Peter O’Brien was born in New York, grew up in Vancouver, received his BA from University of Notre Dame (with a junior year abroad, in Dublin), and his MA from McGill University.

​Along his way, he sold ladies shoes, attended the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts to study ceramics, taught English as a Second Language, worked as a roughneck on oil rigs near Medicine Hat, Drumheller, and in northern Alberta on the frozen muskeg, and was a fundraiser and in communications for various arts, educational, and environmental organizations and institutions. 
While a student at McGill he started, edited, and wound up an international literary and art journal, RUBICON (10 volumes, 2,361 pages), which published poetry, fiction, book reviews, interviews (with Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, and Josef Skvorecky, among others), and art (Betty Goodwin, Geoffrey James, Ann Hamilton, and Ron Haseldon, among others).

He has nine brothers and sisters, twelve step-brothers and -sisters, and an almost limitless number of nieces, nephews, cousins, et cetera. (There are a lot of ill-shaped, meandering, and conflicting stories in a family that size.)

In addition to LOTS OF FUN WITH FINNEGANS WAKE, he has written or edited nine books, including Dream Visions: The Art of Alanis Obomsawin (Viggo Mortensen / Perceval Press), Introduction to Literature: British, American, Canadian (Harper & Row) and Cleopatra at the Breakfast Table: Why I Studied Latin With My Teenager and How I Discovered the Daughterland (Quattro).

He has published widely on art and writing, including in The Globe and Mail, Montreal Gazette, National Post, Azure, Journal of Canadian Art History, Interior Design, C Magazine, and The Fortnightly Review.
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He is a past or current member, or board member, of Open Studio, C: The Visual Arts Foundation, P.E.N., White Ribbon Campaign, Philadelphia Center for the Book, and The Center for Book Arts (New York).

For information about his published books, and links to 100+ articles, reviews and papers: tpob.me.

​LOTS OF FUN WITH FINNEGANS WAKE

​This multi-year artwork – which feeds off and is nourished by James Joyce’s final book, the 628-page novel Finnegans Wake – yokes together my twinning interests of the visual and the verbal, the illustrative and the intellectual. Using coloured words as scaffolding, the artwork is both abstract and representational.
My catalogue, 
The echo is where​
I invited 43 academics, artists, curators, editors, independents, innocent bystanders, scholars, students, and writers from 14 or so countries (and ranging in age from 22 to 105) to contribute celebrations, commentaries, descriptions, and musings on 43 pages of LOTS OF FUN WITH FINNEGANS WAKE. I include a copy of this 100-page catalogue with every purchased original. 
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Full catalogue.
My article in 
The Globe and Mail
I’ve been butting my head against James Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake, for about 40 years. The most multilayered and unstable collection of words ever written, it’s not a summertime beach read. Using about 80 different languages, and an ear fine-tuned to the musicality and mutability of language, Joyce spent 15 years composing it.
 
Full article and portfolio here.
My paper in 
Joyce Studies Annual
​I have been reading Finnegans Wake off and on for 40 years, since I took a class on James Joyce with Roland McHugh at the School of Irish Studies in Dublin. Not an “ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia,” I still have a long way to go. Sometimes, I must admit, I don’t read the text. I just watch the words, picture the pages.
 
Full paper and portfolio here.
My paper in 
​Art / Research International
​James Joyce’s final book, Finnegans Wake, is the most intentionally protean and unstable work of words that we have. I would say it is more playful than Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky,” more digressive and diversionary than Laurence Sterne’s novel TristramShandy, and even more slippery, more saturated with potentiality, than Ovid’s anti-epic Metamorphoses.
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Full paper and portfolio here.