About the Author

     The author, Gerald (Ger) Medenwald, has a BA in English and an MA in educational psychology. He's been a band director, high school counselor, musician, unit administrator at a developmental center, psychologist, truck driver, barn painter, and bartender. He's done other things as well, but hauling bales, sweeping streets and picking rocks hardly count as life vocations.
     He began writing short stories as a college senior, and then took an extended hiatus (life happened). In the last ten years he has written a few short stories and a few novels (five or three depending on how you count a trilogy that collapsed and disintegrated midway through book three). Beauty Tips for the Dead is the first to be published.
     For the past twenty years, he and his wife, Susan Mack, have owned and operated a stained glass studio. They also have a small, online, used, book store.
     When he isn't uncoiling a python from his middle or extracting a bloody leg from an alligator's jaws, the author prefers to observe and record the grittier parts of life from a safe distance. During his younger days as a barn painter, when he was strapped in a parachute harness hanging fifty feet in the air painting a church steeple, he recalls looking down upon his two carefree assistants (who were joking and chatting nonstop when they should have been judiciously tending the pulley life-line) and thinking, "That's where I should be!"
     Okay, so maybe it wasn't a python and an alligator. But in North Dakota in January, when you're traveling through a white-out blizzard, it's twenty five below, you're fifty miles from home, your heater just quit, and you're running low on gas; the thought of wrestling pythons and alligators is a welcome distraction from the frozen doom lying just outside your windshield.
     "Life is funny - quirky and funny - which makes it so much more interesting than death. Once you're dead everything stays the same, except that people can make up things about you and you can't do anything about it because you're what? Dead."

                              Schedule of Coming Events

September

Sept. 10   Sioux Falls, SD Zandbroz Variety       2:00 to 4:00   Book Signing
Sept. 15 Bismarck, ND State Capital Bldg.     9:00 to 4:00   Book Sale and Signing
Sept. 16   Mandan, ND       Huntington Books     12:00 to 3:00   Book Signing
Sept. 21   Minot, ND         Main Street Books    2:30 to 5:15   Book Signing
Sept. 21   Minot, ND         Grand International    6:00 to 8:00 p.m. Meet and Greet
                                     at the ND State Library Convention
Dec.         Fargo               Book Signing