Husband Atticus Carr
Queer Places:
Hamilton College, 198 College Hill Rd, Clinton, NY 13323
San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco, CA 94132
Born on May 12, 1942, Peter Weltner grew up in a religious Lutheran family
in Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina. Weltner met his current
lover, medical social worker Atticus Carr (born January 17, 1954), in 1986.
He showed an early interest in painting, and when he was a boy his
parents sent him to Salem Academy and to St. Leo's Convent in Winston-Salem to
study art more seriously. Around the age of 15, Weltner says, religion "fell
apart" for him and he had a sense that reading and the whole study of art was
an attempt to find another source of religious meaning. When he was 17, he
attended an exhibition of artist Gerald Coble's work in Greensboro and was so
excited by what he saw that he got in touch with Coble, who then took him on
as a student. For over a year, Weltner went to Coble's cabin every Saturday
morning to work on painting and to see more clearly "what making modern art
was all about." During the same period, Weltner returned to New York City,
which he had visited often with his family while he was growing up, to see the
work of the Abstract Expressionists. These artists had a profound influence
upon Weltner, as did the writers he discovered in magazines like Arts and Art
News which he would buy at a newsstand down Market Street from his family's
church after Sunday services.
In 1960, Weltner entered Hamilton College
in Clinton, New York. He felt that going to college was in many ways "a
digression" from what he had been learning in his friendship and work with
Coble. Nevertheless, Weltner received his A.B. from Hamilton and immediately
afterward attended graduate school at Indiana University, where he completed
his Ph.D. in English Literature in 1969. In August of that year, he moved to
San Francisco to teach at San Francisco State University, where he is still
employed as a professor.
1969 to 1972 were "three years of the usual coming-out madness," and in the
fall of 1973, Weltner met Bob Mohr. They fell in love and lived together for
the next eight years. Starting in 1973, Weltner and poets Linda Gregg, Robert
Hass, John Logan, and several other writers began to meet regularly at
Weltner's apartment on Telegraph Hill to discuss poetry and writing, though at
the time Weltner was writing only critical essays and reviews. Before he could
begin writing fiction, he sensed he had to free himself from the academic
strictures which for the preceding ten years had limited the kind of writing
he really wanted to do. More importantly, he had to find "a sense of a world."
Until he had that sense of a world and a "sense of comfort in it," he says, "I
don't think I could really have started writing." Once he began in 1976,
however, he wrote a long story or short novel a year, though he refrained from
seeking publication for over ten years.
In 1989, his collection of
stories Beachside Entries/Specific Ghosts was published, followed the next
year by his novel, Identity & Difference. In 1991, more of Weltner's fiction
began to appear in print. Five Fingers Press published his collection of three
short novels entitled In a Time of Combat for the Angel and his story "At Dawn
the Guard Advances in the West" appeared in the special issue of Five Fingers
Review entitled Vanishing Point: Spirituality and the Avant-Garde. In 1992,
his long story "The Greek Head" appeared in both the June issue of American
Short Fiction and George Stambolian's fiction anthology Men on Men 4.
Since this bio-bibliographic essay was published, Weltner has published two
critically acclaimed books: a collection of short fiction, The Risk of His
Music (Graywolf Press, 1997) and a novel How the Body Prays (Graywolf Press,
1999). (Originally published in Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A
Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport,
Conn.:Greenwood Press, 1993.)
My published books:
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