We Make Mud: Stories

by Peter Markus

The brothers in Peter Markus's "We Make Mud" can't understand why cars drive through their dirty river town without stopping, why the people in those cars don'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--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.

69 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2011

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Edward Rathke · Rating 4 out of 5]

--But us brothers, we knew what it meant to be better than dead. We knew that when things die they sometimes just then begin to live.--

It is moments like this within Peter Markus' We Make Mud that make you read and reread sentences over and over. So simple and so understated, but, in many ways, those two sentences are at the very heart of this novel in stories.

Told in plural first person with the occasional transition to singular, a story about two brothers who call each other Brother, not Jimmy or John, which, as we're told by them, are their names. There are a few other characters, but mostly it is the brothers. The most noticeable thing about this book, these stories, is the prose. It is not the kind of prose that shimmers ecstatically. It is deliberate and in such a way that it changes what you thought fiction writing could be. Not because it's maybe somehow the way everyone should've always been writing, but because, for the first time, you realise that writing can look like this, can feel like this. There's a distinct rhythm to the words and the syntax and grammar of the sentences should be awkward, but somehow manage to never be. Repetition is usually seen as a bad thing in prose, but these stories delight in repetition, and it works to a dizzying degree. And the book is built on this repetition of phrases, of scenes, of revisiting variations of already told stories. And that's part of it, too, not only to repeat, but to vary, in the way that jazz uses variations on a theme to expand upon the initial melody.

And it turns this novel into rituals and prayer. It is a prayer. It is a collection of fairytales in the most serious of ways. There is violence, but it is never for the sake of violence: it becomes ritual. And the repetition is part of this. It is a prayer about childhood and what it means to have a single place, a river, be the entire world. Told by brothers who are children, reality bends and blurs and the impossible becomes common, either as daydream and fancy or actuality, the reader never knows for certain. It is a book that surprises and delights even as it becomes ugly and course but more so as it shimmers and grows, glowing.

--We are brothers. We are each other's voice inside our own heads. This might sting, us brothers will say to each other brother. Us brothers, we will raise back the hammer in our hand. We will drive that rusty, bent-back nail right through Brother's hand. Neither of us brothers will wince, or flinch, or make with our mouth the sound of a brother crying out. Good, Brother, Brother will say. Brother will be hammering in a second nail into us brothers' other hand when the father of us brothers will step out into the back of our backyard. Sons, our father will call this word out. Both of us brothers will turn back our boy heads toward the sound of our father to hear whatever it is that this father is going to say to us brothers next. It will be a long few seconds. The sky above the river where the steel mill sits shipwrecked in the river's mud, it will be dark and quiet. Somewhere, though, the sun will be shining. You boys be sure to clean up back here before you come back in, the father of us will say. This father will turn back with his voice and go back away into the inside of this house. Us brothers, we will turn back to face back with each other. Us brothers will raise back with our hammer, will line up that rusted nail.--

There are so many more moments I wish I could put in this review as I found myself highlighting almost whole pages. Because it is not the sentences themselves that hit hard, but the images that Markus builds over the course of five or ten or forty sentences: surreal, surprising, dark, beautiful, grotesque, magical.

A great and short book.

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

In We Make Mud, Peter Markus, like James Joyce’s artist, “forg[es] anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being.” Markus achieves this through peculiarly musical repetition and a deliberately constrained and largely monosyllabic lexicon. “Loving repeating is in a way earth feeling,” Carole Maso writes in her tribute essay to Gertrude Stein, Stein herself a master of repetition, and Markus, through relentless repetition of words like “dirt” and “mud” and “rain” and “dust” and “steel” and “fish,” inspires, conjures that “earth feeling,” whether through taking these words through their noun, verb, and adjective forms, or through taking other words through their conjugations, etc., all of the above often happening within a single singular incantatory sentence, all of which deftly demonstrating how artistic repetition, of words and concepts, alters feeling and meaning. Moreover, such repetitions and “limited” vocabulary make We Make Mud’s fabulist happenings and violent events and endings that much more jarringly, if absurdly, evocative. Like its title suggests, We Make Mud is an invitation for the reader to paradoxically participate in the making of what has seemingly already been made.

[Robert Wechsler]

I read the first half of this book solely on the treadmill, which is the perfect place to read this wonderfully repetitive book to nowhere, full of mud, a river that flows by, two brothers, and their odd, often violent fantasies that constitute the reality of the book’s world. I call it a book because it is more story collection than novel, at least to someone who is halfway. But it’s really neither. It is what it is, it is.

I’ve greatly enjoyed this literary exercise, but will move on for now to other stories as I tread the mill. I look forward to coming back to it next winter when I go back to tread the mill again.

The publisher’s description is perfect: “Markus repeatedly riffs on and rearranges the elements.” This book is worth a look for anyone who likes to exercise their love for language and can deal with repetition.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

The stories in this book dream and shift as darkly as the muddy river the brother characters are so obsessed with. The repeating, though shifting and flowing, elements seem different for a group of stories. Some stories are different, but some are altered versions of previous stories that do something different than the previous version. Even when the stories are different, certain lines show up over and over, like the refrain in a song that won't leave my head. It's dark, it's mud, and dear god do a lot of people's heads get cut off. This is all just my take on it, of course. Regardless, this is an interesting book.

[Josh Boardman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the idea of a restricted vocabulary and an incantation-like prose. It can certainly be powerful. But on the first, the language seemed to be artificially restricted-- I'm thinking of the introductions of guitar and dirt later in the book-- and at times the rhythm seems to falter in an attempt at flourish. The rhythm/pacing also changes dramatically about 20 pages from the end, which made for a pretty unfulfilling, inorganic conclusion. The ideas are here, but the execution isn't quite.

[Jeremy Maddux · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some passages here in this book, this book written by boys where there are some passages that are transcendentally beautiful. Then there are other passages here in this book where there are passages that become so tedious I wish I'd bought a physical copy of this book where there are boys that play in the river and swim with the fish in this river that the boys play in so I could throw this book with boys in the river against the fucking wall.

[M. Sarki · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/we...

...Our father, his voice, it is a raised-back hammer hammering the backs of our boy heads…

What is eventually rewarding to this reader is the enormous amount of labor, the sheer willpower, the daily sitting down to it that Peter Markus displays, chapter after chapter, for all of us to see. He is a writer. A writer writes.

...Night swallowed us brothers up inside of its black-holed mouth…

This is the third novel I have read of late that was written by Peter Markus. I cannot imagine many readers for this particular type of work. Simply put there is a lot of fishing and talking about fish, and not in regards to technique or grand tales of the big fish that got away. No, more about water and mud, empty wooden boats, dead men and women, fish heads nailed to a tree, missing fathers, and slicing in the manner of beheadings. No kidding, there is violence among these pages coming from off the pen of a very nice man I met and heard speak. Markus certainly repeats often in this book, or revises a previous sentence, or scribbles highlights over the object of his obsession. Simply put, this book works hard. Markus is not taking any short cuts here, and for me there is a price to pay. Reading this book sort of reminds me of the Bill Murray film by the name of Groundhog Day. But I do not share the same opinion with wikipedia who states: the term Groundhog Day became part of the English lexicon as a means to describe a monotonous, unpleasant, and repetitive situation. No, what I am referring to is the turning of each page into each new chapter and discovering, as if nothing ever happened before, that many of the previously bludgeoned or beheaded characters are still alive, again, at least for another day. At first a confusing idea to get one's head around, but indeed possible if compartmentalized and Markus allowed creative license.

...A river, us brothers, we soon discovered, it needs rain for it to be a river. Just like a fish needs a river for it to be a fish...

Back in the mid to late nineties, I attended a Gordon Lish fiction-writing class with Peter Markus. It was being held over the summer in an unused classroom at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. In these classes the infamous Lish would talk for hours about the craft of writing and whatever crossed his brilliant mind. We students were expected to sit for eight to twelve hours straight and listen to this man speak. We were not expected to leave the classroom for any reason. Or ask questions. Potty breaks were not acceptable. We were told to hold our water. We were told that great writers hold their water. Later, many years later, Gordon, who became my friend and confidant until he decided otherwise, or just went dark on me as he has done to others for no particular reason, at least nothing obvious, confessed to me that he would take what he called a water pill which enabled him to go on and on for hours on end without the need to relieve himself in the boys room. After class that is the first place he went, that is if nobody else was in there as he was extremely homophobic, or at least claimed to be. He often opted instead to head directly for the women’s toilet room. He also always claimed he sat down to pee, like a girl, and had no qualms in revealing this information to his adoring acolyte which I remained for over twenty years. But what I am getting to is that Gordon taught some key points of which it appears Peter was listening intently to and then put into practice what Lish preached. Repetition and circling his object, supersaturation and revision, the same sentences being rewritten and visited again and again. For some of us readers it is just too much to bear. For others it is what they come to the page for. It is not my favorite method for saying what needs to be said, although Markus makes his mark on anyone who dives in to swim in his simple, but somewhat compounding, language.

...Fish don’t drown…

This here is a mess of words. Like in a mess of fish. Like my own Michigan fish. The ones I took from Tawas Bay. And not just any fish. Perch. Yellow bellies. A mess of perch. Five gallon buckets full of them, scaled and gutted, and then filleted. Rinsed off and thrown into a brown paper bag and shaken until a dusting of corn meal, salt, and pepper lightly coats each moist skin. Deep-fried and served again and again and again. A mess of good words too, hot to the touch, and delicious. A savoring requited from out of the mud. And nothing careless. Consequential if you want to know the truth. Merely entertaining if you are looking for some casual untruths. However, always wishing for something unforgettable.

...But maybe I wasn’t thinking is what I think now…

A remarkable novel, and also noteworthy. A novel composed in the manner Brian Evenson calls an almost religious invocation."

[Emily]

this guy writes the same thing over and over again, but a little different each time, so much like gertrude stein, cyclical, i’ve never encountered someone who does it quite like that, cyclical to the point of incantation - rural fixation, rumination, fish, rivers, mud, brothers, mothers, fathers, rusted nails, reading his prose is like falling asleep on a boat, rocking back and forth, lulling, but sounds too, shocks, and then calm again, though with Markus, it’s visceral and disturbing too. it’s as though he’s writing short stories that are sestinas. can language be soothing and disturbing? yes, i think it can. i know it can.

“When he asks us brothers, Where is your mother, one of us brothers whispers, Fish, and the other one of us mutters, Moon. To this, these words, our father, he nods with his head, then he heads back down to the river. And without so much as a word or a wave from his goodbye, we watch our father walk back across the river’s muddy water, back to the river’s other side: walking and walking and walking on, until he is nothing but a sound that the river sometimes makes when a stone is skipped across it.”

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Here, at the river's muddy shore, us brothers, because we are brothers, we drop down onto our hands and knees, down in the river-made mud, and down here on our hands and knees, down here where dirt and river kiss to make mud, us brothers, we bend down our heads, we close our boy eyes to the muddy darkness inside our own heads."

Sounds like a prayer position, doesn't it? If a prayer book knocked up a book of fables, this novel in stories would be their baby -- a baby made of mud. And its parents should take care of their baby's head, as well as their own. Fish knives, after all, are sharp. The book evokes a litany, with the refrain focused on brothers, river, mud, fish, fish heads, the moon, and stars. Not to mention Girl: "But girl the way that girl was meant to be spelled: with twelve r's, thirteen u's, and twenty-thousand l's at the end of girl, stretching across the earth."

[in8 · Rating 5 out of 5]

i respond to it here: http://www.5cense.com/12/re-mud-ponza...

[Artifizz · Rating 4 out of 5]

great stuff... reviewed it here: A Dirty River Runs Through It