PHOTO: Best-selling novelist Sandra Dallas at her Colorado home, where she continues to craft stories of women’s resilience and western heritage.
Stories Of Strength Loyalty And The American West
Sandra Dallas discusses the serendipity of rediscovering manuscripts, the emotional weight of sisterhood, and how her journalism background enriches her compelling historical narratives with authenticity and grace.
Sandra Dallas writes with a clarity and conviction born of both lived experience and imaginative compassion. Her novels—nineteen to date—resonate with themes of resilience, moral integrity, and the quiet power of women whose stories too often go untold. Whether set amid the dust and distance of the American West or within the intimacy of family life, her fiction captures the essential dignity of ordinary people navigating extraordinary times.
From her days as the first female bureau chief at Business Week to her multi-award-winning literary career, Dallas has always been a storyteller grounded in truth. Her background in journalism lends her work an authenticity of detail, while her deep empathy gives voice to the overlooked and uncelebrated. Her historical fiction is not merely about events of the past—it is about the emotional landscapes shaped by those events, and the enduring human values that echo through time.
With Little Souls, Where Coyotes Howl, and Tenmile, she continues to explore loss, endurance, and the intricate bonds of family and community. Her characters—especially her women—are fierce in quiet ways, enduring the constraints of their time without surrendering the force of their inner lives.
There is, in Sandra Dallas’s work, a kind of literary stewardship. Her novels preserve not only the voices of the past, but the vital emotional truths that bind us across generations. In every page, there’s a sense of place, a sense of honour, and above all, a sense of grace.
How did revisiting a decade old manuscript and its eventual publication as Tough Luck influence your perspective on the persistence of storytelling?
It didn’t.That manuscript was a freebee. My agent’s assistant discovered it. Neither my agent nor I could remember why we’d put it aside. Reading it after 10 years was like reading someone else’s manuscript. I had forgotten the conclusion and wondered how the manuscript would end. There was little rewriting.
Little Souls intertwines sisterhood with an epidemic backdrop—how did current events shape your depiction of morality and sacrifice?
Because the Spanish flu epidemic was so terrible,I knew my story had to contain tragedy. The greatest tragedy in my life was the loss of a sister. That was why I knew one of the sisters would die. When I submitted the manuscript, the reaction was who cares about Spanish flu? Then COVID came alone, and bingo! So COVID did not influence the story. The story was published because of the pandemic.
In Where Coyotes Howl you explore love and resilience on the High Plains—what drew you to Ellen Webster’s journey in 1916 Wyoming?
Years ago, I read thecirca 1910 autobiography of acowboy. What struck me was how ordinary the man’s life was. When I remembered it, I thought it would make a novel. I no longer had the book and couldn’t find another, because I couldn’t remember the title or the author’s name. So I decided to just sit down and write the story. But as often happens, the story shifted, and my account became the story of a couple who meet and marry, then face challenges of life on a Wyoming ranch. I had the last line of the book years before I started writing the book.
I’ve always read western women’s journals and. What fascinates me is their strength. They worked as hard as men and did the cooking and child-bearing, too.Life was difficult for them, and few people gave them credit.
Your middle grade novel Tenmile follows a young girl confronting harsh realities—how did writing for a younger audience challenge your narrative approach?
Writing for children isn’t that different from writing for adults. A midgrade book is only half the length of an adult novel. So the story’s less complicated. Sentences are shorter. No foul language. In myHardscrabble, I learned only an adult, not a child, can shoot somebody. I learned to think like a child—not so difficult since I’m pretty immature. Iput myself in my protagonist’s placeand imagined what it would be like to be denied a change to realize her dream of becoming a doctor. I drew on my own experience with discrimination, having been told several times, “We don’t hire women for that position.”
Children’s books have come a long way from Dick-and-Jane. They’re realistic. Midgrade readers are sophisticated. So you don’t write down to kids today.
You began your career as a Business Week reporter and first female bureau chief—how does your journalism background enrich your historical fiction’s authenticity?
At Business Week, I covered the West, so I learned about subjects such as mining that play a part in my novels. I learned you can’t change history, but you can change a story to fit that history. Still, you can make up some facts. In my novel Alice’s Tulips, I needed the name of a hotel in Hannibal, Missouri,during the Civil War. Research didn’t turn up one, so I just made it up. Writing for BW taught me that history can give a patina to a story, that it can add interest but not dominate.
Journalism wasa wonderful background for writing fiction. In journalism, you write concisely. No adverbs. And you don’t have writer’s block. You write through the bad days.
Tough Luck is narrated in first person, like your debut —what compels you to return to a distinctly quirky voice in Haidie’s character?
I go back and forth between first and third person. The story dictates the voice. I like writing in first person best, because I can get into the character. Once I do that, the voice emerges. I didn’t set out to create a quirky character. She just turned out that way. The voice was natural. Most writers will tell you their characters take over. That’s what happened with Tough Luck.
What single piece of advice would you offer aspiring authors hoping to write compelling historical fiction rooted in real human dignity?
First, read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Second, just do it. I don’t consider my books “historical fiction.”They’re novels set in historical time periods. If you want to write historical novels,know the background, the history, and especially know the social life of your time period. You don’t have to do as much research as you would for a nonfiction history, but you have to know enough to give your book a sense of authenticity. That old saw, write about what you know, really isn’t accurate. You can learn about anything. But you have to learn it well.
Make sure history is secondary to the story. Your characters and their reaction to history are what matters. Some authors have done an incredible job of research history, and by God, you’re going to read every word ofit. They forget a novel is a story, not a history book. Most important, go to the place you’re writing about. Soak up the atmosphere. Imagine what your character feels. When I went to eastern Colorado while writing The Diary of Mattie Spenser, I realized there were only two trees in sight, and one of them was dead.Mattie wouldn’t have reacted to that if I hadn’t been there.
