About Me

My name is Pete Morillo, and I am a storyteller.

I believe I’ve always been one, even though I only recently began to accept it. For years, others saw it before I did. My sister and my eighth-grade English teacher both insisted I had a voice worth listening to, but it took time for me to hear them. Only in the last few years did I begin to believe that my love of stories could find its way onto the page—and so far, it feels right.

That acceptance did not come easily. Like many meaningful life changes, it began with terrible news.

On my birthday in 2017, my oldest friend called to tell me he had six months to live. His name was Reggie Mason, one of the best human beings I have ever known. We met in second grade and became lifelong brothers from that moment on. We always had each other’s backs.

Reggie died of cancer at forty-eight. I miss my brother.

Losing him shook me deeply. I became disenchanted with my own life. I had followed the path I was told to follow: college, hard work, success, a respectable career that lasted eighteen years. I took care of the people who took care of me. I did everything “right.” And yet, I felt unfulfilled. I thought I was happy—until life made it impossible to pretend.

Over the next twenty months, loss followed loss. We lost my friend and aunt, Nancy, whose hospice care took place in my home. We lost Tyler, one of the teenagers we had unofficially fostered, who died in a car accident just after graduating high school. We lost my close friend Smitty, who drank himself to death. And finally, I lost my father, Petronio E. Morillo, in April of 2020 after fighting COVID-19 for more than three months.

There was little time to recover between losses. Death felt constant and close.

The life I had built—and the person I believed myself to be—fell away. I felt exposed, vulnerable, and profoundly alone. Some might describe this season as a “midlife crisis,” but that label never felt accurate to me. It suggests something sudden or irrational, when what I experienced was neither.

What I faced was a reckoning.

It was the stripping away of false priorities I had carried for years without questioning them. Loss has a way of clarifying what matters and discarding what doesn’t. When everything familiar falls away, what remains is essential.

Confronting mortality so directly made one truth impossible to ignore: life itself is what matters most. In the end, all we want is more of it—more moments, more connection, more time with the people we love. Once I saw that clearly, everything changed.

Now my focus is simple. I want to live well. I want to enjoy the time I have with the people I love. I make myself a priority without guilt. I gather with friends. I savor life. Life is fleeting, and nothing has ever been more apparent to me.

The reality is that none of us knows how much time we have. If we did, perhaps we would spend it more wisely.

So I chose to do what brings me joy.

Nothing makes me happier than sharing a good story with friends. Writing became a natural extension of that joy. It has taken time for the storyteller in me to find his way out, but I am making the journey. For a long time, writers felt mythical to me—creators of worlds where knowledge, wisdom, and ideas could be shared and preserved.

What greater endeavor could there be?

As a child, I lived inside the pages of books. I ran the streets with Ponyboy in The Outsiders. I rooted for the rats in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N.I.M.H. I hunted the Ozarks alongside Old Dan and Little Ann in Where the Red Fern Grows. Those stories left lasting impressions on me.

Movies expanded that world even further. Sitting in a theater or in front of a television, I disappeared completely—submerged in worlds created by people with a rare and lasting gift.

Their stories endure. They outlive us.

So here I am.

My name is Petronio Morillo, and I am finding my way as a writer.

Thank you for being here.