Connor: Once the Fellowship was over you headed back to New York. How long after you got home did you find out that Enid, who was getting divorced, was pregnant and that you were the father?

Peter: It wasn’t very long at all. And obviously it gave me a lot to think about, trying to figure out what to do. I spent that winter partly in New York, and partly in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I had friends that I’d met in Berkeley. I got a job in Ann Arbor working as a janitor in student housing. It was the most horrendous winter I’d ever spent. I thought I knew about winters from New York, but Michigan was a different matter. It was a Canadian winter, and all I had to get around on was my motor scooter. That was tough. I admit it: the weather finally forced me back to New York. But in the spring of 1962, after things warmed up, I traveled back to Ann Arbor to collect my scooter. My childhood buddy Phil Sigunick went along with me for company, and we drove back to New York together on the one machine. I remember that particularly because there was this one cop who stopped us… Phil had a driver’s license, but all I had was an international license that I’d gotten when I was in Europe, and the cop didn’t think that was enough for us to be bopping around in his jurisdiction. He said that Phil would have to drive. But Phil knew nothing about scooters at that point. He had never driven one in his life. So there we were, the two of us, late at night, going round and round in a parking lot, me trying to teach Phil how to handle the clutch and the throttle at least well enough to get us out of this guy’s bailiwick.

Connor: Which brings us to the summer of 1962, stage now set, and your first stab at The Last Unicorn.

Peter: “Stab” is a good description for it.

Connor: That’s the summer you and Phil left New York behind and headed north to the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts. It was supposed to be an “artistic retreat.” Whose idea was that?

Peter: That was me. I was at loose ends. Just young and scrambled, with no idea what to do next. We rented this lovely two-room shack on a hillside in Cheshire, really one big room and a bathroom, kind of a guest cottage on property owned by friends of our parents. It was near North Adams, and not too far from Pittsfield. Phil would go out every day on his motor scooter‌—‌he’d bought one for himself by then‌—‌to work on this huge landscape he was painting. And me…well, after Viking rejected The Mirror Kingdom I was feeling less than confident. I just knew I had to be doing something, so when Phil came home every day I could claim that I was working too, not just sitting around all day playing guitar. The first thing I tried was a spooky story set in my own imaginary version of Berkeley, which I called Avicenna, but after a few pages I couldn’t figure out what I was doing. So I let it drop. Then out of nowhere an image came to me of a unicorn going somewhere, for some reason, with a companion I couldn’t see.