Discovering Story
As the daughter of
teachers, Roxane was exposed to books, and many o
f them, at an early age. Her
father, an English teacher, not only read stories to her and her sister,
Camille, but told them bedtime stories he'd fabricated himself. And her mother, an elementary teacher, always had a store of books for her daughters to browse.
This piqued Roxane's
curiosity about the world around her. At age four, while her sister read to
her, she finally insisted, "I want to read it now," and so she did.
As Roxane grew, and when
complex emotions seemed hard to verbalize, she found a way to express them in
written word. Recognizing this as a gift, she later pursued journalism as a
career.
[Photo: Roxane and her sister, Camille, listening to a story read by their father, Robert, in 1970.]A Bit of 'Her' Story
On Labor Day in 1968,
Roxane Beauclair was born in Lovell,
Wyoming. Shortly thereafter, the family of four moved to
Poplar, Montana, on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, which provided
the main setting for her childhood.
In 1991, she graduated from
college in Moorhead, Minnesota, and married her college sweetheart, Troy Salonen.
They then moved to the state of Washington, where she worked for nearly five years as a
newspaper reporter and editor. She was inspired by her very accomplished
co-workers, including a mystery novelist, published poet, and several other
extremely talented wordsmiths.
The birth of their first
child made the Salonens yearn to be closer to their "homeland," so
they relocated back to the Midwest, eventually making their new home in Fargo,
North Dakota, where their subsequent four children were born.
In an effort to stay home
with their young kids, Roxane took up freelance writing. During this time she
also rediscovered children's books and began to revisit her longtime dream of
authorship. She met author Jane Kurtz, one of her mentors, at a writing
conference at the University of North Dakota in 1999. In the summer of 2002,
she attended another conference in Chautauqua, New York, crossing paths with influential children's author
and editor, James Cross Giblin, and Clay Winters, president of Boyds Mills
Press.
After five years of
pursuing publication of her stories, Roxane received a call from Kent Brown of
Boyds Mills Press in October 2002 with a request to buy her manuscript, First
Salmon, thereby launching her new career as an author.
[Photo: Roxane (center, pink dress) with her kindergarten class, September 1973]
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