Coping Mechanism

Peter Stenson, right, in the regrettable hat, with the author, in the regrettable haircut, in 2015. Photo, with the regrettable filter, by Andrew Snee.

I still remember the too-bright afternoon in Fort Collins, Colorado—July or August 2011. My friend and fellow graduate student Peter Stenson and I were seated at a picnic table outside a restaurant, hiding as best we could from the heat and commiserating about inadequate part-time work, when he pulled out his phone to check an email, and his face immediately cracked into a smile. He’d just had an essay accepted at a magazine we both agreed was at the very top of the list of publications to get into: The Sun.

That his essay had been accepted was exciting, but also sort of unsurprising. Peter’s writing was confident and unsparing, unafraid to be sentimental and occasionally even obscene. It was like he was kayaking through white water while the rest of us in the program were splashing around in the shallow end. Well, that’s how I felt, anyway. “He’s a beast,” another classmate said of Peter. “He’s always writing.” (For privacy reasons The Sun published his essay under a pseudonym; otherwise I’d share it here.)

Peter was a year ahead of me in Colorado State University’s MFA program. An old instructor once said to me, “An MFA is where you take a group of people who say they’re writers and you ask them to prove it.” Peter had proven it, though he was perhaps not what you’d expect of a writing student, being just as likely to talk at length about a stunt from Jackass as he was the careful characterization in a Jennifer Egan novel. He chewed nicotine gum or smoked cigarettes constantly, sometimes both at the same time, but didn’t touch alcohol or drugs. (He’d had some addiction problems when he was younger.) He usually wore those five-panel hats that were popular in the 2010s, most of which he got at Patagonia, where he worked to pay the bills. (My girlfriend and I dubbed it Petergonia.) His laugh was loud and infectious, as was his smile, which revealed an endearing, so-skinny-you-almost-missed-it gap between his front teeth.

Peter and I have been in semi-contact since graduating, though our lives have diverged. He stuck around Denver and now works as a writing instructor at CSU. A father of three, he has published three novels—Fiend, Thirty-Seven, and We, Adults—and a collection of short stories, The Sexual Lives of Suburbanites. Many more books have been written and abandoned. I moved to North Carolina and became an editor at The Sun, and I’m anxiously awaiting the birth of my first child in a couple of weeks.

Our calls and texts gradually slowed over time, so I was excited late last year to see his name on an email in my inbox with a short story attached. Excited—but also sort of anxious. The title, “Bone Frag,” didn’t sound like something that would fit at The Sun, and sending rejections is easily the worst part of my job. Doubly so when I’m sending them to a friend.

Then I read it. Here were all the Peter hang-ups I knew so well—sexual frustration, shame, financial precarity, the inescapable gloss of consumerism, body horror—but executed better than I’d seen him do before. I was heartened when my fellow editors shared my enthusiasm. You can read the story, and learn what the unusual title means, here.

Last week Peter and I talked over Zoom about his ongoing work, his hectic family life, my soon-to-be-hectic family life (“Try not to be a dick” was his advice), and our shared love of the jam band Phish, which we had shyly kept from one another while we were in Colorado. Behind him was the type of unadorned-but-pristine house I’d pictured the narrator of “Bone Frag” living in: white walls and can lights and steel railings. Peter was still wearing one of those Petergonia hats, now ten years out of style—though maybe they’ve hung on longer where he lives. He was interrupted a few times by his kids, begging to be allowed popsicles. (“You already had a popsicle, bro.”) Throughout our talk I kept wondering, Why didn’t we do this years ago?

His most shocking update was that a man who’d been in prison three times for violently assaulting children had just moved into their neighborhood. “There’s, like, ten thousand kids running around. How is that even possible? I thought we had priced out the bad guys,” he said, laughing, knowing full well that complete safety is an illusion.

It was hard, hearing this, not to think of “Bone Frag” with its fixation on threats, both global and local, and its supposedly idyllic suburban setting. When I asked how much his day-to-day concerns fueled his writing, Peter replied, “When you asked what was new, it took me all of a minute to get to, ‘Well, this threat just moved in.’ That’s all I care about: my children’s safety and well-being, and protecting them from—” he waved his hand in the air, as if to encompass everything. “That occupies a huge portion of my mind I didn’t know I had. My eldest is starting middle school at a performing-arts public school. She’s there for dance, and I’m so worried about whether kids are going to pick on her. I’m just terrified.” It was an admission, but also a kind of warning: This is what you have to look forward to.

He went on to describe his realization during the COVID-19 lockdown “that big, bad outside threats can get into your house no matter what. Being a father in a bougie, Stepford-like neighborhood with little kids—this is what I think about, it’s what I write about, it’s what I read. How the hell do you maintain some semblance of a personality and artistic drive and interests and vitality when you’re really focused on that?”

When I asked if writing was his primary way of coping, he laughed and said it was his only way.

In “Bone Frag” one of the would-be solutions is technology: a series of cameras installed in the narrator’s home, their security feed accessible on his phone. It is perhaps unsurprising that this isn’t much of a solution at all, but rather just another barb for the anxiety machine that lives in our pockets. Peter told me his kids don’t have phones or social-media accounts. His daughter had talked to him just that morning about how some kids’ parents tracked them through their phones and looked at their texts. “We don’t do that. We try really hard to give them space to make mistakes, but at the same time I know what’s out there: predators and bad guys and cars that aren’t looking.”

In addition to distracted drivers, Peter was concerned about the economy: “The whole world is becoming very unattainable. I don’t know how people navigate it. We were just at the grocery store, and it was $350 for a week of groceries—”

I asked where the hell he shopped.

He affected a well-to-do accent and said, “The local market,” pinkie finger in the air. Then he laughed and corrected: Sprouts, which he lamented used to be as affordable as the larger chains, even with its sizable organic-produce section. “All that plays into ‘Bone Frag’ and the feeling that the world’s going to shit, which I’ve felt the last eight to ten years.” He sighed. “I’m on TikTok, though I don’t do anything besides watch videos. And other than the zit-popping videos”—I didn’t have the stomach to investigate that further—“everything is bad news. And throughout the day I consume, like, two hours’ worth of five-second hits of bad news. I don’t know if it’s real or not, but it feels like it’s absolutely crushing down on my little house.”

Peter also maintains a Twitter—er, X—account, where his posts generally fall into one of three categories: an observation about a bodily function that no one asked for; a pithy sentence about US politics (“I posted about the JD Vance couch thing,” he said, “but I deleted it because I, too, have fucked a couch”); or a reference to a Phish song that absolutely no one engages with.

Our conversation then turned from bummer-fest to a spirited discussion of the music of Phish. Each of us saw our first show in the late 1990s, which we agree is Peak Phish (Phish 1.0ers are weird); both of us took regrettably long breaks from their music; and both agree that classics like “Sand” and “Tweezer” are the best songs to hear live.

A key difference between us, though, was that Peter followed the band on tour and lived the attendant lifestyle. He described a 2003 Phish show at the Deer Creek Music Center in Indiana, where he soiled himself standing beside a nitrous-oxide tank. (Nitrous is ubiquitous at Phish shows, a drug usually inhaled from a balloon for a quick high.) “I’d tried to be sober,” he said, “but I’d relapsed, and it was a disaster. And I found myself in a tent with some gal with a kid—”

“After you shit your pants?”

“I was a mess.”

“You mean that literally, right?”

“Yeah, I had a seizure and shit my pants and had this weird trip where I was like, ‘Don’t believe the devil!’ I just threw my boxers in a field. Anyway, I ended up in this lady’s tent with her kid there. She wanted my balloons, but I just remember her holding me.” At this he laughed, hard. Addicts talk about rock bottom. This wasn’t that.

It’s a good story, though—or, at least, an instructive one. Silliness is essential to Phish, but what I remember, too, is the shadow looming there. I saw my first show when I was fifteen, and it was like that scene where Pinocchio smokes a cigar with Lampwick at the pool hall and turns himself green with sick. (In fairness, sober Phish is a huge part of the scene, and the band’s front man has been sober since 2007.)

“I still get nervous walking around the lot” outside a concert, Peter admitted, referring to the carnival of vendors and partiers—and nitrous tanks—that spring up with every show. “I’m afraid I’m going to get beat up or told to leave because I’m not cool enough. I’ve always felt that way, even when I toured.”

Though we’ve never spoken about it, I’ve often seen Peter’s sobriety and his enviable writing habits as symbiotic disciplines. When I asked if his writing was as constant as ever, he said, “Three or four days a week, but they’re shorter stretches, and there are a million things pulling me away”—kids, work, the latest Madden video games. “It doesn’t seem as consuming as it once did—this desperate need for literary validation that I had when we were in grad school. I just don’t really care as much. It’s a very small mountain to try to be on top of.”

Yet another scene he feels on the outside of—but he’s learning to be more comfortable there. This is exactly what drew me to Peter, and his writing, in the first place: his willingness to be vulnerable, and to admit to something that others might find shameful.