According to my mother, I was conceived in the loft of my grampa and gramma's garage,in a small, western South Dakota sheep town north of Sturgis. This was during hunting season, which is important, because my mother and father had started out on the ground floor stuffing elk salamis and sausages for the smoker. Whether some mistletoe had gotten into the smoker's oak-wood chips, or it was just hand-mixing the herbs into twenty or thirty pounds of ground elk, my mom and my father ended up getting smoked themselves, in the loft. But gramma always says all's well that ends well...even if it doesn't. I first got the idea of being a writer at the age of nine, when I realized that the graffiti on the walls of the "Cowgirls" room at the Pizza Ranch in Sturgis said some pretty amazing things. After that, I couldn't get enough of writing, and spent a lot of time in high school detention hall from following my muse, instead of stuff like science or biology, or social studies. My extra curricular activities included three years in a row of editing the newsletter of the "Forever Amber Club". In my second year,I was awarded First Place in the "Black Hills Limerick Writers Club" contest (see: "There was a Young Miner from Lead"), which included a two month scholarship to the Hoosier Writer's Workshop. By the end my scholarship "back east", I was totally in love with Hoosier Land and have lived here ever since. It is from this rich and sophisticated mid western culture that the inspiration for King Dong-An American Satire, has sprung. Enjoy!