Writers at Soapstone: Marjorie Sandor

Marjorie Sandor was awarded a week’s residency at Soapstone in August of 2003. She wrote, “I managed to stay at my desk for double my usual time, and was able to do a lot of very difficult ground work for the last quarter of a long novel, The Descent of Luck, set in a Southern California botanical garden with a rich history about to be lost.” A long chapter that she worked on at Soapstone will appear this December in the Winter 2009 issue of The Hopkins Review. “I'm hugely grateful for the concentrated intensely focused time that Soapstone gave me at a crucial juncture in this book.”

Marjorie Sandor is the author of two story collections, Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime and A Night of Music; and a memoir, The Night Gardener: A Search For Home. Her short fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize XIII and The Best of Beacon. Her writing has been published in journals such as The Georgia Review, The Southern Review and The New York Times Magazine. Awards include a National Jewish Book Award in Fiction, Rona Jaffe Foundation Award for Fiction, and the Oregon Book Award for literary nonfiction. She is a professor of English and Director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Oregon State University.

RUTH GUNDLE