MQR’s Online Series, “Celebrating Writers in Our Community,” is inspired by our upcoming special-themed issue, “Why We Write.” The series of interviews is a celebration of the diversity of Southeast Michigan writers, their talents, their motivations for writing, and their significance to our community.
Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat, and 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 in Literary Arts and has taught for 25 years as a writer-in-residence with InsideOut Literary Arts. His most recent book is Inside My Pencil: Teaching Poetry in Detroit Public Schools. When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, a new book is forthcoming in September of 2021 from Wayne State University Press (Made in Michigan Series).
[Why I Write] is a tough question for me to think about, which isn’t to say it’s not a question that I don’t often ask others to answer. When I say others, what I mean to say is other writers, or even more specifically, the writers who come to me as students. I do my best not to think too much when I’m writing, or think too much about what I’m writing about, or why I might be writing the writing that I write. I don’t question why I breathe or why I see, and so I try to keep thinking out of the act and process of writing. I prefer to think of writing as more of an act of making, and when I used to spend the bulk of my writing time writing or making fiction, I liked to think of what I was doing as playing, or making believe, the stories themselves I liked to think of as being pieces of make-believe, or that I was simply engaged in the act of making something out of nothing in the way I was and am still envious of others who can make out of paint or clay or scrap steel something beautiful or, in the very least, something new or strange. Or the way someone can take wood and make a house for birds to live in, or steps or stairs for others to walk down to a beach, or better yet down to a river, which is where my own writing often takes me, the river being a source of breath to me, water running through my gills. It would be true, too, for me to say that even just the word river is a word that I love, the sound of that word, the look of that word, the heft and feel of it when I take that word up into my hand, and that maybe that—a love for words, for the sounds that words make, the landscape that words make on the page itself—is the primary reason behind why I write.
But I know better when I write not to try to be wise. I’m not interested in intelligence or useful information. If anything, I write to become a better listener. To make time for quiet. And learn to pay closer attention to what I might find myself seeing and saying as I’m listening to that quiet.
I do like the fundamental way that words can be shaped into a sentence. I like how there are always other ways to make and say and shape a sentence onto the page. When I write, I think first of words and sentences and then how the page becomes plural and is made into a book. Words on the page are how I like to see and say what I am engaged in doing when I sit down and make time to write, which moves me away from the questions or definitions or limitations of genre or form or conventions of intellect and maybe is best left to the ways that the page contains a voice and also a style, a way of seeing and saying that brings about through it a sense of singularity or, better yet, a sense of particularity or maybe peculiarity would be the better word. What Barry Hannah says in his book High Lonesome about this says it even better: “Whoever you are, be that person with all your might… You must announce yourself in all particulars so you can have yourself.”
This makes great sense to me, so maybe I write to have some part of myself to myself. And to be that person with all my might. Or maybe what I want, what I am seeking, is to speak of something that only I know, so that I might know it, through its particulars, even better. To be able to point to it and say yes, exactly, that’s it, or as close as I can make it be. And I realize, too, that writing involves, in part at least, in giving up some of yourself (to others) through those same particulars. But I am less interested in that (writing as communication). I’m not interested, in other words, in a reader, or in even being read, though I realize the contradiction in the act of publishing, or of taking on this question even, or taking what I think is mine and making it public. I am nothing if not about embracing contradiction, or in being in two places simultaneously, or of two different minds about whatever it is I might be thinking, seeing, or trying to say. It’s a struggle, too, like anything else that you might care about, or commit your heart to doing and maybe even doing as well as you can. But it’s a struggle that I think I can control, the idea of a world at the tip of my pencil, at the tips of my fingers. The world around us happens so fast. Too fast, the older you get until one day you look back and think, “When did this happen?”—growing older, looking in the mirror, not recognizing the face looking back—or, “Where did the time go?” I suppose maybe I write to hold onto something that has otherwise gone past. Despite what Faulkner might want us to believe about the past not being past, there’s no argument about things and people going away or being taken from us. So maybe writing is a way to create the illusion that time can be stopped, or at least be fixed to a moment on the page, which may be useful in terms of trying to make sense or see things clearer even. But here I am doing what I said I don’t like to do, which is to think, not to mention this (failed) attempt to say something wise. I’ve been tricked, by this question, by myself, since there’s no one else around to blame, into saying and doing what I said a writer should never try to do (i.e., be wise).
I do think about a poem by Jack Gilbert more often than I might turn to most other poems these days and most other poets, for that matter. The poem is called “Burning (Andante Non Troppo)” from his book Refusing Heaven. In this poem, Gilbert talks about time and the notion that “it is always our gait of being that decides/ how much is seen, what the mystery of us knows,/ and what the heart will smell of the landscape….” So maybe I write to slow down long enough so that my eyes widen in such a way that I can see, and maybe know, something that I otherwise wouldn’t. And yes, too, so that “the heart will smell of the landscape.” I love that. Also, in the same poem, Gilbert tells us, “When we slow,/ the garden can choose what we notice. Can change our heart.”
So okay, maybe I write to be changed by what language teaches me to notice. I know I often tell students that the eyes and ears feed the mind, that the eyes and ears feed the heart. So maybe that’s what I’m really getting after here—the body in touch with its multiple parts and pieces. The way words work together, and side by side, with each other, to say and do and maybe even tell us what we didn’t even realize we were thinking.
Don’t think, write. I hear myself often offering these words to my students and sometimes to myself.
But if I think about it the way the question itself asks me to think about it, I think I write so I might say what I otherwise wouldn’t. Even just this sentence is forcing me, or maybe inviting me would be another way to say it, to see and to feel my way into the unknown, or into what I don’t think too often about. I do it—write—because I choose to give myself to it, take and make the time to do it. And for the pleasures that such making—such thinking—gives me in the act of doing what I do.
It might be true (I don’t know this with any certainty or authority) that Orwell was among the first to put himself up to the task of asking and responding to the question: why do we write? In the fiction that I’ve written and published over the course of the past two decades, it’s been all about the aesthetic pleasures of the text itself. Maybe a story sometimes gets told in the process of such pleasures, though that (telling stories) was never my primary impulse behind the act of picking up a pencil and putting words onto paper. Maybe at first, when I was starting out, a story in the conventional sense was something I was after (or told and taught to be after). But the longer I wrote and the deeper I committed myself to the act of writing, other concerns and obsessions took over, namely (as I’ve already said before) the sounds that a sentence might make. I’ve said it elsewhere that I am a failed musician who found his way (out of failure, out of the process of elimination) to the writing of fiction. And that’s still true. And what drove me to move beyond my failings with a guitar in hand and no voice to speak or sing of led me to a different instrument and a different kind of voice to speak and sing with. But it’s music that has always been of most interest to me. Or sound. Never just craft or call it song. Even in my book The Fish and the Not Fish, which is made up entirely of monosyllabic words, it’s the music that might be made on such a single-stringed guitar or stripped-down set of drums or upon even just a single drum (or bucket turned bottom-side up) that drew me to this restriction. It had gotten too easy and too predictable, the common chords that most musicians fall victim to. Ditto for the conventions of writing fiction. And so it was that I found myself feeling renewed by the powers of constriction, restriction, limitation as a kind of form. It was interesting to see how even invention itself was recharged (the notion that yes, anything is possible). But the music that could still be made was the thing that held me and drove me closer down inside it. When I say it, what I mean to say is the page, the process, the magic, the allure of making, of making beasts as the poet Gregory Orr says in a poem of that same title and the idea put forth in it, that “What has been created/ …crawls/ up through my thoughts now/ on the feet I never gave it.” Or what Larry Levis calls “the widening spell.” Language as alchemy, as a kind of conjuring. Making with it, or through it, something that wouldn’t otherwise be made, or maybe wasn’t meant to be made at all. What other reason to write need there be?
And yet, I’ve stopped writing fiction of late. The charm of such doing having lost its hold. Which is how I found my way to a new book, When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds. “Make use of the world around you,” Raymond Carver tells us in his poem “Sunday Night.” Or what Mary Oliver instructs us to do in her poem “Sometimes”: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” That’s a different reason to write and to live and to write about the living and the dead. This is what I tried to do in the poems in this new book. My father is dying in a house across the river. Tell about it. Pay attention to it. Be astonished and have the courage to look closer at it when all means of reason tell you to turn away. Jack Gilbert writes, about the dying of his wife, “How strange and fine to get so near to it.” In this way, poetry and words, and paying attention, prepare us for what comes next. Or what St. Teresa said about the power of words which speaks to why I turned to poetry to bring me closer to it, the belief that “Words lead to deeds, they prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness.” I can’t say it any better. And maybe, if I think about it, this is all the reason I would ever need to write and to keep writing. To be led to actions and acting, beyond the words themselves, and serving the world in some small way with tenderness and compassion.
Which is maybe why I teach, I don’t know. I’ve never asked or been asked to think about that question before: Why do you write? (yes), but: Why do you teach? (yes, something even better to think about.) When I talk about the power of words, to others, especially to young people, I feel in some way that I am in touch with some purer part of who I am or who I might one day be. But maybe this question is a question better left for another time; I don’t know. But then again, maybe I write so that I can teach. I do know, and I do believe that the two acts go hand in hand, the way words go hand in hand and move us onto the next word, to the next action or next moment, or even the next question, which might be: Why do you breathe? or Why do you live? or Why do you want to live? Because it’s what my body does even when I don’t have to think about it or tell it to do it: it breathes. I live because I choose to live. And I want to live because I have people to live for and to love, and who love me (most of the time), and so I love to do it—this small act of giving back—this thing I do when I don’t know what else to do, this picking up of a pencil, or looking up from my desk as I write these words and I see a bird outside my window, and I say the word bird and in some small way that word, that sound, gets it right.
