* I can not say enough about Peter Markus, so here is an interview with the man, that I hope you will enjoy. If you have not read any of his work, you have to pick up his newest title, Bob, or Man on Boat.
Is there any special method to your writing?
I guess I write the way I imagine most interesting musicians
make music, that is, I play by ear and then improvise to try to keep up with and sustain the sounds that I hear myself making. I do think of words as notes, as musical notes, and I suppose each of the three previous books of fictions that I've written (Good, Brother, The Moon is a Lighthouse, The Singing Fish) seem to locate themselves around a handful of recurring notes, or words, namely such words as brother, river, fish, mud, moon, girl. I'd say, too, that in terms of the newest book, Bob, or Man on Boat, the notes branch off to include such words as Bob and boat and it might also be noteworthy to point out that I deliberately and with some difficulty tuned out the sound of that word brother which has been a very good word for me for some years now.
I do believe that a story begins with a word and that buried in that word lies the utterance of the sentence and in that sentence lies buried the whole chain of other sentences that carry the word and its story out to its eventual end.
I might also add here, while I'm speaking of words and methods, that I do have a preference for nouns and the objects that those word-nouns point to and thereby anchor my pencil and my attention to that particular world where the object in question has been given its name.
How many hours a day do you spend reading/writing?
When I'm really on the inside of a new project, I am never not writing. But when I'm not engaged in that fiction-making process, when I'm in between stories or books, I do what most people do, and that is, I do everything but write. Sometimes that everything but write includes time spent as a reader of someone else's book, but like many people my attentions are most often pulled towards the television, the Internet, the picture window, etc.
My new book, Bob, or Man on Boat, I wrote in six weeks (the first draft) and during those six weeks the writing of that book took precedence over everything else in my life (my fathering, my teaching, the dishes in the sink, etc.).
But when I'm just starting to make my way into a manuscript and if the manuscript doesn't need me or if I'm not compelled to go to it, first thing in the morning, or as soon as the house grows dark and quiet around me, then I tend to seek out the pleasure of other activities (on the baseball diamond, in the hockey rink, out on the river, etc.).
Your stories have been compared to fables or myths.
Do you think this is a fair assessment, why or why not?
And if not what other genre of writing would you compare it to?
I'm no expert on what makes a particular fiction that I might write
a myth or a fable. I see myself as a fiction writer and if someone
makes the claim that the fictions that I write seem to be mythic or
myth-like or fable-esque I'm good to go with that. I suppose the
fiction that I'm most drawn to as a reader might also be seen in such a way, in that there is about these fictions a sense of the otherworldly which is a distinction that I would consider most
flattering and something worth aiming for.
Dzanc Books is publishing your next title, We Make Mud, which comes out in March 2011. This book is said to be a collection that will concentrate on your stories of the two brothers, the dirty river they live near, mud, fish and stars. Can you reveal a little bit more about this book?
The We Make Mud book that Dzanc will be bringing out in 2011 will be the muddiest brother book of all. It will also be the thickest in terms of its spine and will also be the most recurring in terms of its images and word-play.
And do you have a list of favorite books/authors?
There are books that my hands are always reaching out for when they need to take hold of something made out of language. I lean towards those writers who lean on language more than they do story, or worse, plot. Of course the best of these books manage to tell a story and to do so in a way so that the language strikes me as being biblically generated. In the spirit of such a phrase I'll drop such better-known names as McCarthy, Faulkner, Beckett, Hemingway, Stein. Add to this the lesser-known names of Frank Stanford, Pamela Ryder, Noy Holland, Gary Lutz. Norman Lock is another under-known writer whose forthcoming novel The King of Sweden I just read in manuscript and is a book I wish I had written. I wish I had written Lutz's Stories in the Worst Ways. Wish I'd written Noy Holland's Orbit. Ryder's Correction of Drift. Stanford's The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. I am not capable of writing such stories and such books. I am not fit to wash the feet of a Noy Holland or a Pamela Ryder. I cannot summon the skinless monster that the poet John Rybicki is able to conjure up and unleash onto the page. To do so would force me into a state of personal jeopardy, and for this I am unprepared to be that inwardly dangerous.
