John Dunning was born in 1942 in Brooklyn, NY. He was raised in Charleston, SC, is married, and has two adult children.

John always wanted to write, but was a poor student. He left high school in the tenth grade, partly because of an inability to concentrate and absorb lectures. Several years ago he was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD), a malady that could not have been imagined in the glorious 1950s.

This may explain my long affection for typewriters, he says. Unlike a computer, a great old manual typewriter was an honest machine. You did your work, it did its work. There was no sneaky nonsense, no hidden screens that popped up and wouldnt go away, and at no time in my 35 years as a writer did I ever lose anything because I hit a certain key, failed to hold my mouth right, or sneezed at the wrong moment.

John felt he should be a poster boy for ADD. Often the inability to concentrate demanded eight or ten hours of effort for two good hours of work. Sometimes it leads a writer away from his story, causing a months worth of drifting, rambling around, groping. In those times I really have to work to get my story, whatever it is, back on track.

John got a GED certificate from the state of South Carolina in the early 1960s. Historically, its an interesting document--not because its mine but because it states that I am the equivalent of the average white high school grad in the state. Now if thats not an official admission that those old separate-but-equal doctrines never worked, what is?

I was a raging failure early in life. Quit high school, then got kicked out of the Army with a broken eardrum after only two weeks, went on to work in a Charleston glass shop for $1.05 an hour, and looked to be on a fast track to nowhere.

In 1964 I made my break with Charleston, came to Denver with some friends, worked in a glass shop here for a time, then got on the racetrack and went with the horses for two years. I worked for ho