Author Spotlight

Marcia Peck

I was lucky enough to be able to take my time to write my debut novel, Water Music: A Cape Cod Story. A good ten years. And that’s probably an undercount. Fortunately, Minneapolis hosts a strong writing community and while I was learning, I was able to work with giants like Patricia Hampl, Sandra Benitez, Michael Collier, and Josip Novakovich. I found what would become long-time, brilliant, go-to "writing buddies," while carving out writing time for residencies, which encouraged and inspired. All this due to my steady job and wonky schedule as a full-time symphony musician.

Music has been a generous teacher in so many ways. Not only has it given me a palette to explore: using the sounds and rhythms of language to deepen meaning, but I learned to embrace revision as a cousin of "practicing" or "rehearsing" for a musician. Most of all, my life in music gifted me the stability which allowed me to take my time. Of course I was eager to get my novel out in the world, but I also understood that, like a live musical performance, once it was out there, there would be no possibility to revise.

My lifelong love for Cape Cod prompted me—no, drove me—to set Water Music on that fragile penninsula. Throughout my rewrites I was guided by water as the physical landscape of the setting, and music as the inner landscape of the characters. Now I’m working on something completely different: a novel about a stolen cello. The theft of a colleague’s violin years ago and what such a loss would mean to ones career and confidence has haunted me ever since.

The care that The US Review of Books has taken with every one of our interactions has shown me again and again that I am in trustworthy hands. I am enormously grateful.

About the Author: Marcia Peck's debut novel, Water Music: A Cape Cod Story, has won the Literary Titan Award, Next Generation Indie Book Award, a New England Book Festivals Award, an Entrada Incipere Literary Fiction Award, and a 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize Short-Listed book, among others. Her award-winning fiction has appeared in New Millenium Writings, Chautauqua Journal, Gemini Magazine, Glimmer Train, and others. Her flash fiction, "Long Distance,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Essays have appeared in Strad Magazine, Strings Magazine, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and Musical America. Before joining the cello section of the Minnesota Orchestra, Marcia studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and Schumann Konservatorium in Düsseldorf. Growing up in New Jersey, she was a cat person. But she’s learned to love dogs—even the naughty ones, maybe especially the naughty ones.