Peter Ludwin is the son of an adventurous father from Vienna who survived being shot, kidnapped, rescued and subsequently imprisoned in World War I, lived through multiple plane crashes, nearly died from malaria in the Brazilian Amazon and came within seconds of being beheaded in Mongolia. Born on Long Island, New York, Ludwin moved with his family to Seattle when he was five, where he formed a powerful attachment to both the natural world and the American West. As a student at the University of Washington he befriended a group of poets, which stirred a creative impulse that ultimately found expression in poetry. At the end of his junior year he dropped out of college and enlisted in the Security Agency branch of the Army. Having studied Spanish and German in high school and college, he spent nine months in Monterey, California at the Defense Language Institute studying Russian, after which he became a Voice Intercept Operator for 28 months in Bavaria during the Cold War. He traveled twice to Greece, which became a cultural touchstone, as well as to Spain, Morocco, Turkey, and other countries of Europe. Being on a base with numerous guitarists, he fell in love with the blues and began to learn how to play acoustic folk and blues on guitar.
