofield never considered taking the route paved by other literary novelists (such as Kate Atkinson, one of Scofield\u2019s favorite writers) of penning genre novels on the side to broaden her audience.<\/p>\n \u201cCommercial writers, who turn out one book after another, they have a special gift,\u201d she said, citing Stephen King as the foremost example out there. \u201cThey have a gift for story, and it\u2019s not personal. And then there are people like me, who walk around with a personal story inside that has to come out. That\u2019s an entirely different thing.<\/p>\n \u201cI only have my story,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Her current project, which she expects to be the last book she ever writes, is another autobiographical novel, called \u201cAll the Nuns Are Dead.\u201d It\u2019s inspired by her adolescent years at Catholic boarding schools in Texas.<\/p>\n But even if \u201cNuns\u201d is the last book she writes, it might not be her last opportunity to pull her way back up through the cracks and into readers\u2019 view.<\/p>\n Talking about her life and career with The Oregonian\/OregonLive prompted her to dig out some old, dusty boxes she had stored in the house, she said. She found lots of \u201cstory starts\u201d in them, ideas for novels, notes she hadn\u2019t looked at for years. Her life, in her own hand.<\/p>\n She also discovered finished stories that she\u2019d never published and had forgotten about \u2013 and, reading through them, realized they were pretty good. <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been wondering what to do with them,\u201d she said. \u201cI might type some of these out.\u201d<\/p>\n If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement<\/a> and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and\/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last month, The Oregonian reported that southern Oregon novelist Sandra Scofield had been nominated for the National Book…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":471202,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[3444,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-471201","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115310533850731084","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Sandra](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/QZLM7AQ45VGE3L263YSU5KKMVQ.jpeg\"\/)
Young Sandra Scofield in Mykonos, Greece. (Courtesy of Sandra Scofield)Courtesy of Sandra Scofield<\/p>\n![\"Sandra](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/BXT5BTLAABB4HOSOM73JBGY34E.jpeg\"\/)
The cover of Sandra Scofield’s novel “Plain Seeing” features a photograph of her mother.Handout<\/p>\n![\"Sandra](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/QBY7LKVXPNAJNFF3KPLA2A2HUQ.jpeg\"\/)
The author photo, by Christopher Briscoe, on the back cover of Sandra Scofield’s first novel, “Gringa.”Christopher Briscoe, from back cover of book<\/p>\n