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Dreams Like Thunder takes place on a small Eastern Oregon farm between Baker and Hells Canyon. The story is set over a couple of days in 1959, but part of the family seems less in touch with the twentieth century than with the myth of their own pioneer past. The myth varies according to who is doing the telling. It is up to Alberta, who is ten years old and heir to both the farm and the myth, to discover some truth behind the stories—a truth that will help her know who she is and what her own future might be.
Diane Simmons is the author of numerous works of fiction and creative nonfiction, including The Courtship of Eva Eldridge (University of Iowa Press, 2016), Little America, the winner of the Ohio State University prize for short fiction (Ohio State University Press, 2011), and the novel Dreams Like Thunder, originally published in 1994 by Story Line Press, which won the Oregon Book Award for Fiction. Her essays and short stories have been published in journals and anthologies such as The Missouri Review, Beloit Fiction Review, Blood Orange Review, and Northwest Review. Originally from the high desert country of Eastern Oregon, she holds a BA in history from the University of Oregon Honors College, an MA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York, and a PhD in English from the City University of New York. In 2018 she served as a Fulbright Fellow in the Czech Republic.