Born in New York City in 1947, Peter Boffey was raised in metropolitan New York and rural New England. After expulsion from secondary school, he eventually graduated from Bard College in 1970 then headed West. Except for extended vagabondage in Morocco and France and a year residing in Israel, he has stayed out West ever since.
Before marriage, Peter resided in Eugene, Santa Cruz, and Berkeley, and experimented in communal living within the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne (Cornwall Island, 1976) and as a guest member of an Israeli kibbutz (Ein-Hashofet, 1984). In 1985, he settled in East San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Ophira Z. Druch, where they raised their son, Ariel David, and—now grandparents—where they still live.
During decades of gainful employment in gardening, landscape design and installation, and nursery production in Northern California and Oregon, he amassed a textbook worth of aches and pains, such that by 1987 he had to re-career from strenuous physical work to sales & marketing in the commercial seed trade. In 1998, he happened upon the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education, which became the royal road to his long-term recovery. He gradually organized his life in order to train within the Feldenkrais Method then teach Awareness Through Movement courses (2008-18); the Feldenkrais practice led him to enroll in Russell Delman’s Embodied Life Mentorship Program (2011-14), an immersion helping him to reap the benefits of a lifetime of formal and informal explorations integrating self and Self.
Now retired from applied horticulture and his Feldenkrais practice, Peter volunteers as an Ambassador at the University of California Botanical Garden in Berkeley and perennially enjoys exploring the Pacific Coast States, with a focus on flora, fauna, geology, and cultural history. “We figured you for a naturalist,” some deer hunters recently remarked upon discovering his campsite in a remote location near their hunting camp. Naturalist or “naturist,” a half-century of camping, hiking, birding, and amateur botanizing has branded him with a passion for the natural world; his novels have been conceived and composed while under that mighty influence.
Prior to the publication of Two Half Brothers, or Separating Out (2014) and The Three Naked Ladies of Cliffport (2018-22), selections from his poetry, book reviews, and translations of French poetry and essays appeared in periodicals such as The Lampeter Muse, The Redwood Coast Review, Invisible City (The Red Hill Press), and The Third Rail.
In 2023, he embarked upon a work in progress, NOT ANY ONE THING: A MEMOIR OF SORTS.