Meet Richard Peck

Writing was Richard Peck’s first dream, but he came of age in an era when boys were not encouraged to take chances. After college, the U.S. Army drafted him and shipped him to Stuttgart, Germany as a chaplain’s assistant where he set himself up as a ghostwriter for sermons. “It was the first time I wrote to an audience,” he says. At the time, Peck felt he wasted two years of his life, but upon reflection considers his experience an apprenticeship in the last place he would have looked. “Sermons are novels,” he says. “They have beginnings, middles and ends and morals. And they depend upon research, because a sermon is based on the Biblical text.” More…