SONOMA NEWS - June
4, 2015
The 'Irregular' Life of Peter
Coyote
by Lorna Sheridan
After hitting it big in his early 40s with a role in
the blockbuster 1982 film “E.T. the
Extra-Terrestrial,” Peter Coyote is now best known
as a busy character actor and the voice of countless
commercials and documentaries. He is also making a
name for himself as a writer, thanks to excellent
reviews of his two books.
Coyote was in Sonoma on May 28 promoting his new
memoir “The Rainman’s Third Cure: An Irregular
Education” at Readers’ Books. The longtime
Marinite’s commute to the Plaza wasn’t as long as it
used to be – the actor-author made the move to
Sonoma County this summer.
It hasn’t been widely known which town has lured
Coyote from his former home in Mill Valley. While he
said that he loves Sonoma and finds the Plaza
charming, it turns out that he is a fan of the “fog
belt” and is currently doing renovations at his new
place in Sebastopol.
Coyote’s latest memoir is an eloquent introspection
of his affluent but miserable childhood on the East
Coast; his involvement in the counterculture
movement at Grinnell College in the 1960s; and his
years of poverty and drug use in California in his
30s – prior to finding success and happiness as an
actor and dedicated Buddhist.
Today, Coyote takes writing and acting equally
seriously.
“They aren’t that different,” he says. “Acting is an
opportunity to share with people what you’ve gleaned
about human nature. It’s just done in a different
vocabulary, one of gestures and feelings.”
His greatest pleasure is actually the rewriting
process. “My desire,” he says, “is to translate as
closely as words will allow the tone and feeling and
details of an experience of another person, and to
wrestle with the language until the nuances all line
up and are resonant.”
His new memoir centers largely on his early years –
which raises the question as to whether his own
difficult upbringing inspired him to do things
differently with his son, Nick, and daughter, Ariel,
both of whom are now grown.
“Well, I never terrified my children and I never
intimidated them and I never threatened them with
violence, so that was a big difference from my
childhood. I tried to stimulate their sense of
competence and their ability to triumph and that was
very different than my own upbringing.”
Coyote says that he encouraged his children to forge
their own path, an idea that sparks in him a
passionate defense of college as a time of
discovery.
“It’s sad to me when I see young
people and they’re organizing their lives to be
bureaucrats when they’re 18 and 19 – to be cogs in a
corporate machine because they don’t quite have the
courage to get out in the world and invent a life
that they’d rather live,” Coyote says. “I think that
liberal arts actually prepares you for that.”
Coyote returned to Grinnell College last year for
his 50th reunion. It was at Grinnell that he jumped
headfirst into the counterculture movement. “We were
at the beginning of the student protest movement. It
was kind of thrilling to reminisce with all my
friends who tried to change the world that we were
afraid was about to be obliterated.”
Grinnell helped shape Coyote into who he is today
and he feels strongly that “there’s an inherent
value to liberal arts.”
“The neurotic myopia of this culture is the desire
to translate everything into something that
generates capital,” Coyote says. “Any business can
teach you everything you need to learn in six months
– but they can’t generate curiosity, they can’t
generate interpersonal skills, they can’t generate a
breadth and scope and understanding of history and
culture and how people are different.”
His memoir’s subtitle, “An Irregular Education,”
refers in part to Coyote’s lifelong practice of
gaining knowledge where he can get it. He greatly
values the master-pupil relationship he had with a
series of mentors, and he writes that each “became a
part of my sense of self, and whatever I may be
today that might be worth emulating is made of these
men and women and of what I took away from them.”
What Coyote gained from these mentors was not
advice, and you find none for his readers, unlike
most memoirs on the shelves today. He said, “I shy
away from advice because the truth is that no one
else experiences life in the way that you do. It’s
kind of almost a little aggressive to give advice
because it assumes that you know all the content of
other people’s dilemmas, and we really don’t.”
Coyote is now in his mid-70s, and with his move to
Sonoma County looming, I asked him about his mood
and feelings about the future.
“I practice something called radical optimism,”
Coyote says. “It’s an incontrovertible fact that we
don’t know how things are going to turn out.”
Adds Coyote: “If I were to just look at the facts,
I’d say we’re screwed, but radical optimism tells me
that something can always happen and always change,
and it’s better for me to be optimistic.”

[ The
Official Peter
Coyote Web Site ]
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