The Art of the Peeve

The Art of the Peeve has been in the making for twenty years. For sixteen of those years, they appeared as a column in The Zephyr, a paper located in Galesburg, Illinois. The last four years, they have appeared in the blog site thepeever.com. These are the best of the thousands that were written. The book lists the peeves as they appeared each year over that twenty-year span. In addition, each year starts off with a creative nonfiction story that is primarily memoir, personal, meditative, or lyrical. The peeves cover a lot of territory. They are provocative, stimulating, and full of spiritual, psychological, and political commentary using satire, humor, and often laced with a good bit of baloney. They are designed to encourage discussion and challenge the belief system most of us inherit from our parents. They are not meant to demean any person, although at times the author skirts right on the edge of making fun of a particular person. Sorry, but the whole purpose is to peeve you. A lot of the peeves express feelings about things that many people have a hard time talking about. The author has no such problems. Straightforward, unapologetic, and with no remorse, the peeves drive home the other side of most stories. This is not a book for those favoring the status quo or for the faint of heart.