Author Bio
Melany Tupper was born October 18, 1961 in the little mill town of Camas, WA and is a graduate of Camas High School. In the mid-1980’s she attended Clark Community College, where she served in student government, worked on the student newspaper, and graduated with honors.
The first inkling that Melany would become a writer is revealed in a story that her mother liked to tell. When Melany was about 5 years old, and just learning her ABC’s, she went to the kitchen, where her mother was washing the dishes, and held up a hand full of small pages that she had cut with stubby scissors. “Look, Momma, I wrote a book,” she said. Mom put down her dish towel, and the two sat down at the kitchen table. Melany told about what the color crayon pictures on the pages were supposed to represent, and her mother wrote the words at the bottom of the pages. There might be a lesson to parents in this family tale, which Mom always viewed as a sort of a flash of insight into her daughter’s true nature. The little book is still a treasured family keepsake of the author, and her most recent book, The Sandy Knoll Murder, Legacy of the Sheepshooters, was dedicated to her mother’s memory.
Through school, Melany was always involved in journalism. She wrote for her middle school and high school newspapers. At Clark, she wrote several articles for the Penguin’s Progress, a publication of the Associated Students of Clark College, and studied journalism under Patty Kellogg. She worked as the business and advertising manager of Clark’s student paper, The Independent.
A few years after college, Melany and her then husband, and their very large Malamute and wolf cross companion, went to live on the road in a Volkswagen bus. They moved with the seasons, across the western United States, parts of Canada, Alaska, and the Yukon Territory. That nomadic life became the subject of Melany’s second major work (not in color crayon) called, Trip, Nomadic in America, published in 2001.
After moving to Christmas Valley in Lake County, Oregon in 2001, Melany began writing for the Bend Bulletin and the Lake County Examiner as a correspondent, with occasional feature articles published in neighboring counties. In 2002, she married Ken Parrotte. The first volume of her collected works, High Desert Roses, Significant Stories from Central Oregon, was published in 2003.
While researching the range war period in central Oregon in 2003, Melany became interested in the intriguing and inexplicable high-profile murder of Creed Conn, who was alleged to have been killed by the Sheepshooters. While continuing to work at a ‘regular job,’ Melany devoted the next six years to research of the history of the Sheepshooters and tracking down Conn’s killer. In 2010 she published the result, and solved the crime, with The Sandy Knoll Murder, Legacy of the Sheepshooters. The book has rapidly become very popular, with over 800 copies sold, primarily to visitors of north Lake County.
Melany and Ken continue to live in beautiful downtown Christmas Valley, Oregon, where Melany writes for local papers, The Outback News, and The Examiner. She released volume two of the High Desert Roses series in the spring of 2011, and is currently developing a sequel to The Sandy Knoll Murder.
