Episode Details

Author Peter E. Murphy looks forward to celebrating his 50th year of sobriety after waking up in a gutter when he was 21. He has since fashioned a life of service to others by leading hundreds of workshops for thousands of writers and teachers in the United States and abroad.

In addition to being the founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University, Peter has been a consultant to numerous organizations including The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Educational Testing Service and countless school districts from coast to coast. He has been an educational advisor to three PBS television series on poetry with Bill Moyers. And after his second visit to the Rose Garden where he was recognized as a Distinguished Teacher by the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars in the Arts, Bill and Hillary Clinton added Peter to their Christmas card list.

Peter began writing his memoir in progress, "Once Upon a Time You Lived in a Castle," to better understand how his mother's suicide and ongoing abuse by a priest led to his addiction to alcohol as a teenager. Writing in general and poetry in particular led Peter from New York City, where he grew up, back to Wales, where he was born, and where he decided to rise out of the gutter and change his life.