We Make Mud : stories

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. The brothers in Peter Markus & rsquo;s We Make Mud can & rsquo;t understand why cars drive through their dirty river town without stopping, why the people in those cars don & rsquo;t stop and stay. After all, there is a muddy river there, and in and around that muddy river there are fish to be fished for & mdash;fish, and a father who walks on water, and a house with a back of the yard telephone pole covered with the chopped off heads of fish, not to mention a girl that the brothers make out of mud, not to mention the brothers themselves, the many different brothers these brothers have become. In these fifty-three mythically charged stories, Markus repeatedly riffs on and rearranges the elements of this dirty river town with this dirty river running through it, speaking its stories, its reinvented hauntings, with an entrancing cant, a new American language unlike that of any other writer, its vocabulary constrained but still big enough to make a world, to make any number of worlds revealing what lies hidden within the rituals of our own families, the landmarks of our homes Peter Markus makes myth out of mud, a river, fish. By parceling his obsessions so obsessively, he creates a never-before-seen form of mud, a new species of fish, a river that flows backwards to its source: all of this rendered in a language that is uniquely and privately his own. Peter Markus makes more than just mud. He makes a mythical world out of language that is entirely his own