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An Interview with Peter Markus
Peter Markus is from and currently lives in Trenton, Michigan. His books include Good, Brother, The Moon is a Lighthouse, and The Singing Fish. A novel, Bob, or Man on Boat, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books.
Katie Shinkle is a creative writing MFA student at the University of Alabama. She loves Michigan.
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UpInMichigan.org: Do you consider The Singing Fish a novel or a collection of short stories? Is the distinction important, particularly because you've published a number of sections independently from each other, not as excerpts?
Peter Markus: It's not important, for me, what The Singing Fish might be called, or what the pieces that make up the book might be labeled by readers other than me. There is no reader other than me in my closed-off head, which is to say, I write to please myself mostly. A good number of the pieces have appeared previously, in literary magazines, in a couple of short fiction anthologies, and sometimes the editors of these journals have asked me what are or how I see them: are they poems, are they stories? So, some have been listed in the table of contents as poems, others as stories. Of course, I'm working in prose, I see myself as a writer of sentences rather than of lines, I am a fan of the boxed paragraph, and I think I'm telling a sort of story with the sentences and paragraphs that I'm stringing together about these brothers. But did I set out to write a novel? No, I never did see the work that I was doing, what I'm still doing, as doing what a novel might be able to do, at least not in the conventional sense... There have been a number of reviewers who have said that The Singing Fish is, in fact, a novel, short though it may be. These folks have put forth a legitimate argument that I have found both pleasing and convincing but really, these stories, these fictions, these call-them-what-you-may, I have always felt they belong to something even bigger than a novel, like maybe even a box or a wood crate, the sort that you might bury a not-so-small dog inside. Fitting them all in this box and placing them in a specific order, now that is another story, and a problem that has plagued me from the start.
UpInMichigan.org: The style of the prose is very instantaneously urgent and wrapped up in the present moment. Where does this urgency come from?
Peter Markus: I'm not sure where anything comes from, least of all these brothers. I'm pleased that you see the prose as being charged with a sense of urgency, for that is something, I believe, that without it a story or a poem will fail miserably. I suppose the situation itself comes charged for these brothers as being urgent and in need of their most desperate of actions and that childhood itself is a place for which only the present moment is all that matters. That is something that I suppose I am hoping to capture in these stories: the geography of now.
A woman I met at a reading once said something I think is quite wonderful and right on the mark: she said that it's as if the brothers live inside this ambiotic bubble, a bubble made out of mud, I might add to this image, a bubble that sort of floats beyond the passage of time and exists on its own terms and creates its own logic. That makes perfect sense to me and is very likely the source of that urgency that you make mention of.
UpInMichigan.org: There are some major themes of resurrection and demise in the prose. In every section, the narrators are collapsing and coming back, which leaves us to some sort of hope by the end of the book. Is this intended? Why is this important?
Peter Markus: I must confess to not being a fan of knowing really what the work is about. I think I know my surface landscape well and am pretty adept at manipulating the objects that I keep rotating and moving around the playing board. But do I know, or better yet, did I know in the beginning that I was writing stories based around the theme of resurrection? I can't say that I thought much about it. I am a fan of letting the story burrow down inside of itself and reveal something bigger than the small world that I seem to be constantly returning to. The fact that things return, that entire scenes are revisited, at times word for word, the fact that I repeat titles, the idea that things never really die, that Boy drowns and then walks back upriver to be with the brothers: I can't deny those abstractions that reside beneath this surface. Do I have hopes that these stories resonate on some sort of universal level? Sure thing. Do I know my own stories well enough to be able to confidently tell you what they mean, or what they are about: that I can't say. I can't say that I want to be the person who makes this sort of distinction.
UpInMichigan.org: There is little differentiation between the voices of the two brothers in the narration. Was this intended? How does this affect the narration of the entire work in ways that having two distinct voices couldn't?
Peter Markus: The brothers are a single voice. "We were each other's voice inside our own heads" is an utterance that recurs at crucial moments in these stories. I never considered the possibility of switching back and forth between them or of making them have a voice distinct from the other. They are one. They are singularly unified in their desire to stay put in this dirty river place. I suppose had I opted to vary the narrative voice this would have made their characters more defined so that the reader would better know aspects of their character, things such as how old are the brothers, which one is Jimmy and which one is John, etc. But even giving them a name was something that I've always struggled with. For me, they are more of a lingual coupling, they exist wholly within the phrase "us brothers."
UpInMichigan.org: The prose gives the reader a sense of having to suspend reason when reading it—the narrators eat mud for sustenance, have nails hammered into their hands, etc—but we trust the credibility of these two boys and their journey. In your writing process, how do you make this relationship in the prose coincide? Is it part of the experimentation?
Peter Markus: I'm pleased to hear that you learned to trust the brothers and that, hopefully, that trust was earned by the authority that might be anchored to the maneuverings of my prose. The brothers do eat mud, they do make a girl out of mud, they do enter into a covenant with a fish-headed telephone pole in the back of their backyard that is sealed by a hammer and nails. In the real world, of course, eating mud and making a girl rise up from the mud and taking a nail to the hand, all of these things rarely happen, and the latter of which would take the brother taking the nail to the nearest ER room, the brother holding the hammer to the nearest head-shrinking room. But yet, it was to my great delight when I first started working on these stories that these stories seemed to be creating their own world, that the bubble that the brothers were living in was suspended above the landscape of the real. It might have something to do with the fact that I'd spent the previous couple of years working on a book of non-fiction about buying an old brownstone in one of Detroit's most destitute neighborhoods, against reason, against all unasked-for advice that was telling me not to do it, and perhaps because I am the kind of guy who seeks out to go about doing things my own way, after living inside the real world for those two years, I was seeking to enter a world that was purely made up. When I was writing about real Detroit, I eventually got bored by the window and the world outside it and chose, instead, to face my writing chair at the wall. The wall, I think, always offers a more interesting vista (in this case, it was the river, the word river, that summoned me to its muddy banks).
UpInMichigan.org: The Singing Fish is filled with obsessions, lists of them, with words like mud, boy, girl, fish, brother. What draws you to these specifically?
Peter Markus: I can't exactly say why I am obsessed with the words that I am obviously obsessed with, other than the fact that these are the words in our language that I absolutely adore. I love the sounds that these words make, first off, and I love the way that these words look on the page when I first write, and then type, them out. I love the images that these words refer to, I love the landscape, both physical and lingual, that these words conjure up for me in my head. I want to live inside these words. I have lived inside these words. I like to believe that these words are coded in my DNA, that they are branded into my brain, are tattooed in invisible ink into the palms of my hands. These words sing for me. I like to believe that I own these words, that no other writer can use the word mud in a sentence without sounding derived from this guy Markus. I have had people tell me this, in fact, that every time they hear someone say the word brother they turn around and expect to see my face.
UpInMichigan.org: It's said that writers can never get away from their obsessions and that we must reconcile them onto paper our whole lives. Do you feel this way?
Peter Markus: I think you can see that I'm not over these words, these obsessions. I often say that a writer must find the words that they outright own, the way that Van Gogh for me owns the color yellow, or Picasso the color blue. It's become clear to me over the years that my obsessions own me, that I'm just the guy they've chosen to inhabit. In the years that I have been working on these stories, I have deliberately turned the voice of us brothers off, I have forced myself to sit in front of a new wall, and have since written a novel and a book of non-fiction that I hope are born of their own obsessions. Only recently have I resigned myself over to the idea that it's okay for me to return to the brothers as long as they keep calling out to me to come to them. I have resigned myself over to the fact that the brothers might be a lifelong obsession, that I might be writing about them until I have nothing else to write. I like to believe we, all of us, have inside of us one great book waiting for us to write. And if the brothers are it for me, if they are my Moby-Dick, if they are my Sound and the Fury, if they are my Making of the Americans, I can live and die happily believing that.
UpInMichigan.org:How does being a Michigan author/having a Michigan connection shape your highly experimental prose?
Peter Markus: I was born here in Michigan and have lived in Michigan pretty much all of my life (with stints in Vermont and New York City being the sole exceptions.) I return to New York ever summer to live and teach the summers there and have had good luck writing in that non-Michigan place, but I would never even think about placing a story there. I know where I'm from and that place, like language, is a thing encoded in who I am as a writer. The river that the brothers go down to again and again is a sacred place for both them and me. I'm big on the power and presence of place in finding stories that are singularly charged, and the river town that the brothers live in is a real place, though not named in the stories, and I can take you there and we could catch fish there and play with the mud and look upriver at a steel mill that is, as I say, shipwrecked in the riverbank's mud. That place, for me, is the only Michigan I know, it's the Michigan that I love. In some way, this place is synonymous with who I am as a writer of experimental prose.
When I was a kid growing up in this rivery place, I used to get my ass kicked and get called a faggot because the music I listened to and because of the kind of music that I played when I played in bands. The sort of songs that we played or accidentally composed was definitely experimental in nature mostly because we didn't know how to play the instruments that we went into a ghetto pawn shop and bought. Most of our non-pawn shop instruments that we dragged up on stage (the handful of times we used to play out) were things that we found discarded down by the river: barrels, fire extinguishers, bits of cast-off steel that we liked to make sounds come out of. We didn't know what we were doing back then, and perhaps it's safe to say, that I don't know what I'm doing now with the stories that I've found and made down by the same river. Perhaps these, too, are things—stories—that someone else threw away for me to find. I like the idea of that.
UpInMichigan.org: Since the prose is so highly experimental, what is the revision process like for you?
Peter Markus: I compose one sentence at a time and refuse to go on to the next sentence until I get the sentence just right. So the writing process is, for me, slow going. I think these stories will always be in a state of revisionist imperfection, and I don't think I'm unlike most other writers in saying this.
Every time I do a reading, the stories again get played with and certain riffs get re-riffed and so you can see the sentences that I originally believed I had gotten "just right" in order for me to get the sentence right after and to get eventually to the story's end are, in fact, imperfect and will always exist in a state of revision. Here again, I don't think I'm alone in the sense of never being completely at rest, which I like—the fact that the story is always in some way still very much alive when it's held in my hands.
UpInMichigan.org: Top Five: Albums.
Peter Markus: Top five albums? I see that you've saved the most difficult question for last (or second to last.) Had you asked me a list of top five books: that wouldn't be a problem. But top five albums? Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars was the first album that I ever lived inside and felt that a whole new world was being held out for me to join and sing to, that I was being sung to by this world. That was when I was seven. When I was twelve, I listened only to the Stones and did my best to be Jagger-esque. But it was the bands of the early 80's Liverpool scene that really kicked my ass: Echo and the Bunnymen (their first two records), the Teardrop Explodes, The Sound, along with a handful of bands from Southern California from that same time period: The Dream Syndicate's The Days of Wine and Roses, The Rain Parade, Kendra Smith, a band out of Arizona called Savage Republic. Minor Threat kicked my long-haired ass and made me want to almost shave my head. J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. made me want to grow my hair out even longer than it was a couple of years later, and then for years I lost interest in what was going on musically in the world and even though I got to see Nirvana pre-Nevermind, I found the whole scene pretty boring. I now know that I missed out on some good things going on and have gone back into the '90's to rediscover folks like Elliott Smith (whom I regret never seeing live) and Bill Callahan of Smog (whose shit I love and find a real kinship with) and singer-songwriter Chris Moore and other low-fi stuff like Cat Power and some not so low-fi stuff like The Flaming Lips and I love the lyrical weirdness of Neutral Milk Hotel and am a fan, too, of that other made-in-Michigan man, Sufjan Stevens.
UpInMichigan.org: Top Five: Fish.
Peter Markus: As for fish: I'll take whatever bites. I most prefer taking walleye on a handline and northern pike through the ice with a rusty spear. But I love, too, hunting down steelhead and watching their silver bodies leap up in their dance across the surface of the smallest of our great lakes. On a plate, I opt for perch. Once, when I was a boy, I was fortunate enough to see a sturgeon in the bottom of a fisherman's boat. I remember feeling that day that I could climb inside that fish's bottom-bellied mouth and live happily ever after.
UpInMichigan.org: Top Five: Michigan Writers.
Peter Markus: 1 & 2) Philip Levine and Jim Daniels left early marks on my work, giving me a sort of regional permission to write about the world that I best knew. I still go back to Levine's work frequently and find much pleasure there, and am lucky enough now to call Daniels a friend whose work I continue to be drawn to.
3) John Rybicki is a brother to me and his tender hurricane on the page feeds my quiet heart.
4) Stuart Dybek is a writer I first read as an undergrad and was then lucky enough to study with him as a grad student in Kalamazoo. His stories and his world are purely his own and I'd like to believe that some of the drive behind my lyrical impulse is something I learned from him.
5) I love the river poems of Mike Delp, though his river is not very much like mine in its appearance, though I think all rivers share a similar song.
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