Friday feature: Peter Ferry on Peter Ferry

September 19, 8:31 AMChicago Literary Scene ExaminerRobert Duffer

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Peter Ferry the writer teacher

Peter Ferry's debut novel Travel Writing is about a narrator named Peter Ferry who takes a sabattical from his teaching job to uncover the truth about the accidental death of a young woman, Lisa Kim. Peter Ferry the writer took a sabattical to finish this book and the book is dedicated in part to Lisa Kim.

This is not genre-bending pomo navel gazing: this is metamemoir (or is it metafiction?) of the highest order because it focuses not on the writer but on the art of storytelling. Travel Writing (2008) is not just an inquiry into the stories we tell ourselves to create truth, it is a subtle love story and suspenseful amateur detective story (read the full review here).

Even though I'm reviewing it as a paperback one year after its original hype, I still like the story behind the book: a 62 year-old local teacher publishing his first novel to local and national acclaim. Ferry agreed to speak to Examiner in the patient, thoughtful and authentic voice that's found in Travel Writing.

EX: You’ve been teaching English for 30 years, writing travel pieces for local print and editing texts for Rand McNally, publishing stories in some of the best lit journals in the country. This is your first published novel. Why now? How—and for how long—did this story germinate?

PF: I'd like to say that the publishing industry has abused or neglected me, but I think I'm just a slow learner. As I relate in Travel Writing, the writer Walter Tevis who taught me in college once told me, "You haven't much to say, but you say it very well." It took me a long time to figure out something worthwhile to say. The genesis of this story was an assignment to teach creative writing a few years ago. Figured I'd better write something over the summer or I'd get the old "do you do or do you just teach?" question, so I put down the first twenty pages of Travel Writing which describe an auto accident I saw and perhaps could have prevented some twenty years ealier. I put it away with a promise to myself to look at it again the next June and, if I still liked it, to continue. I did and somehow I'd figured out in the course of the year what was going to happen, so I wrote the last eighty pages and then took a sabbatical to finish it.

EX: Give us a sense of your Chicago history. Give us one of your top three most mind-blowing places to visit. Is Quetico the only thing you’ve done that wasn’t overrated?

PF: I moved to Chicago from Parkersburg, West Virginia, when I was a senior in high school, and have been here ever since except for college at Ohio U., a year in Mexico and another as a Fulbright Exchange teacher in The Netherlands. I go back to both countries as often as possible not because either is mindblowing exactly but because I love the people, and while superficially they are very different, both the Mexicans and the Dutch seem to know more than I do about how to appreciate and enjoy life and what's truly important in it.

EX: Your novel does a great service to novelists: anytime an audience member asks an author how much of their novel is true, he can answer with your book. I’m going to have to read Travel Writing a few more times to catch all the subtle literary references. What was your intention writing it? Did you have an audience in mind? I imagine part of it has to be the high school students addressed in the novel.

PF: Yes, my audience was my students. (I taught English at Lake Forest High School for twenty-seven years, and other than my children, that is my proudest contribution to this world.) My premise is that all fiction is based in fact or in real life experience, and that all the stories we tell about our real life experiences are partly fiction. This assumes that all stories of any kind are attempts to discover truth which may or may not have anything to do with the factual. To test this, think about the stories you tell when you are with friends or having a couple beers or both; if you've told them repeatedly or over several years or enough beers, you've no doubt enhanced some parts, left out others, worked and massaged and perfected them until they have their own lives and may not have a lot to do with what actually happened a long time ago. That does not mean, however, that they do not have to do with truth.

EX: You dedicate the book to Lisa Kim, and your wife Carolyn, also a character. C’mon, throw me a bone, who is Lisa Kim to you? Is she more than a literary device?

PF: She was a drunken girl in a car who I didn't prevent from having an accident and who, had she been killed, would have haunted me forever. She wasn't, so for literary and perhaps philosophical purposes, I killed her. I also made up all the details about her life except for one: we really did come side by side at a red light, I really could have stopped her, I really did not and she really did drive into a lamppost.
 
The dedication is part of the story:  Lisa Kim is fictional, Charlie Duke is based on a real person whose name I changed because I wanted him to do some things he didn't do, and Carolyn O'Connor is my wife.

EX: I was surprised by Book Two, that you waited to reveal Ferry’s motives and the confrontation as a flashback. Why? It felt inevitable, yes, but somehow muted.

PF: I'm not sure what you mean. The scene set in San Miguel was indeed a flashback, but not the confrontation with the doctor nor the scene set in Ireland which is written in future tense and so by definition hasn't happened yet and therefore may  never happen.

Peter Ferry can be found at peterferry.com  and is availble for book groups. Travel Writing will be the featured book for the Gapers Block Book Club in November.