Interview, Peter S. Beagle

A little background: The first movie I ever remember watching was The Last Unicorn. I knew (and still know) every line by heart. Go figure. As a child, I collected unicorn figurines and pretty much thought that they were the most amazing things ever. Still do. In high school, I read the novel and was enthralled. This is, by far, the most squee-inducing interview we’ve had so far here at Oberon’s Law, and I’m excited to share it with you.

So welcome, Peter Beagle, to Oberon’s Law.

More than a few people, half the world it seems like, knows your work. Can you tell us a little about how
you got to where you are?

PETER: Mostly by getting things wrong, screwing them up, making mistakes and staying with it because I thought it was the only thing I knew how to do. There’s a lot to be said for feeling you have very limited options — “that one talent which is death to hide,” as Milton put it. I didn’t see that I had a choice. I’ve known people who I felt had as much or more talent than I did, but who had other things to do. It’s also true that I’ve had a great deal of luck, and also assistance sometimes from people who taught me things
I couldn’t have found out on my own, not for a long time. In fact I started out with one enormous break,
which was being born to my particular parents, and into a family of painters and writers and musicians,
where wanting to be some kind of artist wasn’t weird. I had every bit of encouragement from the first
day.

What has been the most unexpected part of being a writer?

PETER: The people your career takes you into contact with. Not necessarily celebrities or other writers, or anything like that, just people who taught me things or simply gifted me with images or turns of phrase, who did things for me they didn’t have to do. That’s always good and always surprising. As far as writing itself goes, the most unexpected part has been finding out that you can do more than you
thought you could – learning, and being taught, to push and go further than your natural inclinations.

What projects are you working on right now?

PETER: I’m cleaning a number of things off my plate – half a dozen or so short stories and novelettes, and two novel polishes — to leave space for some bigger things I want to start. There’s a great deal that’s coming in terms of breakthroughs and journeys that I’d half given up on making, but which are now actually happening. One of these new projects is a novel about baseball. I’ve always wanted to write a fantasy related to baseball and I hope to get to that one next year. It’s set in Pittsburgh in the 1950s, and is going to draw on a lot of the memories I have of from my student days there.

If a major studio were doing a movie on your life, what would you want the opening song to be?

PETER: I really have no idea, though I’m a collector of songs, I think about songs…hmmm. Well, there’s a really obscure one that Bing Crosby sang in a television musical version of Maxwell Anderson’s old play High Tor. Julie Andrews was in that one. She was 20 at the time, just about to go on Broadway for My Fair Lady. Anyway, the song Bing sang was called, ‘Living One Day At A Time.’ It has an easy amble to it, which I like very much. I’m a big ambler.

If you were a fruit, what fruit would you be and why?

PETER: Probably a bunch of grapes, because they can be sweet and tart at the same time.