Boston Literary Magazine is back!

For better or worse, I am a born writer. My mind is a word fountain, and I have always derived pleasure from channeling the words toward creative goals. When I was eight and had the opportunity to enter works in my elementary school’s literary magazine for students, I was grateful for the opportunity to do what I already knew I wished to do. I am also a visual artist, so I submitted drawings as well as a poem, and more than one were accepted. This was very important to me. My parents always considered me talented and encouraged my artistic and literary pursuits, for which I am also grateful. After that, I continued to write and seek publication.

I grew up in the eastern half of the United States. I do not have a home town. My parents and I moved quite a bit for my father’s work. I was born in New York (State) and lived there (at several addresses) for the first five years of my life. Then we moved to Minnesota, Michigan (photo: 1978), Illinois, and Florida before returning to New York. Where am I from? I am from “the eastern half of the United States”. Where am I now? In 2000 I moved out west, which led me to Portland, Oregon, in 2006. From 2010 to 2011 I taught on the island of Saipan. In 2014 I drove trucks in Alaska.

Photo by E. Peate 2025

I have been back in the Portland area since then, suffering the Trumpocalypse with everyone else. On the bright side, here in Portland we have some very strong and healthy frogs.

My first career dream was to be a Walt Disney animator, but when I learned that was not creativity so much as an assembly line executing someone else’s visions, I dreamt of becoming a lawyer, specifically a public defender. I wished to protect the rights of the individual citizen facing the awesome power of the state. Then I realized that artists of all descriptions do both. As a visual artist, musician, or writer of stories, I could be creative and just. I could use my work to advocate social progress. I used to draw more, but then I switched to photography, as that was much quicker. I used to write music and sing, but I wished to write prose and poetry most of all. I could not stop the literary fountain.

In the ‘Nineties I began trying to secure an agent and have as of now given up. In the ‘Aughts I began submitting works to literary magazines and have as of now given up. I find that literary agents, literary magazines, and I tend not to see things eye to eye, and I am not about to change who I am or how I write to pursue popular tastes, which course of action only guarantees failure. My view was and is, “Do what you love. If anyone else likes it, great! If no one else likes it, you have still done what you loved.” And life is too short not to do what one loves.

.

After much debate and several unsatisfying jobs that did not fulfill my mind, I began tutoring Europeans in English. I learned that I could teach and that I loved doing it. That motivated me to go back to school to become an English teacher, which I am now. Now I use my passion for language to help others enjoy a brighter future in a direct and immediate way while also paying my bills. But of course I still write my own works with complete intellectual and artistic freedom, as anything else would be unacceptable.

All of my writing stems from and relates to my caring about my world. Yes, my mind is a word fountain and I enjoy channeling my words toward creative goals, but it is because I care about my world that I devote my works to making the World a better place. Believe it or not, it is my hope that someday everything I have written will be obsolete. I do not wish the World to need pep talks from me. If the World gets its act together regarding capitalism, religion, and every other social problem, it will no longer need writers and artists like me urging social changes, and that is actually the goal. The goal is not to sit around complaining for entire lifetimes—the goal is a better world that does not need hectoring and haranguing.

That said, I devote my time, energy, and works to probing and clarifying social issues. My view is there is more than enough “fluff” out there, if someone wishes that. It’s all around us. You like Bridgerton? Great. My stuff is not like that. My stuff is designed to prick your conscience and make you think about what matters most on this planet. My view is that “controversial” topics are only controversial because they are important, and that is precisely why we must address them. They say, “Don’t talk about politics and religion,” but unless we talk about them they will never change—and let’s be honest: politics and religion are always changing and going to continue to change, albeit more slowly, whether we talk about them or not. So those who wish us not to speak of them are merely seeking their own convenience and are, if I may say so, despicable. As for what I write regarding any topic, even if you disagree with what I write about it, I will consider my work successful if it at least makes you think. I think we all know that sometimes reading something with which we disagree can validate our own existing positions, which itself can be valuable.

My first major work was inspired by Mel Gibson, of all people. In 2004 he released the most successful independent movie of all time, The Passion of the Christ. That year, in response to his movie, TIME magazine had a cover story entitled, “Why Did Jesus Have to Die?” I had long considered it so obvious that Yeshu (“Jesus”) was a mortal man who survived his crucifixion that it didn’t need to be written down, but the combination of these two releases prompted me to say, “All right. I’ve heard your view. Now hear mine.” My view was that Yeshu, a devout Jew, was a charismatic leader who threatened the local Jewish powers, who asked the Roman authorities to rid them of him unsuccessfully, leading to one of the biggest lies in history. In my view, when he survived, he told his disciples he had no choice but to leave Jerusalem to prevent the Pharisees succeeding the next time they tried to have him killed—and they would make sure they succeeded the next time. In my depiction, Yeshu decides to go to Damascus, as that is far enough away from Jerusalem. On the road to Damascus, he says:

It is a hard duty I have had to perform, to leave my friends and my love.

But the Lord wills it, and I do not question Him further. I have questioned

Him too much already—and set myself up as His voice on Earth! I dared.

Now I see that His way is established, and that He does not need any

help from me! He is kind to those who have failed Him. He is kind to me.

This burden is nothing compared to what could have come. I am alive,

and I have my work before me. My work is here, on this road, and

before me, unknown.

Opportunists take advantage of his survival and departure and create a religion in his name. Though in hiding, being a devout Jew, Yeshu is horrified to learn of this blasphemy and even goes back to Jerusalem to demand his disciples put an end to it. Of course, human irrationality often outweighs reason, and the outcome of his attempt to nip Christianity in the bud may be observed all around us. There really was nothing he could do to stop it.

I passed a year researching first-century Palestine, writing my depiction as a play, feeling as I did that having live actors on a stage would make it most likely the audience would be willing to consider my scenario possible. I didn’t wish to hear, “That was a good play.” I wished to hear, “I can see that being possible.” I tried to get it staged to no avail. Unfortunately for an unsuspecting world, however, the self-publishing revolution came along, which allowed me to begin releasing my own work in 2011.

Regarding this play, I was asked, “What would you say to Christians who object to your play?” I said, “I would say, ‘See it before condemning it. If your faith is strong, it will be able to handle my humble work.’” That is still true.

In 2007 and 2010 I became the father of a daughter, Claire, and a son, Lucas, respectively. In 2024, I became the stepfather of a daughter, Elle, and a son, Eli. Parenthood, to me, is the greatest love and work on Earth. It’s the hardest job, but it’s also the best.

In 2008 I entered my literary prime, beginning with a short story called “Chasing Kerouac”, and released my first collection of short stories in 2012.

The literary work for which I am most known is my 2013 novel Sisyphus Shrugged, which is a sequel/rebuttal of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which most people don’t know Americans voted the second-most influential book of the twentieth century after the Bible. Whatever one thinks of Ayn Rand, she was and is influential, and denying that fact will get us nowhere. I had heard of her and expected to be impressed, based on the reputation she enjoyed. When I turned my attention to her in 2012, wishing to use my talents to address the biggest and most immediate problem in our society, that of capitalism run amok, I was devastated by what I found: a mind destroyed, as were countless others, by the false communists of Russia, but a mind akin to my own that a) gushed words; b) channeled them for pleasure; and c) attempted to use her word fountain for good. The problem was that her mind was so damaged by the trauma of the Bolsheviks that she saw Bolsheviks in American Democrats; devoted her career to propagating this paranoid fantasy; and provided countless American rightists delusional ammunition. Most of her work amounts to PTSD. I came to feel sorry for Alisa Rosenbaum, because at the end of her life she learned she was wrong, when her lawyer, Ava Pryor, persuaded her to accept Social Security. Many call Rand a hypocrite for this, but no: it was a humiliating defeat for her to realize she had been wrong. Near death, she could not bring herself to renounce her life’s work, and that was where any hypocrisy lies: when she realized her life’s work had been in error, she chose to leave it uncorrected, most likely to save face and let her legacy remain “intact” to the extent no one noticed she changed her mind at the end and grew beyond it. But her lawyer Ava and those of us who study her know the truth. She is a tragic figure.

So what did I do? I took seven months, read Atlas Shrugged, and wrote my rebuttal in the context of a hopefully-entertaining story as I went. My work picks up where AS leaves off: America has become an unregulated, untaxed, unserved capitalist hellhole of the type that Donald Trump is now pursuing. People work constantly at multiple jobs for pennies to survive until they get sick, injured, or too old to work and die. I created World Times reporter Evelyn Riley, who writes for the Home and Food section of her newspaper but who yearns for meatier fare. Her editor takes pity on her and says, “Hey, Evelyn, there’s something strange going on at General Motors. Absenteeism and productivity are both up, but that makes no sense. Could you look into that?” Doing so leads Evelyn on a grand adventure. Being a reporter, she interviews all the major players, and she learns there is a big social movement taking shape. What if most American workers suddenly decide they’ve had enough and go on strike one day? Who is truly indispensable here? Atlas Shrugged said it was the CEOs and managers, the so-called “creative geniuses” leading mindless workers, though as anyone knows most CEOs and managers are not creative geniuses and most creative geniuses do not become CEOs or managers. Artists are bad at business, and right-wingers are not usually very artistic or creative. That’s just the way it is. But my question was: if labor went on strike, would those creative geniuses keep everything going? I thought not, otherwise they would not need labor to bring their visions to life. The economy would stop immediately. By uniting and striking for reforms, the workers could and would make positive changes happen. Doing so is called “collective bargaining”, and, I might note, Ayn Rand herself said workers had the right to form unions and bargain collectively. But then, most right-wingers do not understand the writer they claim to adore. She was fiercely anti-religion, for example, and opposed Ronald Reagan for not being a true conservative: he used government to favor business with tax breaks and subsidies. She favored complete “sink or swim” economics, with no government support of business. None! Her position was that if you can’t succeed without special favors from government, you don’t deserve to succeed. She considered herself a “radical capitalist”, not a conservative, and I addressed her as such, not as others would have her be. I treated her fairly. When she was right, she was right, but I addressed and rebutted everything in her work that I felt deserved rebuttal. Of course, after releasing my story, which of course ended with liberal reforms, I realized that international business would respond to the events of Sisyphus Shrugged by organizing a global boycott of America to prevent reforms from spreading, so I passed 2013 to 2015 writing a sequel, Money’s Men, about a businessman working to destroy America. This became the most horrible coincidence of my literary life.

Photo: on display at the West Linn Public Library, 2013

The book Sisyphus Shrugged got me my first-ever placement in a library, in a real book store, and an interview with journalist and author Lisa Loving on Portland’s radio station KBOO. In 2018 I sent a copy to Speaker Pelosi, and she wrote me back, saying she looked forward to reading it. These favorable responses contrasted sharply with the rejections I had received in the past and just went to show how “hit or miss” everything was. Meritocracy, indeed!

A quotation in Sisyphus Shrugged to which I find myself returning semi-regularly is this moment in which Evelyn remembers something her deceased father had said:

“It’s not that they disagree with me,” Evelyn heard her father saying,

“though disagreement is at times unpleasant. It’s that they’re such

fucking liars. I wouldn’t mind honest, open disagreement, sincerely

meant and based on sincerely held positions. But they are incapable

of that. Do you know why, Evelyn? Because they have to lie. They

cannot persuade anyone if they say, ‘I am a greedy bastard with no

use for anyone else, and I. want the full power of the Government—

tax cuts, subsidies, contracts—devoted to my personal gain, because

being as rich as I am without government help is just not enough.

I need even more money!’ No; they can’t admit that. So they have

to cloak their actual motivation—serving the interest of money—

in patriotism, in religion, in the pretense of standing up for the

little guy while kicking him down an elevator shaft. They have no

choice. But boy, would it be refreshing if once, just once, they could

tell the truth. I get so tired of the lying. The lying wears me out, which

is exactly what they want it to do, I know.”

Unfortunately, our world situation reminds me of this frequently. 

Since then, I have devoted myself to my religion project, a dystopian series envisioning the Earth taken over by the Roman Catholic Church—with a twist. When the Catholics in the Vatican begin their takeover, some countries go along but many don’t, and all those opposed to theocracy resist them. There is a war, and the Church is on the verge of losing until a group of Sun-worshippers calling themselves Havians offers to help in return for some big concessions should they succeed. The Church agrees, the Havians turn the tide, and the Church wins the global war. But due to the deal it struck, the Church also finds its doctrines and terminology altered forever by the Havians. They say Christianity got it all wrong, God is actually the Sun God Havo, and they get rid of Original Sin and the Patriarchy. So far, so good, right? But they also do human sacrifice.

I consider the Patriarchy the World’s biggest problem, so why didn’t I devote a novel to the Patriarchy? Because I consider Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to be a perfect takedown of how the Patriarchy uses religion as a tool to oppress, and I didn’t think I could have improved upon her work. I wished, therefore, to remove patriarchy from the recipe so as not to be distracted from religion itself as a problem. Men and women are equal in Havendom so there will not be a distraction of sexism from the problem of religion itself.

(That said, my six novels all feature strong, independent, skilled female protagonists. This is just another way I fight the Patriarchy. I have written short stories about the Patriarchy, but I think it’s also important to fight it indirectly as well, so that one day we won’t think anything of a strong character being female. I can use a novel about religion to model female empowerment.)

When I started the first book in the series, The Sun Children, my goal was to depict the evils of theocracy, and I did that, but something else happened that I did not expect: I swiftly realized that in any oppressive system, there are good and bad persons among the oppressors and the oppressed. Things are far more complex than anyone would imagine. Two hundred and thirty-odd years after the Church of Havo took over Terra, my protagonist is a true believer, and the story is that of her journey from blind follower to sighted opponent of the oppression. Due to an unexplained global infertility problem, the Inopia, the world population has sunk to about one billion, and in order to earn a reprieve from Havo, to impress upon Him how important and valuable children are to the Havians, they sacrifice ten children to Him every year. You just know that someone would come up with that idea. But because women cannot become pregnant or keep their babies to term, the Church has a rule allowing Havians to be sacrificed up to the age of twenty-five. Clovia Nervina is a twenty-three-year-old elementary teacher whose father gets the letter. She was not expecting to meet her maker yet, but, being a believer, she is willing to get on the annual shuttle to the Sun, and she helps her father prepare for life without her.

Without my telling anyone, the whole village knows my secret. The students

pepper me with questions:

“Clovia Nervina, is it true?”

“Are you going to meet Havo?”

“Are you scared?"

“Are you excited?”

“Will you come back?”

“Who is going to be our teacher for the rest of the year?”

“What about next year?”

After saying, “One question at a time!” and laughing, I calmly answer

each question. “Yes, it is true. I am a little scared and a little excited but mostly

honored to meet Havo. I will ask Him to end the Inopia. I don’t think I will

come back here until the end of Time, but I do think you will join me in Haven

later. I do not know who your teacher will be.”

In the days that follow, my life returns to normal, to the point that the students

and I do not talk about it. It is possible that some of them forget. My father and I

do not.

“We won’t get to celebrate your birthday,” my father says one afternoon.

I will be asleep in Space.

“Celebrate it for me,” I say, “and please be happy. I am."

I do not notice the rest of the month. I begin to feel only a calm eagerness

to join the nine other Offerings. I trust they feel the same, wherever they are.

She goes to Roma with the nine other “Offerings” from the nine other global provinces and boards the shuttle for the trip to the Sun. The plan is for everyone to wake before reaching the Sun, pray and prepare to meet Havo, but when they all come out of cryogenic sleep, Clovia swiftly learns that four of the Offerings are nonbelievers sentenced to death for apostasy, nonbelievers who say, “We’re not dying for your religion. We’re turning this shuttle around and going back to Terra.” The Church says apostates do not exist, and it would be unHavian to put them to death. The Church has—gasp—lied and betrayed its stated values! That’s when things get interesting and Clovia begins to learn.

So this is the kind of thing I do. I find it intellectually engaging. When I met Ursula LeGuin in 2008 and thanked her for her beautiful work, she said, “It was a lot of fun.” Exactly. And if I don’t find what I do amusing, you won’t either. Again: I must do what I love or no one else will. But if no one loves it, at least I did.

In 2020, something happened I did not expect: an excellent literary magazine, Meat for Tea in New England, invited me to submit a story and accepted it! The kind folks there have been very supportive, having now published seven of my short stories, nominating one of them (“The Ones Who Win”) for a Pushcart Prize in 2022, and even interviewing me on their podcast. It means a great deal to me to have anyone think well of what I do, and I cannot thank them enough for their support these past five years. This just goes to show that good things can happen, especially if one does not try to force anything. Again: do what you love, and if someone else likes it, great! Sometimes we have to wait until we “click” with the right audience, but sometimes, it does happen.

My current literary life: I never plan sequels, only writing them when ideas justify them, and the Havian series now consists of four novels. The election of 2024 taught me that when everything feels safe and secure the whole World can be destroyed, and that prompted me to begin another Havian novel, my fifth, on which I am working sporadically these days. (I have also started a prequel, depicting the war the Roman Catholic Church wages for control of the Earth.) But I do not wish to pass my entire literary life in the same setting, and this year I discovered Japanese culture as never before. I recently released a collection including five stories set in medieval Japan, stories involving samurai and ghosts. I write science fiction and horror at times too. I refuse to limit myself. I will write about anything that engages me.

Robert Peate reads "Bridge Story" from his new collection,

Love in the Land of Zsa.

Robert Peate is the author of The Recovery, Sisyphus Shrugged, Money's Men, The Havian Quartet, and several collections of short fiction and poetry. Though Peate is an independent author, his work has garnered the attention of some of the world's most interesting readers and a Pushcart Prize nomination. His stories have appeared in Better Than Starbucks, Meat for Tea, and Boston Literary Magazine.

ENTER TO WIN AN AUTOGRAPHED COPY OF SISYPHUS SHRUGGED

Send an email with the subject Sisyphus Shrugged to bostonliterarymagazine@gmail.com

YOUR ADDRESS WILL NOT BE SHARED WITH ANYONE AND WILL ONLY

BE USED FOR THE DURATION OF THIS JANUARY ISSUE ENTRY PERIOD