Barbara Richard, the fourth of five children, lived for eighteen years on a hard-scrabble farm/ranch in eastern Montana. After high school graduation, she attended beauty school and, at age nineteen, opened her first business. In 1982 she formed a corporation for the purpose of assisting small Montana cities and towns develop community and economic development projects. Four years ago Ms. Richard retired as president of the corporation and began completion of Dancing On His Grave a memoir she started in 1982, shortly after her father's death. An insatiable reader, she read more than a thousand books before graduating from the eighth grade and continues to read a book or more a week. She credits twenty years of grant-writing, voracious reading and her mother, an English teacher in later life, for her writing ability. Her five children grown, with thirteen grandchildren and two great grandchildren, she lives with her husband Jim in White Sulphur Springs, Montana and Sequim, Washington.