07.43: Trailblazer Pamela Sanderson
Fated Mates - Romance Books for Novel People
Fated Mates
4.9 • 965 Ratings
🗓️ 15 July 2025
⏱️ 97 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our Trailblazer series continues with Pamela Sanderson, the first Native American author to write contemporary romance about Native characters in Native community. Pamela joins us to talk about her writing journey, about her decision to write and independently publish romance, about the need for more Native American romance in the world. We so enjoyed this conversation, and we’re grateful to Pamela for joining us to tell her story.
Listen to all the Trailblazer episodes.
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Notes
- Pamela Sanderson is an enrolled citizen of the Karuk Tribe, located in northwest California on the Klamath River. Pamela also publishes in other genres as Pamela Rentz.
- People Mentioned this Episode: Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, Johanna Lindsay, Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, Stephen King, Anne Rice, On the Island by Tracey Garvis Graves, Courntey Milan, Sarina Bowen, Love is a War Song by Danica Nava, Ali Hazelwood, Tessa Dare, Alexis Hall, Theory of Bastards by Audrey Schulman, the TV show North of North, The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones, and Rebecca Roanhorse.
- Writing Workshops: Clarion West and Romancing the Craft
- The Dear Author blog was an early, vocal fan of Pamela’s work. If you are interested in KidLit or have children, you should be familiar with Debbie Reese and her blog, American Indians in Children’s Literature.
Pamela's Books
Sponsors
- Blue Box Press, publishers of Jennifer Probst's The Reluctant Flirt, available in print and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, and Bookshop.org.
- Kylie Scott, author of Wildflowers: An End of the World romance, available in print and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, and Bookshop.org.
- World Gone Wrong: A fictional chat show about friendship at the end of the world, available at audaciousmachinecreative.com and wherever you listen to podcasts.
- Renée Ahdieh, author of Park Avenue, available in print, ebook, and audio at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, and Bookshop.org.
The Rest
- For even more info about this episode, and to explore everything Fated Mates has to offer, visit: https://fatedmates.net/episodes/2025/7/15/0743-trailblazer-pamela-sanderson
- If you wish you had six more days in a week of people talking about romance, may we suggest joining our Patreon? Aside from an additional episode every month you get access to our Discord, where other romance readers are talking about books they love (and many other things!) all the time. It’s so fun! Learn more about the Patreon and go join those cool people who love romance as much as you do at patreon.com/fatedmates.
- Beyond your favorite podcast app, you can find us on Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, Tumblr, and probably some other places, too, if you look hard enough.
- If you've never listened to our Stop Book Banning episode, there's no better time than now.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Every day of our lives, we're surrounded by other Native people, we're working for Native issues, we're, you know, educating people on Native issues. |
| 0:07.0 | There's a lot of people who never come in contact to Native people other than, you know, whatever, their random neighbor or these historical stereotypes. |
| 0:18.0 | And so I really wanted to write stories about contemporary native people doing what they do, |
| 0:24.5 | like preserving culture, preserving community, promoting their community, dealing with problems that you have. |
| 0:31.0 | How am I going to fund my nonprofit? How am I going to pay my, you know, find a place to live and I don't |
| 0:35.2 | have very much money. How do I pay off my student loans? |
| 0:43.8 | So trying to figure out how to tell stories about people who, especially with Crooked Rock, |
| 0:49.6 | because it's a urban community, that finding your community when you're not in your home place. |
| 0:56.7 | So this week, we've got this very cool Trailblazer. |
| 0:57.7 | I know. I'm so excited. |
| 1:04.7 | So everybody, the way the Trailblazer series works, for those of you who are new, many years ago, we decided, |
| 1:09.3 | Jen and I sort of looked around and we said, somebody should really be taking the oral history of romance. And who would that be? |
| 1:12.5 | Who should be doing that? Who should be doing this? And we said it to each other, ooh, for about a year. |
| 1:18.4 | And then we were like, oh, no, I guess that we can do it. We're volunteering ourselves to do this. |
| 1:26.9 | Well, first of all, welcome everyone to Fated Mates. |
| 1:29.1 | I'm Sarah McLean. I read romance novels and I write them. |
| 1:32.0 | And I'm Jennifer Procop, a romance reader and editor. |
| 1:35.3 | And when we made this decision to start collecting the kind of oral history of romance, |
| 1:41.0 | we were like, we're going to try to collect as many of the early voices that really |
| 1:48.2 | built the house of romance as possible. And so we made this big list and you've been with us |
| 1:54.8 | through a lot of these interviews. You know, we've talked to everyone from, you know, |
| 1:59.0 | Nora Roberts and Sandra Brown to Jude Devereaux. And we've talked to everyone from, you know, Nora Roberts and Sandra Brown to Jude Devereaux. |
... |
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