Dawn Chandler was born in Coffeyville, Kansas, but doesn’t remember much about it. Though she recently had the opportunity to visit there with her husband, and she very much enjoyed the Dalton Museum, she always thought she should have been born in the Wild West. She moved to Idaho when she was six and grew up on Murtaugh Lake, where her father was the dam keeper and the ditch rider. She spent her days in the lake, swimming, catching fish and tadpoles, from sunup to sundown most days. Not hard to imagine that her first full length novel was about a mermaid.
At night, she would spend her time watching football with her dad or cooking with her mom. In eighth grade, she had a teacher, Mrs. Smith, who wanted her to publish one of her short stories. Looking back on it, Chandler says she should have done so. If she had, she would have been an author before now, but she was not ready to be published back then. When she first started writing in school, she hated it. She had to write their way and only their way—in the correct process, outline, rough draft, and so on. Chandler has learned in the progressing years that she is a seat-of-the-pants author, but, in the beginning, she just thought that writing was not for her. She could not, no matter how she tried, get the outline done. She could not sit and sketch out a whole story from beginning to end. She found quickly that, if she just sat and wrote, she could get the first draft out without a problem, but the teachers didn’t want her to do it that way. She really began to love writing when she met Mrs. Smith, and she told Chandler that she could write it in whichever order she wanted. She understood her as a writer and didn’t push her to be something she wasn’t. Chandler has been writing ever since. She is grateful to have the support of her husband and children. Together they have seven, Charles, Cynthia, Kara, Mary, Tina, Pam, and Richie. She loves them all dearly and is happy to have them in her life. Now that her kids are all grown up, she likes to spend time on the semi-truck with my husband, Rod, seeing the country. She loves visiting all the small towns and is grateful to all the nice people she has met. She enjoys swimming, camping, four wheeling with her 4 X 4 group, spending time with family and friends, hiking, writing (of course), drawing, painting, reading—a vastly wide list of authors, her favorite, though, is Stephen King—and she loves taking pictures as she travels the countryside
