Ed Peaco
IMA Graduate,
1994
Hometown: Springfield, Missouri
Ed
Peaco's short fiction explores the moments when aspects of our wobbly
inner selves are forced out into the open — distressing moments
that invariably provide a measure of humor: A man attempts to recapture
his lost dreams by risking his life to trim a high-dangling tree limb,
or he consumes a potentially scandalous substance on the night before
he must submit to health screening for life insurance.
Peaco has been a repeat contributor to the River Oak Review and American
Jones Building and Maintenance. His work also has appeared in the Alabama
Literary Review, the MacGuffin, the online journal Facets and the Santa
Fe Writers project web site.
Building on recent publications, Peaco is working with an editor to compile
a story collection, a series of linked stories tracing the life of a protagonist
from the brink of adolescence into middle age. This protagonist is the
aforementioned reckless tree trimmer and ill-considered pre-health-screening
ingester. He also faces such turning points as his father (not his mother)
throwing out his baseball cards, saying the alphabet backwards during
a field-sobriety test, cremating a human being without creating too much
smoke, and much more.
Peaco lives in Springfield, Missouri, in the Ozark Mountain region in
the southwest part of the state. Although urban sprawl threatens the area,
it remains rich in forests, hills, and streams that create an agreeable
setting for the writing life.
