Peter S. Beagle is one of the most accomplished -- and most beloved -- science fiction and fantasy writers in the world. His book, The Last Unicorn, published in 1968, sold more than 5 million copies and was translated into more than twenty languages at a time when media was NOT global. Since then, Beagle has published numerous other books, short stories, and produced screenplays (including one for Star Trek).

If you're a science fiction and fantasy fan, it's hard not to be aware of Peter S. Beagle, but when he received the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement from the World Fantasy Award committee earlier this summer, Oakland Local found out something we didn't even suspect: Beagle lives right here in Oakland, CA -- and has for several years. A former resident of Santa Cruz and Davis, CA, and a world traveler and popular speaker, Beagle was happy to take some time out before a reading trip to Los Angeles and answer some questions for Oakland Local.

Here's the Q&A with Beagle and editor/publisher Susan Mernit, accompanied by photos by Oakland's Curtis Jermany:

Mernit: How does the place you live influence what you write?

Beagle: It’s funny, but for most of my life, the place I’m actually living hasn’t directly influenced my writing at the time. Later, yes, but not at the time. When I was growing up in the Bronx, I never set any stories there. It wasn’t until I’d moved to Pittsburgh that I looked back and used the Bronx for the setting of my first novel, A Fine and Private Place. It wasn’t until I’d left Seattle, after eight years living in the Queen Anne Hill district, and on Bainbridge Island, that I finally wrote about the Pacific Northwest. You might say that I don’t write about places where I’ve lived until I’ve been able to get some perspective, some distance, and recollect them in tranquility.

For every general rule, of course, there has to be an exception. Mine is the East Bay. I’ve been setting stories in my own imaginary version of Berkeley and Oakland -- I call it Avicenna -- since first stumbling across this place in late 1960, when I was young and brash and attending Stanford on a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellowship. I still do it. My novel The Folk of the Air is set in my alternate world version of here. “El Regalo,” in my 2006 collection The Line Between, is about a couple of Korean-American kids who live in Avicenna. And “Oakland Dragon Blues” from my latest collection, Sleight of Hand, starts off when a dragon parks itself smack in the middle of an intersection in the Temescal District.

Mernit: What places have influenced you the most?

Beagle: For sheer volume of words, it has to be the East Bay. A close second would be New York, where I grew up -- specifically the Bronx, more specifically the part centered around Gunhill Road, and most specifically of all that particular time in the late '40s and early ‘50s. After that, it’s a blur of places. Santa Cruz, where I had a family for the first time and had to grow up fast to take care of them. Pittsburgh, where I went to college. Seattle, where I learned I’d become a transplanted Californian after all.

Mernit: Your bio mentions Davis and Santa Cruz as places you have lived.

Beagle: Santa Cruz was my home for 22 years, and it has deep connections for me. I wrote I See By My Outfit there, and The Last Unicorn, and lived in a variety of rural neighborhoods where the housing was ramshackle but cheap, and you could keep a lot of animals. My kids still live down there -- in much nicer homes -- and I visit as often as I can. Davis was home base for 11 years, but I never felt any real connection to the place itself, as opposed to some of the people I shared the town with. I’ve been gone from there since late 2001, and no smallest gleam of a Davis-based story has ever announced itself to me. I don’t think one ever will, but you never know. I left Pittsburgh in 1960, and it wasn’t until two years ago that I became possessed by the idea for a ‘50s baseball fantasy that I knew had to be set there. Davis has time to catch up.

Mernit: What brought you back to Oakland?

Beagle: Late 2001 was a time of big changes. I’d just gotten divorced, part of which involved selling my Davis house, and I decided to come down to Oakland to take care of my mother. She’d been living here since 1979, and at 95 she needed someone to read to her and cook for her, and generally be a help. She finally died at 100 and I stayed on. I’d always wanted to live in the East Bay after I first discovered it, right through all those wandering years elsewhere. It was a pleasure to come here. I don’t ever see myself leaving, at least not for long.

Mernit: What are some of the things you enjoy here?

Beagle: I enjoy the bookstores, the diversity of all the people, and the food. And I truly enjoy going to the baseball games. I grew up with three teams in New York, so I’m very happy to have both the Giants and the A’s in reach. If we could land just one more it would be perfect. I also enjoy theater in any form, and there’s lot of good theater here, not to mention excellent libraries, an amazing amount of great live music, and a couple of pubs with my favorite dark beers. Everything I need is pretty much within reach.

Mernit: Are there problems you'd like to see the city fix?

Beagle: I’d like to see Oakland spend some money on the police force and on rebuilding infrastructure. They just don’t invest as much as they should here, not nearly as much as Oakland needs or could use. And I’d like to see Oakland present itself to the world as what it is: a varied, extremely interesting place with a rich cultural history that not many people know about, but should.

Mernit: Is there an East Bay community of writers you feel connected to?

Beagle: I’ve never really felt connected to any one specific community -- not anywhere that I recall. Of course, I do have a lot of friends who are writers and artists here in the Bay Area, contacts that I’ve developed over the years. I’m part of a loose group of folks who get together for talk and lunch under the name “The Bad Companions” — me and Michael Kurland and Dick Lupoff mainly, though we’re sometimes joined by as many as a dozen other writer and artist friends. It’s not any kind of official literary community, but it’s fun.

Mernit:  Oakland is full of creative people. As a brilliant writer with early recognition who is still producing, what advice or best practices might you have for others?

Beagle: The best advice I know to give is to learn to put up with boredom and frustration. You have to sit through the dull times when nothing’s coming and stay there, for however much time you’ve given yourself to write, even then. It doesn’t have to be all day that you do this -- it could be an hour, two hours maybe -- but the ability to just stay there in the face of soul-wearying emptiness, that has to be developed just like any muscle. Because that’s what imagination is: a muscle, and it has to be worked out. So you sit there in the face of nothing, or you write gibberish you know you’re going to toss the next day. But you stay there. You work at it. You fill the time. And gradually, the empty days grow fewer, and the frustration periods shrink. You never lose them entirely, but they shrink.

Mernit: What is something about you that you'd like people in Oakland to know that they might not?

Beagle:  Most people wouldn’t guess it, but by nature I’m an extremely shy person. As a boy I was always much more comfortable with books -- and animals, even though I was allergic to most of them, back then -- than I was with people. Barring a few friends who I’ve somehow been close with since we were all four and five years old, the whole challenge of getting along with people, of being a public person, even to the point of becoming a speaker and performer, this is something I had to learn to do. I’ve been doing it for so long now that it no longer seems to be a trick, even to me. But that’s really what it is.

Mernit: Of your published works, which are your personal favorites?

Beagle: Among my novels, I’d have to say The Innkeeper’s Song, which will be coming back into print next year from Conlan Press. The world I created for that one is a place I like to visit as often as I can. I’ve already written enough stories set in the “Innkeeper’s World” universe for two whole collections. One of these -- The Magician of Karakosk -- will be coming out in a new edition soon, and was the basis for a play called Giant Bones that premiered in San Francisco last year. The other doesn‘t have a title yet, but will probably see print in the spring of 2013.

Of all my short fiction, the choice is easy: “Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros,” which is in my first collection The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances.

In television and film, my own favorite among the things I’ve written isn’t The Last Unicorn or The Lord of the Rings, but a 1977 TV movie called The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened. It was based on a novel by Don Robertson, and it gave me a chance to write for actors like James Earl Jones and Debbie Allen. I still hope someone will eventually dig this film out of the CBS vault. It was never released on either VHS or DVD, and I would very much like to see it again.

Mernit:  Could you tell us something about your most recent book, Sleight of Hand?

Beagle: Sleight of Hand is a collection of thirteen quite different stories, and I’m particularly fond of it because of the remarkable range of content. There’s an out-and-out children’s story about the world’s ugliest monster, and an homage to Robert Louis Stevenson called “The Children of the Shark God.” There’s my first werewolf story in 40 years, and an Innkeeper’s World story called “What Tune the Enchantress Plays,” and several darker pieces that I suspect will surprise people who think they know my work. Two of them, “Dirae” and “The Bridge Partner,” are going to be turned into standalone graphic novels. I’m eager to see that, especially with Dirae's story, which is arguably the strangest, most violent, most demanding thing I’ve ever written. I’m very proud of that one. Even though the city “Dirae” takes place in has no name, and could be anywhere, really, I researched it all right here. The sharp-eyed reader might spot a hint or two of Oakland shining through.

Beagle is currently working on a magical realist novel titled Summerlong, a collection of new Schmendrick stories to be called Green-eyed Boy, and an original collection of six unicorn tales based on different mythological traditions from around the world.

UPCOMING EVENTS:

• Wizard World Chicago, Aug. 11 - 14
  Wizard World L.A. Sept. 24 - 25
  World Fantasy Convention San Diego, Oct. 27 - 30
  Texas Renaissance Festival, Nov. 5 - 6
  Wizard World Austin, Nov. 11 - 13

To purchase Peter S. Beagle books, DVDs, artwork, and merchandise visit http://www.conlanpress.com/.

For author updates, subscribe to Peter S. Beagle’s newsletter at http://www.conlanpress.com/html/newsletter.html and “like” him on Facebook.