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MEET SANDRA HAMMOND
by Ann Stalclup (courtesy of Karla Forbes)

What did you most like to do when you were a child?

Sandra Hammond

As a child I lived in a lot of different places because my dad was in the Army. I especially loved living back East because of the woods and open fields. I loved hiking and fishing and exploring.   Our family went fishing quite a bit and that was always a treat. It was fun to just be outside.

What books influenced you most when you were growing up?

I really loved THE LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE series.  I longed to live in the time of Laura Ingalls Wilder and wanted to be in the outdoors and run around with chickens and horses.  I also loved other books too, like THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE, The RAMONA series, and PIPPI LONGSTOCKING.  Believe it or not, I also loved to read our encyclopedias and the dictionary!

Did you write stories when you were growing up? At school? Or at home as a hobby? As a young child, or as a teenager, or both?

I mostly wrote at school for writing and English assignments.  I enjoyed reading more than writing until I was a teenager and then fell in love with Shakespeare and poetry.  I wrote hundreds of poems and short stories, usually about love.  I started acting in plays as a teen, which inspired me to write more short stories and poems for my Literature class.

 What audience did you have in mind for your career as a writer- adult or children?

I want to write for children but I want to make it fun and interesting for older children and adults too, since most of the time they are reading to or with them.  I love to make people laugh but some things aren’t funny to young children so I need to aim towards older primary children for the humor and the younger ones for the goofiness that is more obvious.  Adults can find underlying humor that children don’t think about yet.  I get along with every age group so I have to narrow it down to the ones I am around most and that is primary school-aged children.

What kinds of things inspire you to write?

I like to pull my stories from real life feelings and events.  My poetry has to be inspired by real people and my stories need to be based on real happenings.  It is easier for me to retell a story that I have experienced firsthand than to make something up that I don’t know about.  I tell some stories so often that I feel it is easier to put it in writing than to keep telling it a hundred times!  Once again, I just love to make people laugh.

What gave you the idea for THE TRUE STORY OF CINDERELLA?

Actually, it really is a true story, so I was totally inspired by my chickens that I brought home a year ago.  It was such a funny incident that I told it to so many people and finally decided to make it a book for others to enjoy.

What are you working on now?

I just began working on a story about our pet bloodhound. He is quite a character, and from what I understand, most bloodhounds are. Since few people have this kind of dog where we live, I feel that others definitely need to know what they are missing!

 What other jobs did you have before you became a writer?