MINIMALBOOKS

PIOTR SIWECKI:  Why mud? For me mud is a metaphor of bluring structures, is a symbol of the blured structures. Your stories are, in my opinion, not only about mud, but also are muddy - I mean language, the syntax. Well... is there autobiographical backraound of this mud - on each and every level?

PETER MARKUS: Mud is simply a simple word that I happen to like: the sound of it, the look of it, the sense of place that it happens to evoke for me, not to mention the fact that mud is a noun that can quite easily be turned into an adjective, muddy, it can also be used as a verb, as in the sentence, "We muddied our way up from the river and back to the back yard of our house." There are, in my eyes, lots of possibilities with a word such as mud. For me it's a clean word, an exact word, a word that firmly places me and anchors me to a very specific part of the world. Who doesn't, as a child, love to get muddy? Who, again as a child, doesn't love the feel of mud on one's hands? So yes, as a writer, I reach for that word as often as I can, and when I can shape it into a sentence I usually know I'm going to that space on the page where I like to go.

And while it's probably true that my sentences can oftentimes seem muddy and maybe even a bit convoluted and twisted on the page, for me they are the closest thing on this earth that I can get to exactness and clarity, each sound, even the sound between words, is by me an attempt to create something that is as close as I can get to holding complete dominion over.

PS: Once you mentioned Bachelard... what about Bataille?

PM: Bachelard's writings about poetics and reverie and space, though I can't claim to be in complete understanding of the complexities of his brilliant mind, are to me like long prose poems wherein I often find his thoughts to be the kinds of things that I can stand his words in front of much of what I believe about space and place and invention and be pleased that much of what he says seems to validate much of what draws me to the page. Bataille is a writer I've read, a short book I believe called The Dead Man, and another one that I remember riffing a lot on the notion of silence, but I can't make the claim that I'm an avid reader of his work though I can say that I've read enough of his work to want to say that he and I, in some way, inhabit similar spaces on the page.

PS: Tracy Chapman sung: it's just telling stories... don't you think that story itself is the message?

PM: I'm not a big fan of telling stories. I'm not a very good storytelling, I don't think. I think I've managed to tell a handful of stories that might be story-driven, but for me that's not what interests me about writing. I don't read stories for the stories. I read stories for the sentences that the stories are made up of. That's what most interests me. The writers I most admire, from Beckett and Stein to Faulkner and Hemingway, even when they manage to tell a tale that might keep readers reading on to find out what happens next, I care very little for such things as rising action or plot. What I seek most in a piece of literature is a voice and a style and a musicality that does its best to do something new. If you were to pass out guitars to a group of people, all of whom knew how to play, or some who didn't, I'd likely be drawn to that single musician, somewhere on the fringe, who fashion some strange tuning so that the strumming of his guitar might make a sound unlike anybody else.

PS: What do you think about the lack of utopia in nowadays thinking? I mean: do you think that what you write about should be considered as a certain plan for life, for transcending the life?

PM: The world that the brothers live in and have conjured up for themselves is most definitely a sort of utopia, though of course only they and I see it like that. Childhood itself is, or should be, I should say, a sort of utopian world where anything is possible, and this is what the brothers and their dirty river town are for me. I am very much in tune with their way of tuning in to their own world and way of thinking and believing.

PS: Well... is there a limit... are there subjects you won't write about? I mean: is the MUD project the lifelong project which could help you organize the themes?

PM: I could write only this big book of mud and be happy with that. I've resigned myself to believing that I could do far worse than what I've been able to do with the three short books of brothers on the page. That said, I have turned the brothers deliberately off the radar so to speak and wrote a novel called Bob, or Man on Boat that is coming out next fall. There's a river running through that book too, and fish, but the rhythm of the narrative and the way in which it's told is much different than the voice that carries the books about the brothers. In fact I don't know how to form my tongue around its sentences when I've tried to read from this Bob book because the language of the brothers so completely owns my way of speech. So yes, if I could only write one book, I could live with the brothers forever and be happy with that and with them. They are my brothers. Whatever else I do seem to write, on the side, seem like only passing friendships that might or might not stick.

PS: Your stories tell the truth, I think, about the need of the life on the margin... you once told about that you prefere silence... well, what do you think about pastoral tradition?

PM: I'm not a fan of any tradition, pastoral or otherwise. Without silence there can be no music, so silence I most certainly like. As for truth, there is a poem by Jack Gilbert that I'll let speak to what I believe to be the truth about truth. Here it is:

Poetry is a Kind of Lying

Poetry is a kind of lying,
necessarily. To profit the poet
or beauty. But also in
that truth may be told only so.

Those who, admirably, refuse
to falsify (as those who will not
risk pretensions) are excluded
from saying even so much.

Degas said he didn't paint
what he saw, but what
would enable them to see
the thing he had.

In the end, I'd say, the lie and the sentence lying behind it always makes for the most interesting story.