FOR FANS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

PETER WILL BE IN SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY ON WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY, MAY 6 & 7, AND IN SAN DIEGO ON SATURDAY, MAY 9TH

It's Tuesday, May 5th as this is being written, and in a few hours Peter and Connor will get in the car and drive south from Oakland to Southern California.

During the day on Wednesday and Thursday, Peter will be speaking at Children's Literature classes and a Poetry Workshop at California State University San Bernardino. (The Poetry Workshop, in particular, looks like it is going to be a lot of fun.)

On Wednesday evening, May 5th, from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM, Peter will be reading and answering questions at the Rialto Public Library, in the city of Rialto, which is located in San Bernardino County (address: 251 W. 1st Street, Rialto CA 92376; phone: 909-875-0144).

On Thursday evening, May 6th, from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM, Peter will be lecturing and reading at the Pfau Library on the CSUSB campus (address: 5500 University Parkway, San Bernardino, CA 92407-2392; phone: 925-673-3325). This one's a bit different, because the special subject matter is diversity. Peter will be talking about his experience as Jewish writer, and his perception of the role of Jews in the production of American culture. He'll be drawing a lot on examples from his own life and the life of his grandfather (the Hebrew/Yiddish writer Avrom Soyer), his uncles (the world-famous Jewish émigré painters Raphael, Moses, and Isaac), and his father Simon, who helped found the American Federation of Teachers. He'll also be reading his wonderful story "The Rabbi's Hobby" in public for the first time, which should be a treat for both him and the audience.

Then on Saturday, May 9th, from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, Peter will be in San Diego at the San Diego Children's Book Festival. This should be a truly cool event, with all kinds of well-known children's book authors and illustrators in attendance, plus crafts, music, games, and giveaways. In addition to Peter you could meet Sherman Alexie, Gerald McDermott, Robin Preiss Glaser, Kadir Nelson, and lots more. The event is taking place at the Nobel Recreation Center & North University Community Library, located at 8820 Judicial Drive, San Diego, just off the I-805 at the Nobel Drive exit.

Hope to see some of you there!

(And big, big thanks to Joe Sutliff Sanders, of the English Department at CSUSB, for making all this possible.)

 

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A PERSONAL REQUEST TO ALL MY FANS
by Peter S. Beagle

If you've ever read and enjoyed one of my books or stories, or seen and enjoyed one of the films that I scripted, I'd like to ask a favor of you. It's simple, really — if at all possible, within the next month please do one of the following things.

1) Go to www.conlanpress.com and buy a subscription to my year-long 52/50 Project (more about which, below).

2) Go to www.conlanpress.com and buy any single book or DVD of my work, either for you or as a gift for a friend.

3) If you can't make a purchase yourself, try and get someone else interested enough to take the leap.

As for why I'm asking, that's even simpler: you will change my life.

If you make just one purchase, or convince someone else to do so the same...and if enough of the other readers who get THE RAVEN do likewise...if that happens, then the financial crisis I've been in since my mother died in 2006 will finally be over. If that happens, I'll be able to pay back all the money I've had to borrow to survive. If that happens, the Last Unicorn audiobook and the special hardcover Two Hearts will come zooming out at last from Conlan Press, along with Writing Sarek and the hardcover editions of my two new novels, Summerlong and I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, and more. Better still, if that happens I'll be able to buy the thinking and writing time I need to tell the rest of Sooz's story — i.e., the full-novel Last Unicorn/Two Hearts sequel that I'm eager to bring to all of you (but which no publisher anywhere has so far been willing to pay me enough to live on while I'm doing the work).

Okay, Beagle. Deep breath. That wasn't so hard, was it? Except, of course, being fairly shy about these things, it was.

There are lots of authors who are good at self-promotion. I am definitely not one of them. All I can do is work up my courage and ask, which I have now done: the rest is up to you.

To that end, I want to publicly thank the 53 people who have so far purchased subscriptions (58, total) to my 52/50 Project, in which I'm writing 52 original poems or song lyrics, one per week, for a whole year. The money from these subscriptions paid most of my rent last month, for which I am amazingly grateful. So to...

Richard Arndt
Kathleen Bartholomew
Joe Bartlett (2 subscriptions)
Heidi Berthiaume
Stuart Bousel (2)
Bill Bridges
Callahan Burke
Joanne Burnett
Janet Burt (2)
Vicka Corey
Eduardo Duran
R. H. Garrett-Goodyear
Anna Glauser
Carmela Gomez
Tina Good
Sarah Goslee
Marta Grabien
Jessica Halley
Shana Hickey
Ted Holzman
Elizabeth Janes
Melissa Johnson
Kate Joly
Alice Keezer
Joshua Keezer
Leigh Kelsey
Ken Kessler
Alethea Kontis (2)
Sandra Levy
Cynthia Myers
Akemi Nagata
Donna Odierna
Oliver Plaschka
Sheila Quinn
Beth Regardz
Tina Reynolds (2)
Susan Sandenaw
Marty Sandler
Tim Scoggin
Fabienne Siegmund
Katie Simpson
Melissa Sprenne
Harold Stein
Karen Sun
Diana Swiger
Priscilla Tate
Dianne Timmerman
Terhi Tormanen
Jude Tulli
Erica Venhuizen
Allyn Walfish
Jörg Weese
Judith Wenger

...I give you my thanks, many times over. I hope you enjoyed the three new lyrics that have gone out so far ("The Alien," "Physics Teacher Gunch," and "The Perfect Beer"), and that you will get a kick out of the forty-nine more still to come. Let me take this chance to remind you all that I'm going to base at least 10 of the new pieces on subscriber suggestions...so please don't hesitate to send in your ideas. (I've already gotten a few challenges I know I'm going to have fun living up to.)

And if anyone reading this subscribes, I'll be happy to thank you in public, too!

Launching the 52/50 Project was Connor Cochran's idea, but I confess I'm thrilled to be doing it. I've always loved writing and singing songs (it's why I keep sneaking them into my books and stories whenever possible). I got myself thrown out of the Gunhill Road branch of the Boy Scouts by writing a scurrilous little number about our scoutmaster, and I've kept up with the vice ever since. Apart from the unnamed folk poets of my youth, my heroes range from Noel Coward to Frank Loesser, Carolyn Leigh to Johnny Mercer to Tom Lehrer, Stephen Sondheim to Dick Feller and Jonathan Coulton. In college I wrote lyrics for other people's music, and the book and lyrics for a musical about Ponce de Leon. In 1959, the year we graduated, my buddy Joe Mazo and I actually had some of our songs included in a very-far-off-Broadway revue, directed by and starring Dick de Bartolo, of Mad magazine fame. Later, singing in a French restaurant in Santa Cruz on weekends, I specialized in the work of Georges Brassens, Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour and Leo Ferre. It was the high point of my week for twelve years, and I miss it still.

Somewhere around that time, I discovered that I could sort of write music, after a fashion — not a Broadway score, of course, but to set my own lyrics, borrowing harmonies primarily from Brassens, odd time signatures from Ferre, and odder subject matter from my own life — and, perhaps, yours too. I've sung them in various venues over the years, and I know I'm more vulnerable about them than I ever am about my fiction. You want to get into my kitchen, praise the songs.

Being a sucker for anything I've never done before in writing accounts for, among other things, an opera libretto based on my story "Come Lady Death" and the series bible for a long-gone Saturday-morning cartoon called Captain Planet and the Planeteers. It also accounts for why Connor was able to talk me into this so easily when he suggested it as a way of commemorating my 50th anniversary as a professional novelist, and my 70th year on the planet.

Besides, I just want to see what comes out. And whether you'll like them.

Here's to hope and change, then, to a better life, and to more poems and songs. Always more poems and songs.

— Oakland, May 2009