The Afterword

Tag: writing

  • Better Slightly Uncoordinated Action

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    Peter
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    What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received? The best advice I have received may be this: Better slightly uncoordinated action than fully coordinated inaction. I am a pragmatist at heart. I often begin with a hunch rather than a plan. I have a glimpse of something that might be worth exploring, even when…

  • Learning to Sit with Suffering

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    Peter
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    What’s a skill you consider basic, that most peopledon’t actually know how to do? Sitting with someone who is suffering seems like a basic human skill. It is also one of the hardest. As a young man in my twenties, I regularly visited people in an oncology ward. They were experiencing all kinds of emotions.…

  • John Ames

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    Peter
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    Who is the fictional character you relate to the most? Of all the fictional characters I have encountered, John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead may be the one I relate to most. Ames is an ageing minister writing to his young son. He is gentle without being sentimental, devout without being coercive, and deeply attentive…

  • The Ideals We Keep

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    Peter
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    What’s a song lyric that has stuck with you forever? I was at university when Jackson Browne released The Pretender. There was a music room where people supposedly went to study, although Jackson Browne’s For Everyman and Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark seemed to be permanently playing. I often went there when I had a…

  • Lunch with the Cat in the Hat

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    Peter
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    If you could have dinner with any fictional character who would it be? If I could have lunch with any fictional character, I would choose the Cat in the Hat. He would arrive without being invited. “You were thinking of me,” he would say, stepping through the door with his striped hat brushing the frame.…

  • The Best $45 We Ever Spent

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    Peter
    in

    What is the best purchase you have ever made? The best purchase I ever made was our first dog. We were newly married and living in Lismore on the Northern Rivers. One day we looked through the local paper and saw an advertisement for border collie puppies on a farm near Kyogle. We drove out…

  • What Kind of Bike?

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    Peter
    in

    What’s the funniest misunderstanding you’ve ever been part of? It was probably not the funniest misunderstanding I have ever been part of, but it was the most recent. We were having dinner at the college and meeting someone for the first time. The conversation turned to what everyone had done over the weekend. He mentioned…

  • AntennaPod

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    Peter
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    What app eats up most of your screen time — and do you even feel bad about it? I recently checked the Digital Wellbeing section in my phone settings. AntennaPod consistently comes out on top, anywhere up to an hour per day. I do not feel bad about it at all. AntennaPod is the app…

  • Too Busy Enlarging Our Lives to Live Them

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    Peter
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    If you could erase one trend from history, what would it be? If I could erase one trend from history, it might be the belief that bigger is always better. Bigger houses. Bigger cars. Bigger companies. Bigger cities. Bigger economies. Bigger audiences. Bigger ambitions. We have learned to treat growth as proof of health and…

  • The Same Storm, Different Trees

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    Peter
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    Do you think we’re shaped more by our experiences or by who we are? We are neither fixed selves untouched by life nor blank material shaped entirely by circumstance. We become who we are through the interaction of temperament, experience, relationships, choices and grace. Two people can endure the same event and be shaped in…

  • The Day I Stop Being Curious

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    Peter
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    Are you a lifelong learner? Some people collect jewellery. Art lovers collect paintings. Others collect coins. I seem to collect degrees. One qualification has often led to another, and then sometimes another after that. I now have seven degrees. That makes it sound more deliberate than it was. I never set out to accumulate qualifications.…

  • Writing That Fills Me

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    Peter
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    What’s one habit that has improved your life the most? When I first started writing as a hobby many years ago, I set aside one morning each week. It was a discipline, and for a while it worked. Eventually, though, it was crowded out. I stopped writing for myself during the years when I was…

  • Being Needed and Being Whole

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    Peter
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    What’s a chapter of your life you’d title “The Hard Years”— and what got you through it? People often say that a person’s forties can be the hardest years of their life. That was true for me. I would call that chapter The Hard Years. Not because everything collapsed, but because I came face to…

  • Ira’s Version

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    Peter
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    What is a book you think deserves a sequel? Some books do not need a sequel. They need another perspective. I wrote recently about how much I enjoyed Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons https://theafterword.blog/2026/05/16/a-single-day/. It is a novel about one ordinary day in the life of a middle-aged married couple, Maggie and Ira Moran, as they…

  • When the Villain Tells the Truth

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    Peter
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    What villain actually had a good point? I love the movie, Driving Miss Daisy. The characters are wonderful. Their relationships are beautiful. And it is funny as well. There is no straightforward villain in that film. Hoke is not the villain. Boolie is not the villain. Miss Daisy is flawed, proud, defensive, and shaped by…

  • Where Would I Live?

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    Peter
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    If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? I’m tempted to name a place I’ve never been. Costa Rica. It keeps popping up in my feed, which probably says as much about the algorithm as it does about me. But I am intrigued. The prompt asks, “If you could live anywhere…

  • Before The Problem Starts Shouting

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    Peter
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    What’s a lesson you’ve learned recently that shifted your perspective? Problems often speak before they shout. That is something I have been learning recently. Looking back, there have been situations where the signs were there early in the piece. They were not dramatic. They were not disasters. No alarms were ringing. But there were small…

  • More or Less

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    Peter
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    What do you love now, that you hated when you were younger? When I was younger, more seemed better. I loved to read, and building a library was something I valued. Book by book, shelf by shelf, I watched the collection grow. There was satisfaction in it. A growing library felt like a sign of…

  • Watership Down

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    Peter
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    What is a piece of media (book, movie, song)that changed how you see the world? I loved Watership Down when it came out in 1978. I saw the film first, and was so affected by it that I went on to read the book. That is very rare for me. Usually, if I have seen…

  • Meeting People Part Way

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    Peter
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    Which languages do you speak and how did that impact your life? I admire people who can speak multiple languages. Working in a university college, I spend my days talking with students from all over the world. The are here to study degrees that are taught in English but many of them speak multiple languages.…