Writing (With Words) - An Interview with Oakland University's Peter Markus

Hope: What inspired you to write We Make Mud?

Peter: Not sure “inspired” is the right word behind the making of We Make Mud. It was the language made of “brother” and “river” and “mud” that made me write it, that “insisted” I write the brothers into becoming.

H: How much research did you do for your book We Make Mud? 

P: No research whatsoever went into the making of We Make Mud. All I ever go seeking is the sentence and the sound of the sentence itself.

H: Tell me about the story about the inspiration behind the “pole” in We Make Mud.

P: The “fish-headed telephone pole” is the only not made-up thing in the book. Everything else is an invention, but that pole is real, believe it or not.

H: What is your ideal “setting” while writing? For example, do you play music or write in silence?

P: I can’t listen to music when I write. I need silence to make—or so the hope is—the music on the page. 

H: How many books have you written, and which is your favorite?

P: I’ve written a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat, and the three collections of stories that make up the stories about the brothers—Good, Brother, The Singing Fish, We Make Mud. There is my book made up entirely of monosyllabic words, The Fish and the Not Fish. There is my book of non-fiction, Inside My Pencil, about the teaching that I’ve done and continue to do with the youngest of writers in the Detroit-area schools, and there is my most recent book, When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, which is a book of poems. How many books does that make? Oh, there is a chapbook of brother stories too, The Moon Is a Lighthouse. So what, seven or eight? As for favorites, that would have to be the book that I’ll never write, because that will mean that it has defeated me in the making, in the not being made. 

H: What do you do to get inside your character’s heads?

P: Not sure that characters have “heads.” Remember, a character is made of symbols, called up out of the alphabet, so the only way for me to see them is as Bob, or Brother, or Bird, or in the longest story from The Fish and the Not Fish there were two boys in that story named You and Him, and a girl named You Know Who. I’m being playful here. I like being playful when it comes to writing fiction and talking about what we talk about when we talk about fiction.

H: Do you have other writers in the family?

P: My sister was a writer, was a poet. Or as I say in the back pages of When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, she “put the bird in my mouth.” Or as it says in one of the poems from my new/current book in the making, “the big sister who put the word under my tongue.” As far as other writerly forces in my family, it was becoming a father that made me into the writer I am today. It was my daughter learning and teaching me the new sounds of an old alphabet and making me see the possibilities therein. It was the word “brother” transforming my tongue when my son was born into our world. None of which would have been possible were it not for my wife, an artist who continues to collaborate with me in the making of our world together.

H: Have you ever traveled for research for a book?

P: I don’t go out much. Which is to say, I go out when I have to, when I have to go teach to make a living, when I have to cross the river to see to family and tend to the duties of being a brother and son. On the rare occasions when I do travel, it’s not for research but to sometimes read to others from these books that we’ve been talking about above. 

H: If you had to describe yourself in just three words, what would those be?

P: Three words: mud, brother, fish.

H: How many years have you been writing?

P: I’ve been writing for many years, for too many years, which of course in writer-years, like dog-years, is never enough.

H: How many hours a day do you read and write?

P: I do a lot of re-reading. I like to re-enter books and to try to experience what made me want to return into them. I return to the poems of Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg and Jim Harrison often. I am reading constantly. Even the pages of the river, the pages of trees, the pages of the sky.

H: Which literary magazines/journals are most important for writers/students to subscribe to?

P: Find the pages of a literary journal that make you feel beautiful, that call to you as kin. Then find the pages of a literary journal that make you feel unbeautiful, that make you feel estranged. It’s good to find yourself at home in the world and it’s also just as good to see yourself as an outlier, as someone who doesn’t always have to belong. 

H: Are there any books or authors that inspired you to become a writer?

P: Every book or writer I’ve encountered along the way have made or left a mark in my own making as a writer. I’ve mentioned above three writers whose books I go back to (Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregg, Jim Harrison). There are too many to name and too many pals I might leave out. But among writers who remain pals: there’s the books of Robert Lopez, the books of Robert Fanning, the books of John Rybicki. That makes three more that then makes six writers whose pages make me want to continue to write. I’ve re-read Denis Johnson’s book Jesus’ Son more times than I can remember. It’s the book that I know more writers who have reread that book than any other. It’s that kind of a book and Denis Johnson, in that book, was the rarest of writers. I was just out in New York (for a reading) where I talked to students about that book and there were at least two students in the group who had read that book at least half a dozen times. I’ve read that book at least three times as many times only because I’m older. I encourage any reader with eyes and ears and a heart to check it out. I have another friend, a writer, with the last name of Johnson, Jonathan Johnson, and he’s another writer, also a pal, also a brother, whose work I return to often. I’d be remiss not to mention the poems of another friend, also a brother, the poet Russell Thorburn. I’m a lucky man is what this is making me realize. I have enemies, too, I’m sure, whose books I also sometimes return to, some not-brothers, but why go there? Why not end this conversation on what makes any writer write and want to be a writer which is always love and our love for words and the belief that books are luminous things and sacred objects that sometimes at their best offer us small bits of truth.

Editor’s note: responses have been lightly edited for clarity.