I have lived in Oregon's Southern Willamette Valley for most of my life. I was born into a blended family, with my nearest sibling thirteen years older, to parents who had both begun their parenthood at nineteen. I was the youngest of my generation on both sides of my family, and my parents were both the eldest of their siblings. Most of my cousins near my age lived in the Northeastern corner of the state. My mother worked hard to send me to Christian schools for much of my youth, but her work hours prevented her from being able to be involved in the school communities the way many other kids' mothers were. As a consequence, I was often something of a stranger in my family, in my neighborhood, and in my school. But I was a bright child, and I was reading far before I was school-bound.

My father's parents were farm folk from the central Illinois and Indiana border, and as such, neither advanced beyond eighth grade. My father's first years of school were spent in a single-room schoolhouse. His mother was very proud of her smart grandkids. She would legendarily taunt us with tongue twisters; one of her favorites was "Czechoslovakia", the former union of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. She was tickled at my unusual response: I toddled off to the corner and repeated the word to myself over and over, feeling its shape on my tongue and my tongue in my mouth until the sounds I heard matched what Granny had said. Then I made my way back to her and showed her the results of my practice. "You were so funny," they'd say.

When they put me in pre-school, I only lasted a few weeks before the teachers pulled my mother aside and suggested that their curriculum wasn't challenging enough. I remember the search for a kindergarten fairly well. I don't remember exactly why we settled where we did, but I enrolled at a local Lutheran school which had chapel on Thursdays and included kids up through eighth grade. Chapel is like a church service in the middle of the school day—or, if you prefer, a weekly assembly or pep rally, where the songs are hymns, the speech is a sermon, and you're getting peppy for Jesus. At the time, I was a rabid fan of Muppet Babies, inspired by their reckless imagination driven by pop culture parody, and I would carry my Fozzie and Rowlf dolls around with me everywhere. On recess, I would pretend the wooden structures were a spaceship, emulating Kermit and company's adventures. Before long, the older kids on the playground dubbed me Neptune Kid, and they would quiz me about half-remembered space trivia and half-imagined space fantasy.

That sense of imagination, exploration, fascination, and the inevitable creations that follow still form my core to this day.