Second-Year Spotlight: Walker Peters
Café MFA: Introduce yourself. Who are you and what do you like to write?
Walker Peters: I'm a diehard fantasy nerd who loves writing weird, less conventional stories with twists meant to blindside the reader.
Café MFA: What is your thesis about?
Walker: A college dedicated to the study of the magical manipulation of biological matter. Also there's been a murder. Also the main character is a paranoid amnesiac.
Café MFA: Who is on your advisory board for the project? Why did you select them?
Walker: David Keplinger: A professor of poetry, David has an eye for the lyricism and emotional language that's baked into the fantasy genre, which has its roots in epic poetry. David is also the kindest person on campus, and that's not a minor thing when you're working on something big and weird. Arielle Bernstein: A literature professor, Bernstein has always been very encouraging of my offbeat writing. I trust her to tell me when I'm deviating from my vision, rather than not going along with convention.
Café MFA: How did the idea for your thesis come about?
Walker: I can't tell you -- I thought of the ending first! But it's something I've been working on for over five years, going through drafts and throwing away ideas that don't work.
Café MFA: What has been your biggest challenge with your thesis thus far?
Walker: Epic fantasy is a hard genre to workshop; it carries all the typical problems of workshopping a novel piecemeal, but some of your peers won't have read the earlier chapters and are missing necessary exposition. One workshop I included a 13-page plot summary and glossary to combat that; it might have been a bit overkill.
Café MFA: What has been your biggest success thus far?
Walker: Learning to onboard readers into the world. The flipside to the above is you learn not to rely on genre conventions to fill in gaps that should be explored.
Café MFA: What has this project taught you?
Walker: You gotta grind. With short stories, or when you don't have a hundred other responsibilities to balance, sometimes inspiration strikes and you can spit out a great 15 pages in one day. But you can't rely on that for a novel of this size.
Café MFA: What advice would you give first-year students who are planning their thesis work?
Walker: Think about the advice people give you, and what you actually want to do. Some people are 100% on board already -- don't take that to mean it's perfect as-is. Likewise, some people just don't resonate. I have great peers who have never read fantasy before, and if something pretty typical to the genre doesn't land with them, that's probably not a problem; but they might also have a great eye for prose or character, and that's something to listen to.
Café MFA: Is there anything else you’d like to share with readers?
Walker: It's really important to read great stories and emulate them. I also think it's important to read bad stories, or guilty pleasures that objectively aren't that good. Why aren't things working, and how would you fix it? Why does one aspect manage to carry an otherwise mediocre plot? You're going to be reading a lot of bad work -- your own rough drafts -- so its an important skill to have.
As someone who has been in several fiction workshops with Walker, I can’t stress enough how incredible he is at world-building. As a fantasy writer, he thinks about story elements and niche details that a normal novelist wouldn’t even consider. It’s a skill that I really think all writers should learn and embody to really examine their work from all angles. It’s been super inspiring to see him develop his story and showcase these skills through various drafts. Walker’s work is also a reminder that AU’s MFA program is the type of place where you can come in with genre-specific aspirations and a passion project you’ve been wanting to really dive into.
Walker was also willing to share some of his work with us! See an excerpt of his novel below:
“I’m incapable of going to bed early. I tell myself that I’m going to sleep, and accept that in a few short minutes my spirit will drift to that desolate place. I blow out the tallow candle on my desk and turn my head so that the mosslight filtering underneath my door is hidden from view, but sleep doesn’t come. That isn’t to say I stay lucid; thoughts race through my head, some solid and others as formless as the light of a candle. Who was the man I used to be, the Miles Manaan who deserved admittance to Tirntagarn, whose talents I now waste? Possibilities float through my mind, incompatible realities swirling and dissolving, their boundaries smeared on my brain and pulled over my eyes until the results are unintelligible, unfamiliar — and yet, much more real than the life I now have. Some uncountable amount of time later, the darkness finally takes me, and I hear the whistle of cold gales as the shapeless forms of my room give way to rigid horrors. When I regain awareness, I find myself afloat in a ruined future. Cracks run along the riverbed, widening over the ages as the taste of rain is pushed further and further from memory. Dry silt kicks into the air with even the slightest push, though the clouds have nothing to hide. Anything capable of death had chosen that path long ago, and the stones, cursed to wait atop the riven ground, yearn for a sun that might never return.”
You can find Walker on Bluesky @walkerspec.bsky.social
