At some point, every writer is afraid.
To start. To venture. To intuit. To revise. To be edited. To finish.
I can help you with that.
I help writers in all genres start, revise, and finish projects. I work with leaders and thinkers in other professions who understand that storytelling and communicating are vital for effective and influential leadership. After learning to analyze ‘story’ in 15 years of writing and rewriting feature screenplays in Los Angeles, I used that experience to write three critically-acclaimed novels, two short-story collections and a sequence of acclaimed essays. I’m also a prose stylist and a line-editor who believes in the horsepower of the perfect sentence, and that before any work—memoir, podcast, screenplay— can tell a story, it has to find its voice.
What Writers Say…
Peter’s insight and grasp of storytelling, character and structure provided me the technical/craft education I needed to build a better script…his enthusiasm was contagious and exactly what I needed to power through –Jamie A.
His discerning feedback built my knowledge, confidence, and enthusiasm. –Carol J.
Not all great writers are great teachers. Peter Behrens is both. -Adrian R.
“Peter Behrens is a master teacher. He knows his craft, and his keen editorial insights have always improved my fiction— Soon W.
A writer couldn't have anyone better in their corner than Peter. He puts a lot of thought and heart into each manuscript and forces you to be a better writer.-Lily Q.
Peter challenges his writers to tough but rewarding inquiries…I am indebted to him for guidance and insight – Mary S.
Peter has been a terrific mentor and coach at multiple stages in my career. — Henry McK.
Peter is a calm, generous, and judicious mentor and reader. I could not have completed my project without him. —Libby B
…Over the next six months, I sent Peter pages and he sent me notes, and the work developed into something that surprised even me…I am happy to report Anansi is publishing my book Spring 2024. -Sabrina R
(Selected) Reviews
…one of those rare books that comes along from time to time that makes you feel that you are in the presence of greatness: a gifted storyteller with a truly compelling story to tell—Irish Sunday Independent (The Law of Dreams)
Behrens captures his narrator’s naïveté and the casual anti-Semitism of the times with great skill and intelligence . . . as true an observation about human nature as there is. —The New York Times Book Review (Carry Me)
…another meditation on history and destiny . . . that make[s] the past feel stunningly close at hand. —Megan O’Grady, Vogue (Carry Me)
…brimming with character and incident, even more ambitious in scope than its prizewinning predecessor . . . Supple prose captures both their keening sorrowfulness and their rapturous engagement with the pleasures of the physical world. –The Daily Beast (The O’Briens)
Absorbing, unsparing and beautifully written...a masterly novel — The New York Times Book Review (The Law of Dreams)
The O'Briens is a major accomplishment” —New York Times Book Review
Great writing keeps readers on this threshold, in liminal space, wanting to know and understand more than literature or life will allow, anxious for the next big lesson. Carry Me is full of this kind of searching, characters looking for a way to map their lives against war and love and change. Portland Press-Herald
Great historical novels give us a god's omnipotence. They don't coddle but burden us with the sure knowledge that we can do nothing to alter the flow of time. And this is the inherent tragedy that lives at the heart of Carry Me, which follows the fortunes of two intermingled families through one of the most turbulent times in modern history" —Jason Sheehan, naming Carry Me one of National Public Radio's Best Books of 2016
Peter Behrens’ first novel The Law of Dreams (2006) won the Governor General’s Literary Award in his native Canada and is published in 9 languages. The New York Times called his second novel, The O’Briens (2011) “a major accomplishment”. Behrens’ 2016 novel Carry Me won the The Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature, was a finalist for the National (US) Jewish Book Award and one of National Public Radio’ s Best Reads of 2016. Peter is a contributor to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered. A Fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (1985-86), he held a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellowship at Stanford University (1986-87). “Vulcan”, his first short story published in the U.S., appeared in The Atlantic in 1986 and was optioned by the legendary Hollywood producer Jerome Hellman. Peter subsequently worked with Hellman and with directors such as John Frankenheimer on feature film projects. A member of the Writers Guild of America (West) and the Writers Guild of Canada, his screen credits include In God’s Country (2006), Kayla (1997) Saltwater Moose (1995) and Cadillac Girls (1992). Peter was a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in 2012-13 and a Fellow of Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, 2015-16. He was Distinguished Visiting Writer at Wichita State in 2013 and the 2017 Mordecai Richler Distinguished Visiting Writer at Concordia University. Peter has taught Fiction, Screenwriting and Narrative at Colorado College, Concordia University, Roger Williams University, in the low-residency MFA Program at Queens University of Charlotte, and has guest-lectured at UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television and Sarah Lawrence. He has received Fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. A native of Montreal, Peter lives with his family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Message me using the Contact button. I work on novels, stories, screenplays & all types of nonfiction projects, including essays, speeches, resumes, CVs and career biographies.
We will schedule time to talk about your project. No charge for the discussion.
If you feel I could be useful, I charge a reading fee and use an hourly fee schedule.
After reading your pages I will offer an extensive set of notes.
Then, the process works best as a back-and-forth: you write/I read and offer notes/ you rewrite, revise…and etc.
We continue for however long the process is helpful to you.
Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known. –
–Seamus Heaney, from North