Connor: And then came “Two Hearts.” Do you remember your reaction when I asked you to give me a new story to use as promotion for the audiobook release?

Peter: I wanted nothing to do with it. I’d been telling people for 37 years that I would never go back to The Last Unicorn again, not for any amount of praise or fame or money. Not even if I could.

Connor: So why did you, finally?

Peter: Well…I was intrigued by the idea of having a limited edition hardcover to give away to the first audiobook customers. You also made it easier by telling me that I didn’t have to go anywhere near any of my previous characters. But what really did me in was the dangerous part of my imagination that can’t resist a challenge regarding words and stories. I can be lured into writing something I’ve never tried before just because I’ve never done it‌—‌like the time I wrote a libretto for an opera based on my story “Come Lady Death.” So after I grumped at you and went away I started to wonder if I actually could re-enter the unicorn’s world…at which point Sooz came into my head and the story just happened. It flowed. It was the exact opposite of my experience writing The Last Unicorn. I locked onto her voice, the voice of this nine-and-a-half year-old girl who was telling the story from the first sentence, and I just followed her. It was one of the very rare occasions where I felt from beginning to end that I knew what I was doing. Some of that certainty came from powerful recent experience: in the story King Lír is on the border of senility when Schmendrick and Molly find him again. Well, my mother Rebecca was going through something similar…a loss of mental acuity and function that wasn’t Alzheimer’s, but just the result of getting old. Here was the woman who taught me to read, without whose tutelage and support I would never have become a writer, and every day I could see that her own wonderful mind was faltering. I was thinking very much of her when I wrote King Lír. I know that. And it is one reason this story means a great deal to me.

Connor: It was the easiest edit of any story of yours I’ve ever tackled. Just minor tweaks and cutting one sentence where you described Schmendrick doing something overtly magical, but in too showy a style. That was all. The biggest change in the story was actually suggested by your webmaster, Kim Flournoy. She pointed out an inadvertent echo of Tolkien, which you easily corrected by changing the name and gender of King Lír’s secretary.

Peter: That was a good catch. No Grima Wormtongues, please‌—‌I didn’t have anything like that in mind when I was writing. Of course, I didn’t have a title, either.

Connor: That was a little like your big Schmendrick revelation. The title was there in your story all the time, staring us both in the face, waiting to be found, but it took me weeks to wake up to it. Lír tells Sooz that griffins have two hearts, both lion and eagle. And as I read that bit of dialog for maybe the 47th time, it hit me that “Two Hearts” was not only a beautiful and evocative phrase, it also summed up the multiple emotional pairings that form the thematic focus of the story: Lír and the unicorn, Schmendrick and Molly, Sooz and her lost Felicitas, Lisene and Lír, Sooz and her dog Malka, Lír and the griffin, the unicorn and the griffin…all of the characters, actually. Looking closely at “Two Hearts” is like staring into a kaleidoscope of dualities. And now it’s a dual award winner, too‌—‌it got you a Hugo and a Nebula. Your first of each, though I’m betting there will be more. How does it feel to wake up in the morning and see them on your mantle?