BIO

Peter Trivelas spent three years in the Intelligence Office of the USS Intrepid during the Vietnam War — handling aerial reconnaissance photos, tracking bombing missions, and watching pilots come back from things he couldn’t quite reconcile. He came home, eventually found Transcendental Meditation, eventually found San Francisco, eventually found himself. It took a while. He’s been writing about it, in one form or another, for most of his adult life – eventually created the fictionalized novel.

That novel, Grass Through Pavement: War, Sex & Enlightenment, was published in 2025. It is the book he needed to write and, he hopes, the book some readers have been waiting for — candid, funny, and honest about what it actually costs to live a full life and what it might be worth. Several chapters were published as stand-alone short stories in literary journals before the novel was complete; one was a first runner-up for the Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Award and performed as part of a WordTheatre worldwide spoken word presentation. He is now at work on his second novel and a collection of short stories.

In between the war and the writing, Trivelas built a life that doesn’t fit neatly into a single category — which probably explains the novel. He edited television at WGBH in Boston, then in New York for NBC, ABC, PBS, and spent seven Emmy-winning years on The Martha Stewart Show. He edited a documentary about the surviving crew members who bombed Hiroshima that is now in the Smithsonian archives. He became a TM instructor in the 1970s during the first wave of widespread interest in meditation in this country, and later served as Director of Programs at the David Lynch Foundation’s New York office, bringing TM to veterans, first responders, and students in underserved communities. After the Newtown school shooting, he was part of the team that taught TM to the first responders who were there. He now teaches TM to veterans and first responders in Los Angeles. The USS Intrepid, where he once served, is a museum in New York Harbor. He finds that quietly remarkable.