Raised wild and free on a Wyoming cattle ranch, Kay M Mittan rode horses from the time she was two, learned to steer a vehicle at age five, began driving tractors during harvest when she was seven, purchased her first Hereford steer at age eight and started working full-time in the summer fields when she was ten. Between times she read. “Generally when I was supposed to be doing housework, which I hated,” she says.

 

There was literature she was allowed to read: any children’s book, Reader’s Digest magazine, newspaper, or literary fiction, particularly a classic. Books that were not allowed were her uncles’ collection of Earl Stanley Gardner’s ‘Perry Mason’ mysteries. She read every one of them.

 

Educated in a very strict one-roomed country school, Kay was encouraged (“actually required but it didn’t take much coercion”, she says, laughing) to write stories as soon as she could print a sentence. Another weekly assignment was to memorize a poem to be recited in front of her classmates on Friday morning. Familiarity with poets such as Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Christina Rosetti and Emily Dickinson gave her a deep love of language.

 

A high school English assignment to write her own obituary led her to confess her dream of becoming a writer. She never showed the assignment to her family. Somehow the time to write didn’t seem to fit in with her love of the animals, the fields and, especially, the mountains surrounding her home.

 

Over forty years later, Kay published her first biographical novel, ‘I, Nephi…’ about the man who homesteaded the ranch where she grew up. “He was so fun,” she says. “I adored him. He was from typically reticent English stock and I was the only person he ever allowed to kiss him. That was probably because I didn’t ask permission.” ‘I, Nephi…’ is the first in a series of meticulously researched biographical novels chronicling men and women who, with courage and humor, endured the rigors of life as homesteaders on the American frontier.

 

‘Find Excalibur’s Sheath!’ , the initial book in her Stolen Treasures series, combines her love of history with fantasy. “Fantasy is easy to write,” she says. “After all, I raised eight kids of my own as well as an untold number of teenagers who needed a meal, a bed, homework help or a shoulder to cry on. Kids fantasize all the time. And they have the most interesting attitudes and takes on life.”

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Now retired from active motherhood, Kay lives on country acreage where she divides her time between research, writing and designing water gardens.