Praise for the Writing of Peter Conners
With Thanks from Peter for the Praise
Review excerpts for [Growing Up Dead]
"The hardest part of being the Grateful Dead's publicist was convincing the media that Dead Heads were diverse, thoughtful, and not infrequently accomplished. If I'd just had a copy of Peter Conners' Growing Up Dead, I could have simply handed it out. The Dead Head subculture was rich and fascinating, and this book is a terrific documentation of it."
--Dennis McNally, Grateful Dead publicist and historian, author of A Long Strange Trip
"No music fan is more invested than a follower of the Grateful Dead. Peter Conners' new memoir, Growing Up Dead, chronicles the exhilaration of falling in love with music as if nothing else in life even remotely matters. Conners was an aimless 16 year old when he first heard the whirling, improvised rock of his heroes. He describes guitar runs that send "sparkler streams across the arena" and writes that the sound of a keyboard "swirls down your cochlea, expanding into warm chocolate behind your eyes." Music fans will understand: That's not LSD imagery but just the way music sounds when your surrender has no limit."
--"All Things Considered" on National Public Radio. Hear full review [Here]
"This is a very important addition to the Grateful Dead bookshelf: an honest, articulate, celebratory, and inspiring account of life on Dead tour in the 1980s. Peter Conners does a great job of describing the magic."
--David Gans, host of the Grateful Dead Hour, author of Conversations with the Dead
"Growing Up Dead is not only a great insider account of life on the road following the Grateful Dead, but a well-written overview of the Deadhead subculture, as well. Author Peter Conners doesn't have to resort to any of the clichés normally applied to the life; he lived it. From the wake-up rituals "on the bus" to the parking lots of summer, it's all here - but so are the thoughts and feelings that led Conners to the scene and, eventually, beyond it. Honest, thoughtful, and an entertaining read, Growing Up Dead offers a look into a lifestyle observed by many but understood by few."
--Relix Magazine
"Poet and editor Conners (Emily Ate the Wind) offers a perspective often missing from other Dead chronicles: that of one of the suburban teens in the late 1980s and early 1990s who dropped out of high school and/or college to follow a band whose members were 30 years their senior. Unlike most Dead fans (and rock critics) from the 1960s and 1970s, the band’s music wasn’t the most important thing to Conners and his Gen-X companions—the focus was on “becoming and living as a Deadhead outside the Grateful Dead concert.” So while Conners offers some earnest and often hilarious chapters about his teenage stoner life (“One of the problems with teenage drug abuse is that you never get to know what your adult brain would be like without it”), his most inventive chapters offer second-person accounts of what really went on at a typical Dead show in the 1980s. 'You are thrilled. You score acid. You smoke the Indica. You eat some mushrooms.... The situation is post-verbal.'"--Publishers Weekly, January 2009
"Categorizing Peter Conners' Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead is like trying to pigeonhole The Grateful Dead themselves: difficult and not very useful. It's part memoir, journalism, sociology, history, and drug culture exposé. But mainly Conners has written a heartfelt, entertaining, and appropriately scattered coming of age story. If the book were a film (and man, could it ever be!) it'd be co-directed by Cameron Crowe and Richard Linklater, and would play like Dazed And Confused meets Almost Famous - but in Conners' screenplay William Miller takes acid and smokes weed." [read complete review]
--John Dworkin for Blurt Magazine
"Conners is a gifted storyteller and delivers his tale not as a series of banal or hyperbolic generalities but in a well-knit sequence of anecdotes and portaits. The book moves along swiftly and sweeps you up in the life path of a bright, thoughtful young person questing in search of fun and liberty and friendship and love."
--Christian Crumlish, Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus
"But while there have been plenty of Dead books aimed at the faithful, novelist and prose poet Peter Conners directs Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions Of A Teenage Deadhead—his examination of and adamant non-apology for his former lifestyle—at general readers."[read complete review]
--The Onion (AV Club)
"No 1960s nostalgia to be found in this Deadhead memoir: Conners actually tracks the lives of teenagers who dropped out and started following the Grateful Dead around on tour in the '80s and '90s. An interesting perspective on the Dead's long, strange trip decades after it began."
--Creative Loafing Sarasota, February 2009
"Part memoir, part social history…[Conners has an] engrossing personal story and breezy style…Recommended for Dead followers and rock music fanatics.”--Library Journal, March 2009
"Required Reading"
--New York Post, April 2009
"I just finished reading Peter Conner's book Growing Up Dead and I really liked it. It bought back a billion memories but it also took me farther/further than my own Dead experiences on a journey of vicarious good times. It' recalls both the late era Dead scene and the music/philosophy that proceeded it as well as how teen rebellion is inspired, cultivated, and turned into something beautiful when it moves along to music. I'd give it about twenty-three stars, with twenty stars the most a book can earn."
--J.T. Dutton, author of Freaked
"Growing Up Dead is also an entertaining look at a subculture, in which you'll read how Conners compares and contrasts such related groups as beatniks and hippies; what life is like in the world surrounding the concerts and in the tent cities, set up in the parking lots outside shows, and in the constant pursuit of a music that speaks to you. As he writes, the music is the most important thing. When it's all said and done, he writes, "The music is with us." [read complete review]
--Jack Garner, arts critic for Rochester Democrat & Chronicle
"For some readers, Growing Up Dead may be a familiar memoir. Conners will help any Deadhead recall their own experiences: their first show, first great high, and so on. For me, this was cultural or social anthropology. Until I read this book, all I knew about the Grateful Dead was that they made tie-dyed t-shirts famous, and that they allowed fans to make bootlegged copies of their shows.... As I read Growing Up Dead, I could imagine me asking to tail along with some Deadheads to go to a show. And I laughed hard about it.... Deadheads will enjoy this book for the memories. I enjoyed it because it made me more curious as I read it. I give it thumbs-up." [read complete review]
--Stuart Nachbar, from American Chronicle
"Conners’ memoirs are delivered with refreshingly pure passion, Deadhead antics and band performances contrasted by his own story, starting with dumb teenage antics in Rochester, New York, and interspersed with background on the band, LSD and Prankster philosophy. If the 80s shows were joyful, acid-fried celebrations, by the 90s the Dead’s fame and freewheeling attitude was turning against them, attracting negative elements, while Garcia’s drug problems were dulling the live experience. Conners departed to struggle as a writer, finally producing this, in turn, mesmerising, moving, comical, honest testimonial to both the Dead and one of the most dedicated bodies of fans music will ever see." Read the complete review at [GUD Review in Record Collector]
--Kris Needs, from Record Collector
"Conners is a gifted storyteller and delivers his tale not as a series of banal or hyperbolic generalities but in a well-knit sequence of anecdotes and portraits. The book moves along swiftly and sweeps you up in the life path of this young person questing in search of fun and liberty and friendship and love."
--Christian Crumlish, from Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus
"I feel this book is a must for anyone’s “The Scene” historical library shelf, even though it only covers the last eight years of a thirty+ year American phenomena, it covers the introspectional emotions of it beautifully. This is not a history of the band, nor of the music itself, (even though he does cover some of its historical background I wasn't aware of,) but it is informative in its description of the reality of it, and I think Mr. Conners has done an excellent and entertaining job of it in Growing Up Dead."
--The Old Hippie's Groovy Site
Review excerpts for [Of Whiskey & Winter]
"Conners's language is gritty and visceral. Readers will feel cold seep through blown-open windows and smell spring earthworms churning debris. And yet, "The seasons hold us tight: the storms have betrayed our trust but they must be forgiven." Highly recommended for contemporary poetry collections." [Read complete review here]
--Karla Huston, for Library Journal
“What’s remarkable about Peter Conners’s collection of prose poems is its affection for the unbeautiful, the wonder it discovers on the margins of the natural world.”
--Nicholas Allen Harp, for Boston Review
"Having begun in winter, the book closes with autumn, the poems mirroring well the likely feelings of the reader: wiser, eyes more widely opened, aware simultaneously of great beauty and fragility. Peter Conners has offered a wonderful cycle and proof, for those of us who may need it, that prose poetry requires no more validation: It has arrived."
--Weston Cutter, from Mid-American Review
"In reading Peter Conners’ poetry collection, Of Whiskey and Winter, you come to understand the broad potential of the prose poem, both in subject and style. Thematically diverse, these poems cannot be pigeonholed – there are narratives and lyrics, letters and fabulist fables. Interwoven throughout the collection is an extraordinary sense of playfulness that exemplifies Conners’ ability to experiment and succeed in thwarting readers’ expectations of the prose poem genre." [Read complete review here]
--Bernadette Geyer, from The Montserrat Review (Named Best Fall Reading Book of Poetry, 2007)
"Whether he is transforming ancient narratives into contemporary fictions or stripping away layers and layers of linguistic textures to reveal the naked truth of our aloneness, Conners's singular wisdom and deft musicality somehow make the process seem as effortless as breathing." [Read complete review here]
--Tony Leuzzi, from In Posse Review
"Of Whiskey & Winter is an excellent prose poem debut from someone who has clearly listened to the band before stepping up to the stage for his first solo."
--Steven Wingate, from Colorado Review
"Peter Conners' poems in Of Whiskey and Winter have a wonderful way of communicating strangeness, displacement, through precise yet unorthodox choice and placing of words within each poem. His poems often have a remarkable stillness to them, giving the reader time to look around once inside their world, and really breathe the poems in. He has a way in finding beauty in struggle, and at the same time celebrating being in the moment, whether in trying to survive a northern winter, or coming to terms with our own mortality." [Read the complete introduction here.]
--Glen Raucher, from his introduction at the Writers Voice Series of the West Side YMCA
"Peter Conners displays an amazing security in the various voices in these poems, even as those voices seek and explore the world in complex ways. His prose poems rely on more traditional tales from life lessons and realistic fables to get his points across. Conners seeks revelation from established truths and uses the prose poem to both unveil and dig for answers."
--Ray Gonzalez, The Bloomsbury Review
Praise for [Emily Ate the Wind]
"Sparks of brilliant images light up the compressed worlds Peter Conners creates with words. Music is made with whispers and curses, belches and laughter, pronouncements and asides and sly retorts. Startling lists transform into unsettling truths. The performances in Emily Ate the Wind are dazzling."
--Joanna Scott
“The crisscrossing sketches, stories, chronicles, and dialogues of Emily Ate the Wind definitively capture the shimmers and smashups of life in its darkening seasons. Peter Conners has written a wise-hearted, courageously compact book of quiet, vital exactnesses.”
--Gary Lutz
"Like the grotesques of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Conners’ characters slice through these pages with their gaping moral, spiritual and emotional blindspots, and their big hopes and hopelessness. Loosely woven together (and including lovely anomalies, such as the tales from an earlier era written by the author’s father and the fabulous interview with a sunburn victim), these stories slip between the heartrending and the visionary, lashing to a wounding close."
--Eleni Sikelianos
"Peter Conners’s novella Emily Ate the Wind unfolds as a textured series of 2-3 page soundbursts that populate and interview the far-reaching ghost of America’s everytown bar. It’s a story of bad luck and unseen brinks, lived by loose circles of friends that bond and unbond as strangely as real people." [Read the complete review here]
--John Calasacco, from The Brooklyn Rail
"There are some works of literature that simply don't fit within the usual categories of genre fiction but stand alone as seminal and unique. Such is the case of Emily Ate The Wind by Peter Conners. Told in a series of vignettes, love letters, questions and answer formats, newspaper clippings, short stories, and prose poems, Emily Ate The Wind showcases a series of drinkers, gamblers, lifelong friends and frustrated lovers whose lives intersect at The Bar. Peter Conners tells these stories with a deft skill that ranges from gritty realism to an almost surreal lyricism as the characters mature from childhood to adulthood, experiencing marriage, war, loyalty and betrayal. Of special note are the entries "Some Thoughts about Money'; 'Headlines from Tomorrow'; and 'The Regular and the New Bouncer'. Emily Ate The Wind is a complex, occasionally iconoclastic, sometimes heartfelt, and always engaging work of sophisticated storytelling that is highly recommended for readers who appreciate sophistication and originality."
--Midwest Book Review
"Peter Conners has long been one of my favorite writers. Known for his "brief prose," or as he has termed it PP/FF, Conners here instead stitches together a collage of voices that exist, or near exist in a fictional place, room, hall of stories, known only as The Bar. In these brief composites, texts, news articles, monologues, sketches, stories that resist becoming not quite a novel emerge, whose absences speak more about the struggles to simply "be," than many novels with twice as many pages attempt to convey. As the pages accumulate, slowly, the sheer impact of solitude vs communion begins to argue, in voices often blurred by the fragemented text, it seems, so they become painfully unaware of the fractured nature of their existance. But all is not pathos here, as the book is full of frightfully funny and ironic moments. Perhaps it is all allegory? Read this book, and somewhere in its pages, I swear, you will find a shard of yourself in it, weeping, or perhaps even singing."
--Sean Thomas Dougherty
"Peter Conners’ novella Emily Ate the Wind extends the experiments of such well-known, locally focused writers as Sherwood Anderson and Thorton Wilder. In both Winesburg, Ohio and Our Town, these writers chose to focus on a small town and its people. Their lives come to represent in a loose allegorical fashion the human experience. Conners extends these experiments by adding wild stylistic shifts and various framing devices that present a multi-voiced and multi-layered approach to his ‘local,’ known only as ‘The Bar’ somewhere in upstate New York." [Read the complete review here]
--Jefferson Hansen, from Gently Read Literature
“Emily Ate the Wind is not your father’s fiction; nor is it your professor’s prose poetry. It’s hybrid, sound bite, narrative prose poetry. Call it what you will. It’s that underground thing we’ve heard so much about for so long and perhaps stumbled upon in the publications and presses that are not afraid to deviate from the styles that sell or appease the academy. It’s that rare thing: the new fiction.” [Read the complete review on p.6 here]
--Curtis Tompkins, from Review Revue
"All in all, among the tragedy, Conners serves up, in Emily Ate the Wind, a pantheism much like Whitman’s, where each sketch and each character grows like a field of lettuce, each speaking its own unique language and story, yet part of the universal mumble. And these stories are worth reading over and over, whether you are a Whitman or Faulkner fan or not. If you haven’t read Peter Conners’ work before, or if you are a huge fan, you will find this book startling in its complexity, and holding the most beautiful black holes and sparkles that make us human and God." [Read the complete review here]
--Doug Martin, from Web del Sol Review of Books
Review excerpts for [PP/FF: An Anthology]
"It (PP/FF) is a beautifully complicated anthology of fluxifying work. It shows that as writers we can have our say and play it, too. One of the strongest things a written work of art can do is make its readers want to write in turn. This volume makes me want to write with innovation. Not only that, it makes me want to say, hey: pass that can of spray paint, make it the red one - I know a few walls that could use some fluxifyin'."
--Chris Muray, Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics
"An essential read for anyone interesting in cutting-edge writing."
--Carolyn Wilkinson
"In our age of test marketing and referential storylines, it's sometimes hard to remember that writing is a creative act that can produce material as original and multifaceted as any other art form. PP/FF, an anthology edited by Peter Conners, serves up an exciting collection of unusual writing, not to be classified by structure or content, except that most pieces are short (one or two pages) and achieve the immediacy of storytelling.... Nearly every selection in this anthology seeks to respond to a timely question, reveal a painful truth, or depict a collective memory."
-- Rain Taxi Review of Books, Summer 2006
"Once again feisty little Starcherone Books runs in and scoops the field, ensuring PP/FF a long life in bookstores, in classroom use and for course adoption at programs sympathetic to the daring and experimental. Peter Conners, one of the most noted US prose poets, here takes on a gigantic challenge, as he struggles to produce a solid critical mass of what he considers the exciting "flash fictions" and "prose poems" of today. Wearing the heroic flippers of the editor, Conners has waded through the dregs of this material and pulled out a whole variety of plums of different sorts."
-- Kevin Killian review for Amazon.com
"...PP/FF is a kind of earthly paradise where the Language poet lies down with the self-absorbed memoirist, the bourgeois Fabulist picks fleas off the back of the avant-garde Maoist and everyone wears lovely party clothes - or a nice new boiler suit."
--Stride Magazine
"PP/FF shows how blurry the line between flash fiction and prose poetry can be. As editor, Conners brings the writers of both together to create an interesting and provocative anthology. The stories range from a brief quarter of a page to three or four pages long. (Scroggins' novel is sixteen pages long.) The pieces run the gamut from more straightforward stories to highly experimental styles. It's a compendium of fascinating and provocative prose poetry and flash fiction. May the blurry "teeter-totter"continue its fascinating movement."
-- Flash Fiction Newsletter
