In addition to Maps of the Imagination:
The Writer as Cartographer, Peter Turchi
is the author of Suburban Journals:
The Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Prints of Charles Ritchie,
in collaboration with the artist, a novel, The Girls Next
Door, a collection of stories, Magician,
and The Pirate Prince, co-written with Cape Cod
treasure hunter, Barry Clifford.
He's also co-edited with Andrea Barrett,
The Story Behind The Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers
and How They Work, and with Charles Baxter,
Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction
and the Writing Life.
His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Story, the Alaska
Quarterly Review, among other journals.
He's received fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation.
And since 1993, has taught fiction in
and directed the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson
College.
He received his MFA from the University of Arizona in 1985.
Peter Turchi is among today's most astute observers
of a craft of creative writing.
In a minute or two, you will learn this for yourself.
What you won't learn unless you've already encountered
Pete's creative work is the mastery
with which he applies this keen understanding
to his own fiction.
Last night, I reread his story, "Mesa Verde"
and noticed how it is held up by its own marvelously rigorous
geometry.
Still, we do not see this scaffolding.
What we see is a man holding on to an old regret,
an awful thing he said a long time ago to a fragile girl who
did not deserve his scorn.
The story is a map of a man's life, a funny and aching
chronicle of adolescence.
Yet Pete made it look all effortless, as if
the story had, in fact, no structure at all.
It's just a tale, told to you with horrible honesty,
by a likable flawed friend.
Lately, I find myself returning again and again to that quote
by Vincent van Gogh, "let us try to master
the mysteries of technique to such an extent
that people are deceived by it and will
swear by all that is holy that we have no technique.
Let our work be so savant that it seems naive and does not
stink of our sapience."
Pete is a teacher of technique, a leading thinker of technique,
a master of technique.
Perhaps the best thing I can say about his body of work though,
is that reading his stories, you'd never know it.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Peter Turchi.