Peter Conners

Finding fresh ways to share the ideas that consume his thoughts. That's the simple, driving force behind this Pittsford, NY, resident’s journey as a writer and one-time Deadhead. It's taken him through the worlds of poetry, prose, and genre-defying spaces in between.

PeterHe clearly follows one of the first rules of the pen: write about what you know. His careful attention to character and scene brings even short passages to life.

Peter got his start in poetry during high school.  

“I shared it with some friends and they responded enthusiastically which encouraged me to continue,” he says.

“I have never stopped writing since then.”

Peter's putting the final touches on his next poetry collection, The Crows Were Laughing in their Trees, to be published by White Pine Press in spring 2011. Until then, here's a taste of Peter's work, from Of Whiskey and Winter, published by White Pine Press in 2007:

A Man Learns to Fly

In his younger years his father had toted him out to the bird feeder.  It was brown, bent, speckled with white droppings - angled against all seasons.  No mix was sufficient to keep the lesser birds away: Old bruise-colored grackles arrived on the scene.  Meager starlings.  Rusty female cardinals.  At each new mix, elated, they waited, but the loveliest of feathered winds never blew their way.  And so the father taught him to love the ugly ones.  Named them after earls and dukes, invested them with flight patterns to shame the baldest of eagles. 

In the boy's front yard, truly, the meek had inherited the earth. 

Such is the ornithology of family.

A boy flew away one morning to return a man to find his father turned to ash beside a bag of grainy seeds.  And this note: Help me to fly. 

Today, Peter is an editor at Rochester, NY-based BOA Editions, Ltd., one of the longest-running, best-known, and most respected literary publishers in the country, where he also directs the publishing company’s marketing efforts.

Click to visit "Growing Up Dead" online.And this writer never stops writing. He’s even adapted his last book, Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead, into a screenplay he hopes to see shot in Rochester. But that’s as much as he’ll reveal about the project. For now.

“I can’t say much beyond that other than – when it happens, you’ll know about it,” he says.

His next nonfiction book, White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg, will be published by City Lights Books in November 2010.

See more: www.peterconners.com, www.growingupdead.com, www.boaeditions.org

Say hi: phconners@hotmail.com