A Must-Have Book for Your Library

Back in print after all these years

Peter Christopher invented “Submerging the I”

And now his work is back in print! He was a star in the Lish workshop, a friend of Hempel and Spanbauer, and a teacher loved by his students.

It was Peter who came West for a visit and taught occasionally in Spanbauer’s workshop. He told us that first-person narration carried the highest authority, because you got a sense of who was telling the story, and why, and in what context the story was being told. Peter held that modern readers knew that every story had an agenda and a slant, and only first-person narration could hint at those.

Then he told us that readers recoil from the pronoun “I.” It bumps them out of the dream. People who talk too much about themselves are boors. The solution was to “submerge the I,” that is to write in first-person, but to avoid using the “I” as much as possible. These cheats can be as simple as I picked up the hammer revised to My hand picked up the hammer. And to avoid filtering, thus I heard the bells ring becomes The bells rang. The easiest way to avoid the dreaded “I” is simply to keep the camera pointed elsewhere. Depict the scene around the narrator, and allow the reader to forget this is written in first-person.

That, among oodles of other stuff, Peter taught to us. For twenty years I’ve been pushing his story collection Campfires of the Dead. The book has been out of print so long that prices for used copies ramped up into the hundreds of dollars.

Now 11:11 Press has reissued Peter’s work, all of it, adding his more-recent unpublished stories. Campfires of the Dead and the Living: The Collected Stories of Peter Christopher. The book will be released on Sept. 26th. To find out more, please click here.

I’ve got two advance copies of the book, would you like to win one?

Invent a paint color. Create a two-word combination that suggests an emotional state. For example: Burnt Remorse or Dusty Mania. Or Tawny Despair. The two-word moniker need not include an actual color name such as blue or umber. Enter as many as you like in the Comments below, but I’ll award the books to two different people.