Peter Ludwin
Peter Ludwin is the son of an adventurous father from Vienna who survived being shot, kidnapped, rescued and subsequently imprisoned in World War I, lived through multiple plane crashes, nearly died from malaria in the Brazilian Amazon and came within seconds of being beheaded in Mongolia. Born on Long Island, New York, Ludwin moved with his family to Seattle when he was five, where he formed a powerful attachment to both the natural world and the American West. As a student at the University of Washington he befriended a group of poets, which stirred a creative impulse that ultimately found expression in poetry.
At the end of his junior year he dropped out of college and enlisted in the Security Agency branch of the Army. Having studied Spanish and German in high school and college, he spent nine months in Monterey, California at the Defense Language Institute studying Russian, after which he became a Voice Intercept Operator for 28 months in Bavaria during the Cold War.
He traveled twice to Greece, which became a cultural touchstone, as well as to Spain, Morocco, Turkey, and other countries of Europe. Being on a base with numerous guitarists, he fell in love with the blues and began to learn how to play acoustic folk and blues on guitar.
After living in Berkeley for 16 months following his discharge from the military, he moved back to Seattle, became the booking agent for the Seattle Folklore Society and met some of the greats from the country blues world, such as Mississippi Fred McDowell, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, Mance Lipscomb and Reverend Gary Davis, as well as folk legend Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. He assembled his own jug band, became accomplished on autoharp as well as guitar, and among other funky gigs performed at the Pacific Northwest Folklife Festival, the Bumbershoot Festival, Expo 74 and for the Seattle SuperSonics of the National Basketball Association.
Ludwin has had a series of diverse jobs, such as mail carrier, member of a tree planting crew, apple picker for several seasons near the Canadian border, food vendor at sporting events, telemarketer, art show representative for Costco road shows, moccasin salesman, employee for both the Seattle and Kent Park Departments and greenhouse worker. For eighteen years he sold Christmas trees in New York City, driving across the country and back as he explored remote areas of the West.
In particular, the period from 1998-2006, during which he spent parts of each winter living in a beat up 16-foot trailer a few miles from Big Bend National Park on the Texas-Mexico border, was especially fruitful for his writing. These journeys formed the foundation for his first book, A Guest in All Your Houses, just as his earlier travels in Greece and Morocco and later ones in Latin America, the Czech Republic, China and Tibet fueled his second, Rumors of Fallible Gods. For his third book, Gone to Gold Mountain, he turned to the massacre of over thirty Chinese gold miners in Oregon’s Hells Canyon in 1887, often using the persona poem to explore the trauma of an alien culture. His fourth book, An Altar of Tides, is more personal, set primarily in the Pacific Northwest with a strong environmental theme and a series of poems exploring his relationship with his father. He is currently working on a memoir.