![]() I take pride in the very small-you might even call it cultish-readership I’ve managed to cultivate over the years, with a handful of short-ish books, as that guy who writes fiction about fish and rivers and mud. We all live and write and make things under the influence of others, but the writing that we are born to write might lead us to believe otherwise. ![]() ![]() I’m thinking of writers such as Beckett and Stein I’m thinking of painters such as Pollock, Basquiat, and Van Gogh. There’s a newness to it each time that I gaze into those pages, and yet there’s also something inevitable about them. Peter MarkusWho’s to say what any of us is ever born to do? And yet when I send such words out to my students, when I ask them to enter into such a daring relationship with language, I suppose what I’m thinking about are those writers whose work, when I encounter it, again and again and again, feels as if I’m reading it for the first time. ![]() I’m curious-how would you describe the writing that you were “born to write”? Zach DavidsonThese lines are excerpted from the introductory letter that you sent to your fiction workshop: “My belief is that you will learn to write the writing that only you can write-the writing you were born to write-by writing the writing that you ultimately want to read. This informs our misery as well as our delight. What else is there in the end? / What better reason to keep on writing and pushing back / against time and death with the heart in his body still singing.” When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds makes clear that the fruit of death is bountiful. In this way language is the only living thing / between him and death. He is forever able to describe in new ways his perception of his father’s death the experience of his death lacks the relief of an ending.Īt the same time, the speaker has permission to continue on his quest: “He writes. Then dead.” For the speaker, the endlessness of language is a source of comfort and despair. In the poem “There Is Always Some Other Way to Say It,” the speaker reports, “He was dying. What haunts the speaker is not the fact of death as much as the possibility of communicating it. “I am here to translate my father’s death / into fruit.” The speaker recalls the yogurt he tried to get past his father’s lips, and the shaving soap he used on his cheeks after his father died. In When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds (Wayne State University Press), Markus’s first collection of poetry, what the speaker is trying to make clear is his experience of his father’s death. This dual effect-the transmission of the effort required to make a thing clear while making a thing clear-is characteristic of Markus’s work. Markus introduced himself to the class via an attached letter, in which he wrote: “All I can ‘teach’ you about the writing/fiction-making that you are here to write/make is some of what I think I know and what has sometimes worked for me in my own process of fiction making.” Markus’s guarded introduction not only conveyed his pedagogy-writing/fiction-making is a fluid, individual process, albeit one that can benefit from company-it communicated the declarative nature of his writing. I first met Peter Markus seven years ago, in a writing workshop orchestrated over email.
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