Peter Gribble is a writer and a lifelong student of history whose work explores the intersections of knowledge, power, and the human condition. His fantasy series, The City of the Magicians, is set in a civilization that rejects traditional warfare.
The series examines how intellect, psychological strategy, and telepathic abilities can be both a society’s greatest strength and its most dangerous vulnerability. Influenced by his childhood in postwar France—where silence about the war was as pervasive as its lingering shadows—Gribble crafts stories that explore the dangers of complacency and the consequences of pacifism and brutality colliding.
Gribble studied art at Sheridan College School of Design, experimental psychology at the University of Toronto, and education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. He has written for NUVO and various British Columbia publications, including gardening columns for two journals over a decade. His time working in bookstores reinforced his belief in the power of books to inspire, challenge and transform. Learn more at PeterGribble.com.
Why do you write in the genre that you do?
Writing in the fantasy genre offers the complete freedom and joy to create, invent, explore and write about anything and everything, regardless of the conventions of the day. In the face of any controversy, this allows the author to state calmly, “It’s fiction, after all.”
Do you keep a notebook of ideas?
Absolutely! At all times, I carry around a slim, spiral-bound reporter’s notebook that I can slip into my back pocket when I go out or place beside my pillow at night. Not only for ideas but sometimes a single word, a name, a phrase, snippets of dialogue or entire plot arcs.
Currently, I’m on notebook number 35. To take verbatim lecture notes during postsecondary education, I developed my own shorthand that I use to this day to jot down notebook entries.
Do you have a muse?
Not a muse but a purpose. I wrote City for Robert, my partner of 43 years. I was in a Scheherazade/Arabian Nights-like situation writing The City of the Magicians to circumvent yet encompass spiritual subjects I could not talk to him about. When he was about 11 or 12 years old, his best friend was diagnosed with a serious illness, but his parents refused medical treatment for religious reasons.
Robert witnessed his friend being reduced to a vegetable and it lit a passionate lifelong hatred for anything to do with religion or spirituality. As each chapter of City was written and he gave his critiques and suggestions (he was a good editor), discussions on spirituality gradually became a tolerable subject for him.
Chapter by chapter, over the years, he read the entire manuscript and with the final page, declared his admiration for it. He died peacefully after enduring a decade long decline. City had helped him keep going. Threat, book 1 is dedicated to him.
Are you more of a fan of plot-driven stories or character-driven stories?
If the writing is good, it doesn’t matter. If plot and character combine to drive the story—even better.
Fill in the blank: “People will like your book if they like stories about…”
. . . intrigue, mystery, whether untried strategies will ultimately reveal the unseen enemy, the struggle to maintain one’s integrity in the face of mounting opposition, the evolution and unknown destiny of a culture, the waking to an unsuspected potential and discovering spiritual truths.
What are your thoughts on typewriters?
Essential during their heyday. Clunkers compared to today’s keyboards. Strong athletic fingers were mandatory as was liquid paper, a lifesaver for painting over mistakes. Ah, the good old days without spellcheck or autocorrect . . . (I don’t miss them.)
Would you rather own a bookstore or run a library?
I worked in numerous bookstores over the years, and my last one was with Robert. It was a second-hand bookshop (two floors) and on average the stock comprised of about 60,000 titles.
We were open 7 days a week; closed only for Christmas and New Year’s. Our stock was always changing, which made it interesting.
Robert was a superb buyer, and we quickly became a destination spot. The customers were tremendous fun and many became good friends.
We ran the store successfully for ten years until, without warning, the landlord raised the rent by 50%. Utterly unfair but, in addition, Robert’s health was beginning to fail. It was time. All the stock was sold off at discount and we closed.
A year later, we thought it a weird, fated instance of retail karma when the entire building burnt down. Fifteen years later, the site has yet to be rebuilt. We experienced a skewed, delayed relief that all the books were sold and we were long out. The book loss would’ve been a far more devastating heartbreak than the loss of the business.
How do you name your characters?
Names have come from all over the place. I always liked the name Shoan who had featured in a short story I wrote years ago but never finished. His name waited years to re-emerge in City.
Sometimes a character will tell me what his or her name is. I love browsing foreign language dictionaries for unusual sounds or words.
Sas, one of the protagonists’ names came from a Greek-English dictionary. Sas is the Greek word for the second person plural possessive, your. I don’t speak Greek yet the character Sas rose to claim Sas as his name the moment I saw it.
On the contrary, Lalya, the other protagonist, was a longstanding puzzle. She was shy about revealing anything; her gender, her name, her history, her position in the story so she was place-marked with a name I knew was not going to fit.
Months later, her name popped onto the page and suddenly she and everything else fell into place effortlessly. Patience is a requirement for writers.
What is your favorite website that you use to promote your writing?
I’m new to social media and marketing so the best source currently for information is my website: www.petergribble.com. I’m very slowly inching my way into Instagram.
If Hollywood bought the rights to your book, would you want it to be turned into a movie or series?
It would probably be better as a series, unless, it was a movie series.
Who is your dream audiobook narrator?
Stephen Frye is my dream narrator, but he’s an Olympian and out of my league. Without exception author friends and others have warned me off using AI voices because the pronunciation, cadence and accent are frequently off. The consistent advice I’ve heard is to wait until AI matures. Who knows, maybe Stephen Frye might think it a lark to do City. I wonder if he would do it for scale.
How many words or pages do you typically write in one writing session?
It varies widely. During the writing of the first trilogy, (which started out as a single book), I didn’t follow word counts but instead wrote five to eight hours a day, every day without fail.
There were exceptions during Robert’s decline, but the daily hours continued for thirteen years until the manuscript was complete. The additional five years of subsequent editing followed the same regimen.
Do you have any writing rituals?
A stable, regulated life is an absolute prerequisite for writing a series of this length.
What are your passions/obsessions outside of writing?
Gardening. Before starting The City of the Magicians series, I wrote monthly gardening columns for two journals over an eleven-year period. It’s an excellent writing exercise: deadlines and word counts.
Have you made any public appearances to promote your book?
Yes, several. I had a successful book signing, selling out all my copies of Threat (book 1 of City) at the Robson Street Chapters/Indigo bookstore in Vancouver and in April 2025, I thoroughly enjoyed signing books in the Black Château booth at the LA Times Festival of Books where I met many interesting authors and readers.
Who would you most want to read your book?
Simply: those who would enjoy it.
Who is on your Mt. Rushmore of greatest/inspirational authors?
There have been many and I have gone through phases where I’ve read everything an author has written but then I move on. I’m not sure any of their faces are worth defacing a cliff for.
Is there a book that somebody gave to you that helped you pave the way to becoming a writer, or is there a book on writing that you recommend all writers read?
My mother wanted to lure me away from my go-to predictable comfort summer rereading of the Oz books and the small collection of similar kids’ books at the cottage and so lent me her copy of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. From the first page, the writing and the protagonist’s perspective captivated me and permanently altered my outlook. Du Maurier’s opening line is famous, Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
Have you ever mentored another writer with their writing?
Absolutely! I have two friends who I regularly talk with.
One showed me his work-in-progress manuscript and he said my remarks and assessment proved wonderful stimuli for him to keep going and I was delighted to have helped. The other isn’t ready to show me his yet, but we discuss various features of its progress while covering a wide range of related topics.
Neither has met the other and being very different people. I doubt they would have much in common.
Is there an idea that a non-writer has pitched to you that you have considered writing?
Very early on in writing the series, I let a young woman read the first three chapters of Threat, and she mentioned her expectation of a certain revelation to occur in chapter 2 (Lalya’s first chapter) but didn’t. It was a creative wakeup call for me and I immediately inserted it, which clarified Lalya’s position, firmed a longer plot arc and neatly capped chapter 2’s ending beautifully, and I thanked her for her observation. From that point, this insight reconfigured my approach to keep a more alert eye on seeming side issues and to give them a voice if they enhanced the issue, character or plot arc or articulated and heightened their realism.
Do you ever use dreams as inspiration for your writing?
Not really. I kept a dream diary for many years but oddly, I’ve dreamt about the City a mere two or three times and only as some sort of backdrop for something unconnected. On rare occasions, a character will have a dream that sets off an event or understanding but it’s a device I’m very cautious of using at the best of times.
Are you a big reader? Do you own a large collection of books, or are you more of a borrower?
I have a massive collection accumulated over decades. God forbid I should ever have to move! Then there are the piles of literary magazines . . .
Have you ever gone away to work on a piece of writing? If not, where would you go if you could?
No, I have no desire to go anywhere. The bookshelves surrounding me stuffed with books available for inspiration or reference are required as much for access, motivation or ballast. If I need a break I can always go into the garden or read on the back porch. It’s a generous, if cluttered rock I live under.
What is an annoying thing that a non-writer has assumed about writers or the act of writing?
Some of my long-suffering, non-writing friends were annoyed that I was seldom available during the intense period of writing the first trilogy. Eventually, they grew used to my 5 to 8 hour writing regimen and made allowances. I appreciated their reluctant understanding and thanked them—often.
How do you measure the success of your writing career?
Personal satisfaction is the best success and comes when I know the writing is excellent—and my editor confirms it! As a writing career goes, having an ever-widening happy readership is a decent measure of success.
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