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Coymoon: You've been surrounded by gifted writers throughout much of your life. Are there any particular ones that have influenced you? Peter: My decision to be a writer predates most of what I can remember in life. I grew up in a house with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and my mother, father, sister and I were all prolific readers. My mother still has a poem that I wrote when I was six that has one good image in it. I went to graduate school to be a writer, and in those days was most influenced by poets: Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Robert Graves. Coymoon: Your love for the poets certainly surfaces in your many vivid metaphors and similes. I once asked you if you would share some of your poetry with me and you responded by sharing your music. Has that been a viable channel for your poetry aspirations? Peter: I guess that music absorbed my interest in poetry. I feel about them both something of the same, that I would rather be a talented amateur than a second-rate professional. Perhaps because some of my friends are truly great poets and musicians, I recognized my limits fairly early. However, I'm finally getting back, slowly, into making music just for the hell of it, and leaving the judgments to others. I tend to be self-condemnatory, and it can crimp my fun. Coymoon: How would you describe your writing style? Peter: As far as I can tell, I have no "style". When I read my own writing, I hear my own voice and see the elliptical, associative organization of my own mind at work. I think that's what most writers probably do, but I'm not sure, since I've never asked them. Coymoon: Writing political essays is also an integral part of your literary efforts. How would you compare the writing style of those to Sleeping Where I Fall? Peter: The style of Sleeping is much looser and hopefully more entertaining than the style of political essays, whose primary intention is to state an argument clearly and succinctly. There are sections of Sleeping where I try to do that, but more often than not, I am assuming the role of a story-teller, trying to be amusing and pictorial - to create images that will tell the story which the reader can see in his or her mind. Coymoon: Well, you definitely succeed in bringing a great deal of imagery and humor to your stories without sacrificing the hard reality of what life was like back then. How long ago did you actually make the decision to write a book about the Sixties? Peter: I wrote and published "Sleeping Where I Fall, an essay, in ZYZZYVA (pronounced Ziz-a-vuh), a Bay Area literary magazine in 1989. Jack Shoemaker read it and told me it had to be a book. He was then the editor of the now-defunct North Point Press. I started work immediately, finished seven years later, and sold it to Counterpoint Press, whose editor, Jack Shoemaker went there when North Point folded after the death of its angel, Bill Turnbull. Coymoon: I assume that winning the Pushcart Prize for "Carla's Story" further encouraged you along the way but you've been quoted as saying your book is an "unruly and sprawling story." Did writing this book seem like an impossible task at times? Peter: I have so much respect for anyone who has ever finished a book, even a bad book. I liken the project to climbing up a glass building by your fingernails. It seemed endless, formless, impossible, daunting, boring, and useless. But somehow I kept plugging away until it was done; had a shape, and now I love it. Coymoon: Anais Nin once said, "We write to taste life twice." Do you see any truth there for yourself? Peter: It's a wonderful quote, and it's certainly fun sometimes to re-live important occasions mentally. However, in my case, re-view tended to give shape to relatively incoherent events; hindsight offered perspective and the ability to draw lessons and deductions from my own past. Coymoon: Was setting down these stories actually a matter of retrieving old memories or did you also have journals that you had kept during that period? Peter: I was amazed that I still had a mind which could retrieve memories after all the drugs and damage I'd inflicted on it. But somehow one memory begets another and things began to steam-roll. Also, during the writing I discovered two, heretofore "lost" journals from those days, and incorporated large sections of them into the text of the book. Coymoon: In light of the hard drugs and your neverending amorous adventures, "sowing your oats" is an understatement. Having come full circle as a parent yourself today, is your task as a father made even more difficult by your own personal history? Peter: I think that my parenting was enhanced rather than diminished by some of my own stupidity. When I spoke to my kids about drugs, and options of behavior, I could do so without panic, and give them the straightest information, hard-won and often first-hand. In some cases, they've seen the consequences of my behavior in my health and understand for themselves the costs of certain violations of good sense. Coymoon: As edge dwellers, many leaned too far over the edge, some falling to their death, real or imagined. What saved you? Peter: Luck. Karma. A random thought: What is health? Coymoon: Lenore Kandel and Sweet William (Bill Fritsch) had the potential of being among the "best and brightest" of their generation. Yet, rather than becoming a beacon, they succumbed to lives "tipped into darkness" as you put it. It's difficult for us common folk to understand anyone's attraction to the Hell's Angels. Can you explain it? Peter: Lenore still is among the best and brightest of her generation, just unknown and in chronic pain. Bill is another story. I think the Hell's Angels represent courage, independence, the willingness to throw oneself away for one's beliefs. The fact that those beliefs may not always be enlightened or inspired is beside the point. One still challenges oneself, "Well, if an outlaw can do this, will I defend my own beliefs and aspirations as totally?" They were a challenging example, and all I can say is that when they came around, ALL the bullshit stopped. Coymoon: I noticed you used the words "fearless" and "fearsome" quite often. Are those admirable qualities to you? Peter: Fearlessness, according to Don Juan is one of the first great enemies of mankind; the first hurdle one has to pass en route to real knowledge. I guess you can intuit from how often I use "fearsome" what an issue it has been for me. An ongoing struggle. Coymoon: Besides growing up in a home that fostered political thought, what books or authors have had a strong influence on you? Peter: The Bill of Rights; The Constitution; The Federalist Papers of Thomas Jefferson, The Twisted Dream (a Marxist History of America) by Dowd, Noam Chomsky's work, especially Manufacturing Consent; Michael Parente's work; Howard Zinn's work; Gary Snyder's political essays; Murray Bookchin's work, also Kropotkin and Bakunin, the two essential authors of anarchism. Coymoon: Had you been born ten years earlier, do you think you would have gravitated toward the Beat philosophy or would it have been too politically passive? Peter: The Beats were misunderstood and misrepresented as politically passive. Regard Allen Ginsberg and his lifetime of assault on the CIA and regressive political practices; look at Gary Snyder's deep understanding of Marxism and Anarchism. I think I would have been with the Beats probably, in a reaction to the stultified, repressive social politics of the Fifties, following the stream of the Great Underground, to which I remain loyal and partial even today. Coymoon: Purposeless, rootless meant "free." How would you define "free" today? Peter: Total acceptance of interdependence. Coymoon: There seemed to be very little Zen woven into your philosophy during those years. Did its discipline actually develop much later? Peter: Although I had read and studied Zen philosophy for some time, I never understood the sense of "practice" I developed later at the monastery. During the Sixties, Zen was sort of a mental pet, something to drop in conversation, but not to live. Coymoon: What continually comes across throughout your book is your spirit of generosity. Is this something that's always been part of your nature or did it blossom through communal living? Peter: I think that expansiveness and generosity towards others came with the package. I can't explain it or take any credit for it. Perhaps it came from feeling like I always had more than enough. Coymoon: As a Digger, you sought authenticity, and now as an actor working among many "plastic people" in the entertainment business, doesn't your vocation demand an even greater challenge to sustain an authentic life? Peter: Yes. I pay a tax on that life by living out of Hollywood, but it needs to be said that there are many people in LA who are far from plastic. The question to be asked is why they are not looked at; why the media chooses to focus on the Madonnas rather than the Marlons... Coymoon: Why do you prefer to think of yourself as a writer rather than an actor? Peter: So often the work of an actor requires checking one's intellect at the door. Many of the scripts are stupid; many of the stories incredible or sloppily constructed, fodder for the entertainment wing of the multi-national corporate culture. Since I have to do a living, of course I work when and where I can, unless what I am asked to do is simply too egregious to bear. As a writer, however, I am in control of the story; the way in which it is told, and the quality of the final product. I like and need this kind of power, which is precisely why I've begun writing scripts and planning to direct: to give myself more responsibility for the final product. Coymoon: If your book goes on to be part of a college curriculum, what do you think its value will be to the student of the 21st century? Peter: I would be proud if my book could help re-define the Sixties as the groping, selfless, experimental and morally and spiritually driven experience it was. I would like it if future readers could understand that THEY are history; that it is not simply the records of whores of the courts or winners of wars, but the quotidian realities of the lives of normal people is the "real" history. Coymoon: Are you planning any particular celebrations to mark your entry into the Library of Congress? Peter: I hadn't even thought about that. What do you think it means to "enter into the Library of Congress?" I prefer to think of entering the congress of libraries. Coymoon: That's much more interesting. As one who is "lonesome for a hero," I thank you for the opportunity to read the memoirs of a man who has stood his ground for almost 35 years now with his dream for a better world, and given us a very humble and honest book NOT ONLY about "what the pursuit of absolute freedom felt like and what it taught," but ALSO what it cost.
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