Robert Boswell Interviews Peter Turchi

Faculty member Robert Boswell interviews faculty member Peter Turchi regarding Turchi’s newest book A Muse and a Maze for Fiction Writers Review:

Pete Turchi and I met in graduate school at the University of Arizona. We had the good luck to be in a fiction workshop led by Francine Prose, and we discovered that we had a lot in common: we both loved lousy baseball teams (well, Pete’s team won the World Series that year, but went on to embarrass themselves for decades), and we suffered cheerfully through long seasons with the same combination of pluck and denial. We both had girlfriends who were smarter and better looking than we were, and we pondered the enigma of their apparent interest in us. We both had been raised by good-hearted parents who had climbed from meager beginnings to the lowest rungs of the middle class and who were worried and baffled by our belief that we might escape the 8-to-5 schlep by investing in language and narrative.We both loved literature with a particularly desperate dedication, wishing to write novels that would express the beautiful, terrible wonder of the human treadmill. We both drank beer.

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You can also read “The Pleasures of Difficulty” from A Muse and a Maze on the Tin House blog.