Peter Rock will be reading from his new novel My Abandonment on Monday, March 30th at Powell’s.
In 2002, Peter’s novel The Ambidextrist was an Oregon Book Awards finalist. In 2007, his book The Bewildered was also a finalist. Peter teaches at Reed College.
This is how Peter describes a good writing day:
A good writing day is any day where a piece of the clock is given over to the invisible people. In the past I was spoiled, and often had hours and hours to write; now the writing often happens when I wake up and can’t sleep at two in the morning, or at five, before my daughter wakes up, or fifteen minutes on the bus, or half an hour pretending I’m not in my office with all the ways the visible people can reach me turned off, shut down, disconnected.
I want to believe and to travel. Sometimes a good writing day is an hour of madly scribbling, vistas opening up ahead and inside, landscapes and synapses of some person rushing at me, and the whole rest of my waking day I carry that like a charm, knowing
there’s more and that I’ve been in touch with the invisible again; sometimes a good writing day is ten minutes of crossing out a paragraph, or adding a comma; sometimes a good writing day is half an hour of daydreaming with not a word to show for it.There are no bad writing days; even those that seem the worst are leading us onward, only in ways that were not expected, perhaps slower than we believed we desired.
What could be better than that?
