From the Stanford Creative Writing Program
Success Stories
by Yvonne Daley, Stanford, July/August 1999
Peter Rock
STANFORD WRITING PROGRAM: 1995-97
This Is the Place, Anchor Press, 1997, and Carnival Wolves, Anchor Press, 1998
QUOTE: "When I left Stanford, I thought, 'It's not hard to write a book a year.' I definitely got spoiled."
Before he got to Stanford, Peter Rock had lived enough to gather material for several books. His travels took him to a string of inhospitable places: a junior college on a cattle ranch near Death Valley, a ranch in Montana where he lived in an unheated cabin, a polygamists' town in Utah. In between, he earned a bachelor's degree from Yale.
His fictional world is anything but ivory tower. Both his novels are about loners, people living on the fringes of society searching for something--snakes, power, connection, spirituality. The characters sometimes confound the reader; it's hard to grasp what they really want out of life. Rock likes it this way. He says he's never after "an easy story."
As a Stegner fellow, he found himself having to defend his raw; confrontational style of writing, his characters and his plots. "The process pushed me and helped me see more clearly what I was after," he says in an interview from his apartment in Philadelphia. "I'm never satisfied with my own work-but for different reasons than everyone else." Before his second year in the fellowship, he had a two-book contract. The manuscript for This Is the Place won the prestigious Henfield Award in 1996.
Such early success may have spoiled him, Rock says. "When I left Stanford, I thought, 'It's not hard to write a book a year."' he says. These days, he answers phones and otherwise "works as a lackey" for the University of Pennsylvania football team while his wife, Ella Vining, completes medical school there. Rock says he's lucky to get in a few hours of writing a day. "Still," he says, sounding a little like one of his hard-bitten characters, "it's better than nothing."
