It's true, there is "Joseph G. Peterson: I Write Very Close to the Place Where I Dream” in its entirety here and there is some excerpt below. Cool? Indeed it is.
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I suppose all writers, if not all humans, are seeking some kind of light in their life and on their journey. It feels to me that your journey has been one of engaging in this search through the act of writing itself, and I wonder if you know why it’s been writing versus some other medium, what you’ve learned and what seems possible to you?
Ben, I think that you’re right: that my journey in life has been through the act of writing and I don’t know why that is. I’ve never followed the path of other writers. I’ve never participated in writing programs. I’ve never workshopped a story. I don’t have an agent. I don’t really engage with the whole writer community. My writing-vector is very inward and hermetic. Writing feels like an incredibly private act. I don’t follow standard models of storytelling. Repetition drones through my work like incantatory speech. In some of the pieces that I’ve written for Ninety-Nine Bottles and in some works that I’m working on now, I feature artists who are obsessed with making their art, but their art seems so incredibly private to the artist that the artist refuses to make it public. The tattoo that is incredibly private and not meant for public display is a recurring motif in my work. I’m currently writing a piece about a piano player who is insulted by people who tell him he should perform. That’s not what this is about, performance! he says. In fact, Memorandum from the Iowa Appreciation Society is also the story of a man, Jim Moore, who despite the prodding of people who care about him, refuses to open up and tell his story. No one knows, for instance, about the woodsman that visits Jim Moore in his imagination, and he’s not going to tell anyone either. I think there is something in this circular-hermetic state of the imagination talking to itself for its own purposes that generates my work. Nevertheless, I’m incredibly lucky to have found so many wonderful publishers who have supported my work along the way and who have helped me to find a readership for my work.