Karl Gartung was born in Liberal, Kansas in 1947. He received a B.A. from Hastings College, in Nebraska, in 1969. He married artist Anne Kingsbury f in 1970. In 1976 he was hired to run a small press bookstore (Boox, Inc.) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Gartung says this was the beginning of his serious apprenticeship to contemporary literature. In 1970 he was a co-founder, with Karl Young and Anne Kingsbury, of Woodland Pattern Book Center. At Woodland Pattern he has been involved in the planning and presentation of hundreds of poetry readings, music performances, art and book exhibits. He felt that these activities were as centrally artistic as writing or publishing could have been. This was (and is) really his education. Keenly aware of his late start, he would say "we can’t share what we know, so we must share what we are learning." He came to realize that something like Woodland Pattern was an improbable and tenuous possibility, depending as it did on luck, energy and ardent management by Anne. When some desired activity was impossible to accomplish on a very tight budget, he would console himself, thinking that if it were not for good management, it would be impossible to sustain Woodland Pattern as an alternative. To that end, in order to provide regular benefits and the income necessary to see the Book Center through inevitable funding droughts, he took a day job as a truck driver at what has become UPS Cartage Services. He calls this his deal with the devil. He thought it would leave time and energy for writing and book center work, but it didn’t quite turn out that way. An hourly worker can, when all is said and done, be considered a disposable form of property. After several layoffs, Gartung helped organize his workplace into the Teamsters Union in 1993, and has served as a union steward from the ratification of the first contract to the present. This necessary though difficult work became a major distraction in his life as a writer, though it finally ensured his job and the jobs of his fellow drivers and restored some dignity. He credits the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a venerable organization for union reform, with much of the credit for this success. Representing others on the job became a new and satisfying field of work, leading inevitably to more writing.