Contemporary Authors

1.The Singing Fish (stories) Calamari Press, 2006 2.Good, Brother (novel) Calamari Press, 2006 3.Bob, or Man on Boat (novel) Dzanc Books, 2008 4.We Make Mud (stories) Dzanc Books, 2011 5.The Fish and the Not Fish Dzanc Books, 2014 6.(co-editor, and contributor): To Light a Fire: 20 Years with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project Wayne State University Press, 2015 7.Inside My Pencil: Teaching Poetry in Detroit Public schools Dzanc Books, 2017

• Oakland University Web Site - https://oakland.edu/english/top-links/directory/markus

  Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat, as well as five other books of fiction, the most recent of which is The Fish and the Not Fish, a Michigan Notable Book of 2015. His fiction has appeared widely in anthologies and journals including Chicago Review, Iowa Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, Quarterly West, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, among many others. He was awarded a Kresge Arts in Detroit fellowship in 2012 and has taught for 20 years as a writer-in-residence with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project.

• Fiction Writers Review - http://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/language-as-a-playground-an-interview-with-peter-markus/

  INTERVIEWS | FEBRUARY 17, 2014

  Language as a Playground: An Interview with Peter Markus
  "On a strip of paper on my kitchen wall are the words "Thinking is for morons." I'm much more prone to that way of being in the world, both on and off the page."

  by NINA BUCKLESS
  Not long after my recent move to Ann Arbor, I found my way to Nicola’s Bookstore, one of the town’s literary havens. On the Staff Picks shelf were several books by Peter Markus. “This guy is doing something nobody else is,” said the bookseller, pulling back the cover of We Make Mud and pointing to the first lines:
  The river was not far from the place we called town. It, our town, it was a dirty river town with a dirty river running through it. Town, it was mostly just a two-way road cutting through the middle of the place where the all-by-itself traffic light was always blinking from two sides of it yellow and from the other two sides of it red.
  During my first year in Michigan, I was granted a Civitas fellowship through the Helen Zell Writers Program and found myself working with InsideOut Literary Arts Project, a program that nurtures and encourages the creative writing processes of students in Detroit Public Schools. During our orientation, none other than Peter Markus, a senior writer with the program, stepped through the door to lead the teacher training workshop, which he did with a calm and quiet wisdom. That day, my colleagues and I walked away remembering Peter’s gentle encouragement on how to find ways to make the children’s work sing.
  Markus was recently honored by the Kresge Foundation, which awarded him a fellowship for artists and writers of merit living and working in Detroit. Indeed, his work sings. His prose playfully invites repeated words to speak in many different ways; the meanings of words evolve and change. Each sentence digs deeper until words shift into unfamiliar wonder. As he told us to do with our students, Markus rediscovers the meaning of “play” in his work. It is as though he is following sounds over water, listening, rather than confining the sounds and meanings of words to symbols on pages.
  Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat, as well as three books of short fiction, the most recent of which is We Make Mud. His stories and poems have appeared in places such as Chicago Review, Black Warrior Review, Quarterly West, Alaska Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Unsaid, New York Tyrant, and Puerto del Sol, among others. A new book of fiction, The Fish and the Not Fish, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books in July. He lives in Michigan where he teaches as the Senior Writer with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project of Detroit.
  When I heard he had a new book releasing, I invited Markus to have a discussion about his approach toward writing. As an emerging writer myself, I was curious about his thoughts on the connections between sounds and words, the purposes of transformation in stories, and how he makes his own work sing.
  Interview

  Nina Buckless: What is a story to you?
  Peter Markus: A story is a room in a house I sometimes wake up inside. The best stories are rooms that I’ve never been in before and yet inside them I feel strangely at home.
  And, in your collection We Make Mud, you revisit stories and words by exploring different angles and perspectives.
  A story is like a river in that it is never the same story twice, even if and when it looks like it might be on its surface. Even a word is ever changing, never the same word twice.
  Is this why there is a feeling of uninhibited exploration in your prose?
  One day I sat down and wrote a sentence that I liked because I liked the words that were in that sentence. I liked the way the words in that sentence sounded, and I liked the way the words looked together, and I liked the world that these words seemed to conjure up. Then I wrote a sentence that was born out of that first sentence and a sentence that then came sibling out after, and after a while these sentences were saying and writing themselves, and I knew as I listened that even the space between the words was as beautiful and important as the words themselves. I always wondered what Rilke was getting at when he wrote, “Perhaps we are here if only to say: house,/ bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—/ at most: column, tower… But to say them, you must understand,/ oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves/ ever dreamed of existing.” I found the words that were mine to say and mine to make with and mine to be a maker of. Or maybe I finally found possession of the pencil that was mine and did not belong to anyone else before I took it up into my hand and lifted it to my ear and then listened close to what and how it wanted me to do our saying.
  The musicality of your prose is rhythmically rich. There is an underlying timbre and resonance to it. How does sound play into your work as a writer?
  We learn early on as children that the alphabet is a song. We sing what we point at and what we see. I want to write stories, or sentences, or words the way a child first comes to language. Each letter as a landscape, a symbol, each letter a sound, each word a world in and of itself. Language as a playground. And if I don’t hear the beat of a shaman’s drum then I know the dead are asleep in their not-so-shallow graves.
  In your collection We Make Mud, that there are many “rituals” or “acts” revisited between the brothers, such as: seeing father wearing the same boots, going fishing, eating fish, cleaning fish, hammering nails, the use of wood, the purposes of mud, interacting with a river.
  Writing a sentence is an act, a ritual, a prayer, a dance. When I’m immersed in the act of sentence-making, the hope is always that what the sentences are making and pointing to and conjuring up will take on the feel of the ritualistic. I’ve heard the sound of my own voice say it more than once: Be a shaman, or don’t be at all.
  We Make Mud by Peter MarkusFaulkner once mentioned at The University of Virginia that he put off the actual act of sitting and writing for as long as possible. In this way, he also suggests that all of his daily living experiences were a part of the act of his writing.
  I’m sure I could be made to believe just about anything that Faulkner offers up as a way to get things done. I’d be sure to believe him that a mason jar full of water was moonshine if he said that’s what it was. Just like when he wrote the sentence “My mother is a fish,” I became a convert to what a sentence might be able to say. To be a writer one must find pleasure in the act of sitting. That much is for sure. I myself don’t place quite as much belief in the actual act of thinking. On a strip of paper on my kitchen wall are the words “Thinking is for morons.” I’m much more prone to that way of being in the world, both on and off the page.
  Do you find that children approach writing differently than adults?
  Children approach writing the way children approach the world: with a sense of the new, the unexpected. Because they don’t know any better, because they don’t yet know what they cannot do, they go most openly into those places where language and invention don’t just live but thrive. A child believes you when you tell them there is a 12-legged octopus living inside your pencil. Most adults might say they believe you but even so they’ll still imagine an octopus that has eight legs. To a child the alphabet is more alive. Each letter is an image, a visual on the wall of a classroom. The letter M, for instance, is a monkey hanging from a tree. P is a pig playing in the mud. For most adults, P is, at most, a tongue sticking out of a mouth. When I tell my students that my mouth is a cave with a fire burning inside it or that my hand is a starfish or that the moon is a fish hook, they open up their mouths, they take the bait, they begin to sing.
  Can you speak to your approach on working with the first person “we” voice in this collection?
  For these stories, of which there are hundreds, the brothers were always “us brothers” and so even though at times in the narrative the brothers do separate into the singular, they also are most of the time together, hence the plural “we” that makes these boys seem as if they are some sort of conjoined twin. The “us brothers” are in this together. Maybe for many writers writing the first-person plural there is comfort to be found in this sort of fusion. That said, I can offer up little advice to any other writer other than to maybe make sure that there is some sort of connection—cosmic or otherwise—when characters form between them this sort of “we”-ness.
  The brothers in these stories create and destroy. For example, the brothers make “Girl” out of mud. A creative transformation occurs.
  It goes back to [Wallace] Stevens and his blue guitar. “Things as they are/ Are changed upon the blue guitar.” Nothing is ever what it seems. Mud is more than mud as soon as the word mud makes it more than. Language takes the blank and silent page and makes it greater than by making out of silence song. And of course the common tongue is never enough. As the brothers might say about Girl, about the word girl, is that the word itself needs to be re-written, re-imagined, “with 12 r’s and thirteen u’s and twenty-thousand l’s at the end of girl stretching across the earth.” Or however it is they in their sayings say it.
  What we may lose or gain through transformations. Dirt to mud. Live fish to dead fish. Girl to no girl.
  Things change. Everything is always changing. The river is never the same river. Or is it? The brothers try to resist that. They want the river to be the same river. They don’t want to change, to move away from this dirty river town with the dirty river running through it, they want to stay, which is what brings them to the backyard scene involving the fish-headed telephone pole to which one brother hammers the hands of the other. And it’s here that things, like fish, they never die, even when they cut off their fish heads the fish keep singing, which is to say they stay forever beautiful.
  The-Fish-and-the-Not-Fish,-Peter-Markus-COVERLanguage is also often expressed through sensory experiences by your characters.
  The sentence is the only sensory experience I know anything about when it comes to fish or mud. In other words, I might be able to claim some sort of authority over the words themselves but not the things themselves. The word “fish” refers only to itself and the dominion of its letters. The words “river” or “mud” have little to do with landscapes versed in actuality. In other words, on the river itself, when I step out on it, I am a fish out of water. Those who read my fiction might believe otherwise and therein resides the illusionary power and the ultimate seductive pleasure of fiction. I only can speak about the “fish” that is a fiction, the “mud” that doesn’t really exist.
  In the past, I have heard you use a sort of a mantra, a suggestion that there is merit in a writer “honoring their work.”
  This means, to trust that the story or book or call it what you will (poem, song) is wiser than its maker and trust and understand that it—story, poem, book—knows where it has to go and how it has to move and to place the authenticity of the work itself over the authority of the name that claims authorship of and to and on and down the side of its spine.
  I participated in your on-line writing workshop, which was a challenging and playful experience. You guided us toward working outside of our limitations, encouraging us to journey into areas we might otherwise not have expected. How do you challenge yourself in this way?
  I lived and wrote for almost a decade in the skin of “brother” and “river” and the interplay between those two words. I wrote the novel Bob, or Man on Boat in six weeks as a challenge to see if I could write something other than brother this and brother that.
  It was Bob, it was man on boat, there was still the river there and yes, I failed—a failure I fully embraced—when the brothers reappeared briefly in a sort of cameo role. I got to know brother, as a word, quite well, it was my mantra, my incantation, the drum, the vertical note of what became my song. To play away from such singing, in The Fish and the Not Fish, I’ve placed a very specific and astringent lingual restriction on myself that makes it impossible for brothers to wash ashore. In this forthcoming collection and in a novel that I’m also working on now all the words on all of the pages must be, in order for them to be placed in a sentence in these books, single syllable words. It’s an absurd venture, I realize, this kind of self-handcuffing, though as a child I was always mystified by the likes of Houdini and how he was able to make himself escape. Maybe I won’t escape. Maybe it’s more of a digging a hole which may or may not be a grave. Either way I can live with whatever failings come my way. I do believe, in the end, that I’ll have written a book of great restraint that is the first of its kind and first-ness is a thing that gives me supreme pleasure.

Kirkus Reviews, 1/14/2017:
A fiction writer chronicles his journey teaching Detroit children to use words to give flight to their imaginations.

For 20 years, Michigan-based novelist and short story writer Markus (The Fish and the Not Fish, 2014, etc.) has worked at the InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit as a writer in residence and educator. In this book, he presents a series of quirky, charming essays that capture some of the exchanges he had with the young inner-city students he taught. Markus begins with a piece that recalls how he transformed an episode of tardiness to class into an occasion to tell his students about the “twelve-legged purple octopus with the goldfish-orange top hat” that made him late. “I wanted to talk to the kids about the powers of the imagination, how words can get us to believe in the unbelievable,” he writes. In “Inside My Magic Pencil,” Markus shares some of the creative visions of his “young seers”—which included everything from a giant purple squid eating a cheeseburger to a rainbow eyeball—after they looked inside pencils that Markus made them believe were “magic.” As he writes in “Caged Brains,” his intent was to make the children “see what nobody else has seen.” With eyes trained to “see beyond the surface,” his students, most of whom struggled with poverty, could then begin to look for beauty in everything from broken glass to crushed violets. In “Nothing Beautiful,” the author recounts how an 8-year-old girl who believed that “nothing is beautiful” in the world later discovered it in herself after her mother told her that she was beautiful. Markus writes in spare yet poetic language that is simple enough to be read and understood by younger readers. However, adults—especially writers and teachers—willing to see with their hearts as well as their minds will also be rewarded for reading this unique book.

An inventive and inspiring memoir from an innovative educator.

Publishers Weekly: review of Inside My Pencil
Markus (The Fish and the Not Fish) transports readers into the classroom in the Detroit Public Schools where he has spent over 20 years teaching creative writing as part of the nonprofit InsideOut Literary Arts Project. Markus—or “Mr. Pete,” as he’s called in his classes—doesn’t devote a lot of space to the mechanics of his role or the lesson plans. Instead, he immerses readers in the discourse in the classroom. Markus makes use of the creative license he instills in students; the book is a teacher’s guide of sorts but reads like experimental memoir. He demonstrates with his own words how he captivates students through stories and how he gets students to believe in the power of words and imagination, and see beauty in the work of metaphor and simile. Over the course of the book, readers become his students, and even the most cynical will emerge believing a bit more in the magic of creativity. (Mar.)

Detroit Free Press:
Book of one-syllable words makes Peter Markus notable
By Kurt Anthony Krug, Special to the Detroit Free Press Published 12:04 a.m. ET Jan. 11, 2015 | Updated 12:11 a.m. ET Jan. 11, 2015
With his sixth book "The Fish and the Not Fish," Peter Markus wanted write a book that was the first of its kind.
So Markus, 48, of Trenton, conceived the idea of "Fish" (Dzanc Books $14.95), a book made up entirely of one-syllable words.
"Even Dr. Seuss books have words such as 'about' and 'around' in them, and I wanted to do what hasn't been done before. And so the challenge of that constraint was the primary inspiration behind this new book of three long stories punctuated as they are by three shortish fictions," explains Markus. He's an alumnus of Trenton High School, the University of Michigan and Western Michigan University, where he earned his graduate degree in fiction writing.
Food, fear and fish: Michigan Notable Books announced
"Fish," which was just announced as a 2015 Michigan Notable Book, is a collection of three novellas offset by three shortish stories, featuring Markus' experimental poetic prose. An example: "The lake when he sees it like this with this fish hid down in it, it is blue. The sky when he sees the lake like this with the fish down it, it too is of a kind of blue but it is not the same kind of a blue as is the blue that is the lake."

The stories occur in a dreamlike post-industrial town.

"I don't write poems, though I've been accused of writing stories and even a novel that feel more like long poems than they do conventional stories. I can't apologize for that. It's just the way that I write. It's not a choice or a conscious decision. It's who I am and how I roll," says Markus, who in 2012 was awarded a prestigious Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship.

"Fish" is one of 20 books published the previous calendar year (2014) that are about or set in Michigan that are named to the Michigan Notable Book list, which is sponsored by the Michigan Department of Education. It is a statewide program that began as part of the 1991 Michigan Week Celebration, which is designed to pay tribute and draw attention to the many people, places and things that make Michigan life unique.

QUESTION: What inspired you to become a writer?

ANSWER: Short answer: Words … A carpenter must love the smell of wood and the feel of a hammer in the hand, so must a writer love words — yes, even the smell — and the feel of a pen in the hand, the sound of words on the paper.

I think that if you spend any amount of time as a reader — as an eater of words — at some point you reach the point where you yourself begin to think, "I can do this, too. I can make this thing for others to want to eat." In other words, the relationship between reading and writing: The way the words of others feeds the words that are waiting to be heard inside of each of us.

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Q: How did you break into print?

A: I started out like most writers starting out who write literary fiction by writing stories and sending those stories out to literary magazines. I started publishing stories in graduate school and once I started writing stories that felt like they were a part of a book that I could put my name behind — which didn't happen until I was in my early 30s – I was fortunate to find a number of small press publishers who wanted to publish me.

Q: How many drafts did you go through when writing "Fish"?

A: I draft sentence by sentence, so each sentence isn't abandoned for the next one until I feel that its particular sequence of sounds and images is ready to be chiseled into stone before I go on to the sentence that is there to follow. Then, of course, once all the sentences make up the story that they tell, I go back to make sure that the sentences — whether they're about rivers or not — flow the way I know a river needs to flow.

Q: What was the best part about writing "Fish"?

A: Even though this book was an experiment in restriction and constraint (in terms of language) it proved to be my most varied book, maybe even my most inventive book, in terms of story, plot, even character.

Q: What was the most challenging?

A: Writing with my hands tied behind my back, so to speak. Learning to play and to still hopefully make music on the page even with a limited lexicon of words to play with.

Q: What was your reaction when you learned it was named as a Michigan Notable Book?

A: Any kind of recognition, be it a nice review or an award or even a e-mail from a reader, feels good for about a minute and can add wind to the sails, so to speak. I do see and identify myself as a Michigan writer and am proud to be a voice from this particular landscape, so this award is one that I find especially rewarding.

Kirkus Reviews, 1/15/17, review of Inside My Pencil. Publishers Weekly, 1/23/17, review of Inside My Pencil. Detroit Free Press, 1/11/15 Kurt Anthony Krug, review of The Fish and the Not Fish, and interview with Markus

• Gotham Writers
  https://www.writingclasses.com/resources/interview-with-peter-markus
  Word count: 2174

  An Interview with Peter Markus

  Peter Markus is the author of “What the River Told Us To Do,” a short story that appears in Fiction Gallery, an anthology of short fiction created by Gotham Writers' Workshop. The story first appeared in Quarterly Westmagazine and is also included in Markus's new story collection The Singing Fish.

  “What The River Told Us To Do” is a very short tale about two brothers who are reluctant to leave the muddy, dirty place in which they live. It's safe to say that the story is unlike any other work you're likely to read, unless it happens to be another story by Peter Markus.

  Markus holds a unique place in contemporary fiction, expressed by one literary magazine like so: “An author who nobody's heard of but nevertheless has attained a kind of cult status despite the fact that neither his editors nor his groupies can spell his name right.”

  We couldn't resist the chance to ask this elusive cult figure a few questions.

  Buy The Singing Fish Here

  GWW: Anyone who reads a few of your stories will notice that you have a fixation on certain words. Chief among these—brother, river, fish, and, especially, mud. What's the deal with these words?

  MARKUS: Everything for me begins with the word, in some cases a single word, and most often it is the sound of that word that sets me off into the sentence-making process. The words that you cite in your question are, as you might suspect, words in the language that I love. I love the way they sound when I say them, when they lift up from my tongue; I love the way they look when I look at them; I love the way they taste, and smell, and feel when I run my hands across them. How can a word taste, smell, feel? It just can. It just does. At least for me. And that's where it all begins: in that sensory place where pleasure meets up with the desire to make something out of nothing: to make love. To make something that didn't exist until the force of my sentences called it forth. These stories that I write with these words that I love, they are to me love stories. I'm not sure if anybody else views them this way, but I do, and I suppose that's why I brought them into this world in the first place.

  GWW: Your fiction is unusual in a variety of ways. Your short stories are very short, most of them running less than two pages. Most of your stories, if not all, consist of one extremely long paragraph that contains only a handful of serpentine sentences. And here's the really strange part. Most of your stories, if not all, seem to be telling the same stories over and over, just looking at them from slightly different angles. And yet, the result is mesmerizing. Can you try to explain what you're doing with your fiction?

  MARKUS: I'm not gonna go at this question with that old metafictionist's complaint that “all stories have been told.” Though I will say that I am doing my best to do something new on the page, to make for the reader a reading experience that they've never experienced before. And I've been told by more than a few readers that they've never seen stories quite like mine, which of course pleases me to no end.

  But to answer your question which is asking about how I seem to be returning time and time again to the same story, especially to the same story ending, I guess what's going on can best be explained like this. When I wrote the title story of “Good, Brother,” which is then retold later in the story “What the River Told Us to Do,” when I reached that scene at the end of the story with the hammer and the nails, I of course didn't set out to end the story—these stories—this way. I knew that the brothers had to do something, they had to find some act of defiance to show, to prove, to themselves, how much they loved the dirty river town that was and would always be for them home. The fish-headed telephone pole was simply an image that appeared early on in the story, the one strong visual detail that, as the writer, I could see and be held by. I was anchored by that pole, with the fish heads nailed to it, a sort of totem pole that was sticking up from the center of this world. I suppose that, on some level, I knew that something important and perhaps even sublime would take place around or underneath that pole. And as I worked through towards the story's end, the pole just sort of called the brothers and me to come to it. The fish heads were singing out to us brothers (myself included). I can tell you that I myself was quite surprised by what the brothers end up doing at the end. Did I gasp when I wrote that scene? I doubt it. Did I grin when I got to the closing lines?You're damn right I did! I'm pretty sure I was very pleased with myself. I knew that I had gotten down to that place where the story needed to be taken to. 'This is the way a story ought to end' was what I was likely thinking, or at least feeling. It's like what Henry Miller says in Tropic of Cancer, “If you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT.” This story was the closest I had ever come to ending with TNT.

  Personally I love to hear stories, the same stories, told over and over. I suppose I find comfort in the repetition. I don't mean to get religious on you here, but as a boy I sometimes used to go—I used to get taken—to a Greek Orthodox church where the mass was said—no, it was more like it was sung— in Greek. The sounds of this strange language, the smoke of the incense, the paintings on the domed ceiling of angels, the images of saints standing trapped in stained glass, this was an incredibly mystical experience for me. What I discovered early on was that God was mostly just a sound. He was a language that I did not understand, one that I could not decipher, one that I could not speak. The whole business of God and religion was completely mysterious to me. I got none of the shame or guilt trips that end up turning most people away from God. And in that whole experience of going into a place that was completely foreign to me, there was one thing, a story, that held me, year after year, and it was the same story: the story, and of course the image, of Christ up on the cross. I would read
  that story, over and over again, every time that I'd go to church and sit down in the pew, I'd return to that story. And each time that I did, it was like I was reading it for the first time. I can't explain it, really. I can't really explain any of this, which I guess is okay by me. I'd rather, in the end, that it all, that all stories, remain a mystery.

  GWW: You're a likable fellow and a gentle soul, and yet most of your stories culminate with an act that is shockingly violent or horrifying. The ending, for example, of “What the River Told Us to Do” has been known to make readers gasp. Do you ever find that readers are disturbed by your work? And, if so, is that the desired effect?

  MARKUS: I'm pleased to hear that you find me to be likeable. I like being liked. And of course like all writers I would like my stories to be as well-liked as me. Personally I find nothing disturbing about my work. I certainly don't set out to disturb or shock. The apparent violence in my stories is softened, I think, by the fact that in this world that I'm conjuring up, these acts of violence (what some have called a crucifixion) lead the characters (the two brothers) into a world that is a sort of muddy-rivered neverland where miracles are known to occur. When was the last time you read a story about two boys who can walk on water, or who make out of the mud a girl for them to be boys to? I've seen the looks and I've heard the gasps that you're referring to, but even when a boy's head gets chopped off in one story, or when a boy drowns the first time he tries to walk across the river, the head grows back, the boy eventually walks back upriver, undrowned. In other words, if I had to say it, there is a resurrection of sorts going on in these stories that is made possible by the violence. Does that sound reasonable? To tell you the honest-to-goodness truth, I don't know what's going on in my own work. Perhaps I'm a disturbed fellow underneath that likeably shiny surface. If, as I tell my students, anything is possible in a piece of fiction, then it is certainly possible that, as a writer of fiction, as a man of words, I am working out some sort of Dr. Jeckyl/Mr. Hyde tension through the stories that I am telling.

  I guess to get to the skinny of the question, maybe what's at the heart of the whole Peter Markus the father, the good man, the lovable brother, etc., and Peter Markus the monster of a man on the page (I'm grinning as I say this), is that the page allows me to become other than what or who I am when I'm not on the page making a world that is wholly the world as I choose to make it. That seems to make
  perfect sense with what I often hear myself say to my students: that fiction's aim is to displace the given with the made. I can't help it that I'm a likable fellow. Maybe in my heart of hearts I secretly wish that I was born with more violent and/or disturbing tendencies. Perhaps on the page is that one safe and sacred place where this other side of me gets to be unleashed.

  GWW: Let's say you decide to take a break from writing short stories about mud and go for the big money writing a best-selling detective novel. What would it be about?

  MARKUS: Funny you should ask this, because I recently finished work on a detective novel that I'm calling BOB, which is a story about a man, named Bob, who lives on a boat on a river and is fishing— not unlike a fish detective—for a fish. I guess the book is detective-like in that this man Bob is fishing for one particular fish—not just a particular species of fish, but one particular, singular fish—not unlike the way the protagonist in a detective novel might be trying to solve one particular mystery or one specific crime or whatever it is that a detective-novel protagonist is likely to do in a detective novel book. But in BOB the narrator, also named Bob, has as his core desire the desire to get to know fisherman Bob because this Bob who lives on a boat on a river is this other Bob's—narrator Bob's—father. That's just the basic story of this closest-to-a-detective novel that I might ever sit down to write.

  What interested me most about writing this particular story was the rhythmic shape of the narrative. Unlike my stories about the brothers, which as you pointed out in your first question are written in one long sweeping serpentine paragraphs that often end with either a hammer or a knife being raised back into the air, this new book is made up of mostly paragraphs that are, on average, one or two sentences long (or short). It's a much quicker-paced read, not quite so dense, more white space, much easier, I'd say, on the reader's eye. (Not that I write with my eye on the reader!). And though I know less about the conventions of plot than I do about the musicality of a sentence, this book is, in my view, very much a plot-driven book. But will this book—if it ever becomes a book—get me the big advance? Here again, this is a question that I think I know the answer to, though I'm willing to let it remain unanswered, and mysterious, and swabbed with possibility.

• Bookslut
  http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2008_10_013658.php
  Word count: 764

  Gina Myers:
  A rose is a rose is a rose, just as a fish is a fish is a fish. For those familiar with Peter Markus’s work, his new novel Bob, or Man on Boat returns to familiar territory: the dirty river of a dirty river town. Bob, or Man on Boat is a story of many Bobs: The narrator’s father and main point of interest is Bob; the narrator is Bob; the narrator’s son is Bob; the narrator’s boat -- the dead man’s boat -- is Bob; and the river, too, is Bob, or at least it is at night. But before you start looking for Church of the SubGenius themes, you should consider that all these Bobs are also fish. Because at its heart, this is a story about fishing, a story where the son fishes for the father while simultaneously wishing to be fished up by the father. Are you with me so far?

  Whether or not Markus intentionally restrains himself to a limited vocabulary of, say, 200 words like Aaron Kunin does in The Sore Throat, I do not know. However, I do know Bob, or Man on Boat tightly revolves around a small group of common nouns that Markus builds into monoliths through repetition. Words like fish, boat, river, father, brother, and son become magical as they open up to multiple meanings, loop back on themselves, and create a personal etymology ("The river, in the rain, becomes a lake."). Markus gives gravity to these basic words, words likely to be found on first grade spelling tests.

  Though much has been made, and should be made, of his spare use of words, there is still a verbosity to Markus's writing. Through using redundancies like "half-part" and favoring re-using nouns instead of substituting them with pronouns, Markus engages in a certain intentional over-writing. In the business of constructing sentences, he seems to delight in making syntactical oddities and near palindromic and riddlelike phrases: "Is there a bigger fish for a man to fish for than the fish that is his father?" (It's no wonder the characters at the center of this story share the most basic sort of palindrome for a name: Bob.) Episodic in nature, the individual sections build logically from one sentence to another:

  There was a time when Bob wasn't a fish out of water.
  There was a time when Bob was just a boy.
  There was a time when to Bob, in Bob's boy eyes, the river was just a river.
  But then something happened, to this boy Bob.
  Down by the river.
  Down in the river.
  This boy Bob heard a sound.
  This sound, it was coming from the river.
  This sound, Bob knew, was coming from a fish.
  This river with this fish in it, it was calling out to Bob his name.
  Bob, Bob, is what this sound said.

  Markus emphasizes this basic unit of composition by giving each sentence it's own paragraph. At times, the choppiness and lyric play lends itself more to poetry than prose:

  To fish.
  To fish the fish that is more than a fish.
  We fish.
  We are fishing.
  We fished.
  We kept on fishing.
  We fished until there was nothing left to fish.

  With its repetition and focus on musicality of words and phrases, it is hard not to think of Gertrude Stein, especially when Markus alludes to her: "A fish is a fish. Is a fish." It is also hard not to hear echoes of Faulkner's Vardaman any time the narrator states that he is a fish, or his father is a fish, or his son or uncle is a fish. And it is hard, too, not to think of Moby Dick in this epic tale of fishing for that one fish, but Markus playfully reminds the reader, "A whale is not a fish."

  In this timeless tale of big fish eating smaller fish and fathers consuming sons, the narrator directly addresses the reader. He instructs, "Look at Bob," explains, "You know this. I've told you this," and later clarifies his use of "we": "When I say we I mean this: me and you and the river and the fish. Us." There is a sense that the reader is part of this story, part of this tale of generations and searching. The reader is Bob. The reader is a fish.

• Metro Times
  https://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/for-his-latest-book-peter-markus-gets-in-touch-with-his-inner-child/Content?oid=2231630
  Word count: 1213

  Lee DeVito
  An interview with Peter Markus, author of 'The Fish and the Not Fish'
  Child's play
  By Lee DeVito @leedevito
  click to enlarge
  art2-1.jpg
  Local scribe Peter Markus has developed a name for his poetic prose, reducing storytelling to its primitive core for a result that is both childish and dreamlike. His latest book, The Fish and the Not Fish, came out last month, and tells stories from a strange, post-industrial town where a boy decides he is a bird and Death himself is just another neighbor, among other oddities. The Trenton-based writer has covered the literary arts as a writer for Metro Times before, so we thought we'd turn the tables and interview Markus for a change.

  Metro Times: Was The Fish and the Not Fish fun to write? At times it was humorous, but it could also be quite sad.

  Peter MARKUS: I wouldn't write the writing that I write if it didn't bring me some amount of pleasure. I enjoy playing with words and making things out of our language. If there's a kind of sadness present, that's an element that's almost beyond my control.

  MT: Do you consider your The Fish and the Not Fish to be a naturalistic story, or allegory?

  Markus: It's all fiction. It's all made up. It's truth that can only be arrived at through a kind of lying. All stories can be read as a kind of allegory. All words give way to some other hidden meaning. As for this being a book of naturalistic fiction, I don't know. I guess if you mean that the characters all have specific relationships with their personal landscapes, their surroundings, then yes, I guess you can say this is true.

  That said, I don't set out saying in my head I'm writing anything but a fiction, a made up thing; call it a fable, a fairy tale, a story, a long poem, et cetera. The reader always sees things that I don't. Which is cool. I like to learn about my own work, to see it through somebody else's eyes.

  MT: A lot of The Fish and the Not Fish seems to revolve around ideas of decay, especially of a post-industrial town. Even though it was a rural town, it was hard not to think about Detroit.

  markus: I like that. Post-industrial rural. I mean, Detroit is sort of post-industrial rural in certain places, is it not? I spend much of my life in Detroit, so it makes sense to me that Detroit in some form makes its way into my fiction, though, as you say, the landscape in this new book is not Detroit, is not a named place, is more small town in the aftermath of what these places maybe used to be. The bulk of my other books have been set in a post-industrial river town not unlike the landscape south of Detroit, though here again I don't name these places, these rivers, these towns. I guess I'm aiming for a more mythic representation of landscape, a place that doesn't exactly exist on a real-world map.

  There's something beautiful and, of course, storied about a ruined place. Our eye is drawn to both the broken and the beautiful, and at times the two seem to merge to make its own kind of broken beauty. I think that's what draws people to a place like Detroit, and maybe even — or hopefully ... will draw those same people to this book.

  MT: I do get a mythic, timeless feeling from it. It could take place in the past, or even an apocalyptic future.

  markus: That feeling that you get from the fiction pleases me to the end and to the beginning of time. I want to blur that sense of time. I do want these stories to take place in both the past and the future. Maybe this book begins at the end of one apocalypse and ends at the beginning of some kind of second coming.

  Maybe every book begins and ends in this way. Or maybe what I'm saying is that I wish more books did, or would. I think the books that matter most to me certainly do. And because they do, I'm blown away by them.

  MT: The simple prose makes it at once accessible, like a children's book, but it also gives it a distancing effect. It seemed almost alien at times, like the narrator is far removed from the subjects.

  markus: The prose is deliberately simple, of course. It's stripped down to its barest of bones, monosyllabically so. It's a strange instrument I'm playing in this book, a single-stringed guitar. I like the idea that you might feel removed by such an effect in the way that anything that's aiming to do something new causes us at first to step back from it and to ask, 'What is that? I've never seen or been asked to listen in such a way before.' I'm hoping this is the case here in this book.

  I'm not writing stories about characters that readers can relate to. I don't turn to fiction for that. I want a world entirely its own, and the people who might inhabit that world — I hope they might be their own creatures that have little to do with who I am. As both a writer and reader, this is how literature works for me.

  MT: It may seem to people that writing simple prose like that might be easy or effortless. Is it a challenge to constrict yourself in that way?

  markus: It's all a game for me. The self-imposed constraint makes it interesting to me. To write a story any other way would be too easy, though its effects, I fear, would be too easy, too. Too predictable, too conventional, a story in the worst kind of way. I do my best to get the most out of each sentence. I pay close attention to the shape and sound of each sentence. Meaning and event and invention itself rises up from this kind of attention-paying. I like to stare up close at the spaces between words, that bit of silence, I tend to hover around commas, I always ask myself, 'Is there another way of saying this sentence?' And of course there are always other ways of saying. My aim, in the end, is to say it in a way that only I could say it at that moment before I say to myself, 'OK, you can go on. But remember to listen to the sound that just came before and make from that, or move away from that.' That's how I work my way through a book.

  In the end, I think there are far easier ways for a writer to work. I like to build my house stone by stone, brick by brick. The hope, in the end, is to build something that will do its best to stand up against time and to resist both fashion and decay.

• Brooklyn Rail
  http://brooklynrail.org/2008/10/books/fiction-three-chords-and-the-truth
  Word count: 694

  by Joseph Salvatore
  Much has been written about Peter Markus’s limited vocabulary. Nearly every review of his previous three books offers a list of his words, often draped in quotation marks and given in no particular order: “moon,” “mud,” “river,” “rust,” “fish,” “star,” “brother.” A recent scholarly essay by the writer Brian Evenson analyzes the frequency with which Markus uses certain words. (Fact: Unlike nearly every writer in English, whose most repeated word is “the,” Markus most often employs the word “fish.”) For a contemporary like Evenson to be doing critical analysis on this less well-known writer’s use of language suggests that something unique is happening in Peter Markus’s work, not only on the level of the sentence, but with respect to the entire narrative design. We are dealing not only with the repetition of a scene, as in, for example, Tim O’Brien’s “How To Tell a True War Story,” or the repetition of a symbol, such as photographs in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, but the repetition of a single word, so that, as the story continuously circles back to a particular referent in a sentence, the story itself starts to become about that referent, changing the way we experience the meaning of the story by changing the way we experience the meaning of a certain word—form and function operating here in a kind of a recursive loop of referentiality.

  With his new book, Peter Markus has given us another word to add to the vocabulary list: “Bob.” In Bob, or Man on Boat, his first novel, Markus takes us back to familiar territory: a “dirty river town” somewhere in the middle of America with a steel mill that is “shipwrecked and rusting in the riverbank’s mud.” Above this steel mill, there is a moon and stars. Underneath, a river with fish. On that river is a boat, and in that boat lives a man named Bob. Bob is the greatest fisherman on the river, catching miraculous numbers of fish each day, and yet Bob fishes the river faithfully everyday in the hope of catching only one specific fish—not one kind of fish, but one particular fish. Allusions to Melville here are not only invoked, they are encouraged and celebrated, including the use of a narrator who is on a personal quest of his own. The narrator of Bob’s story is not Bob, but rather it is Bob’s son, who is also named Bob (this narrator Bob, it should be mentioned, also has a son named Bob, as well as a grandfather and great-grandfather named Bob—repetition being a major stylistic device and narrative strategy of Markus’s). Bob-the-son narrates Bob-the-father’s story with a limited vocabulary repeated to startling effect: “That fish that Bob is fishing for, Bob can’t say for certain what kind of a fish this fish is. . . . In the end, it doesn’t really matter what kind of a fish this fish is that Bob is fishing for. A fish is a fish. Is a fish.” (Allusions to Stein: ditto.)

  As Harlan Howard writes about country music, it could also be said that Markus’s work is made up of little more than “three chords and the truth.” The integrity inherent in Markus’s simple structure, in such works as Good, Brother and The Singing Fish (both by Calamari Press), is deceptively powerful, often leaving the reader in a hypnotic swoon. It is through the accumulation of so few words, their repetition and syntactic arrangement and re-arrangement that a kind of linguistic alchemy takes place. Inside the blast furnace of Markus’s prose, language gets smelted down and reconstituted. Words we assumed to have fixed meaning slowly begin to lose meaning, begin to take on new sound and new sense, and, finally, return to a meaning that has been enriched with new alloying elements, both uncanny and astounding.

  One of literature’s gifts is that it can refresh language for us. In Peter Markus’s Bob, or Man on Boat, language is not only refreshed, it is utterly remade.

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