Toot, Toot! We won first place!!  :-)   :-)    :-)

I’ve never been too good at tooting my own horn. Maybe that’s why I gave up playing the saxaphone. (Also just one of the many reasons why I’ll never be the Republican nominee for President, but that’s another story.) But in my own little way, I’m doing what I can to make memoir great again. That’s a joke. I’ve been too obsessed with the election. Memoir has been great ever since St. Augustine wrote the first recognized memoir,  Confessions, in 354 A.D.

Skipping merrily through the millenia to present day, my memoir, King of Doubt  has just been selected as a finalist in the Oregon Writers’ Colony literary competition. (Winners to be announced in early December.) Okay, it’s not quite as well known as the Pulitzer, but there are a lot of fine writers in Oregon, and I’m feeling proud. OWC is the fourth pre-publication nomination King of Doubt has received. To date, it’s won awards in the Pacific Northwest Writers Assn. 2016 competition, the Willamette Writers 2016 competition, and is also a current finalist in Chanticleer’s national non-fiction/memoir competition. You can read a sample chapter on my web site petergibb.org. The book will be available from Wheatmark, in March 2017.

Quick synopsis (from the back cover):  A five year-old boy trades his soul to the devil. Desperate for approval, Peter poses naked for pedophile teachers. He becomes a U.S. diplomat, crosses the Berlin Wall in the coldest days of the cold war, and learns about love from a three-legged dog in Greece. But the curse of self doubt haunts his every move. One man’s story but everyman’s journey, King of Doubt is a tale of lost and found, a page turner that astounds you with the beauty of its language, as it grips you with its honesty and holds you captive to the last page. For anyone who has done battle with self-doubt, King of Doubt is a chance to watch your own shadow in action and view your life through a new lens.