Language and Laughter: Two Writers in Conversation

Peg Alford Pursell and Nancy Au first met at the College of Marin (in Northern California) over nine years ago, when Nancy enrolled in her first writing class, a flash fiction class taught by Peg. Deeply inspired by Peg’s teaching, Nancy began attending North Bay Writers, a writing workshop Peg founded and facilitated in Sausalito. During this time, Peg also founded the award-winning literary reading series Why There Are Words (which since has become a celebrated national series and also inspired Peg’s founding and directing WTAW Press, a nonprofit independent publisher of books). Peg could see that not only was Nancy an original and talented writer, she was also interested in literary community building, and asked Nancy to become in involved with the series. Nancy began interning for WTAW in its second year. Nancy went on to earn her MFA from San Francisco State University, where she teaches creative writing. She is also an instructor at California State University Stanislaus and, in the summers, she teaches creative writing to biology majors! Nancy co-founded The Escapery, a collective of teachers who are dedicated to diversity, and to writing and art as a form of resistance. Of all the writing workshops Peg has attended in her lifetime, one of her favorites, one of the best was led by Nancy at The Escapery.

Peg Alford Pursell is the author of A Girl Goes into the Forest, just released July 16, by Dzanc Books. She is also the author of Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, the 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year for Literary Fiction. 

Nancy Au is the author of the debut story collection Spider Love Song and Other Stories, forthcoming from Acre Books in September. Of the book, Peg wrote: “Foxes, turtles, ducks, oysters, fish, badgers, beetles, damselflies, bees: all manner of creatures scratch, swim, thrum, and shimmer through these tender and fantastic stories. Characters struggle with the entanglements of the living and the dead, like the ‘spiders’ webs [that] can wind around anything that doesn’t pay attention,’ while they long to be out in the world that both compels and terrifies. I was spellbound by Au’s unique vision and language that pay attention to the many wild, rich worlds that hold us.”

The following conversation between the two writers took place long distance while they were traveling, Peg promoting her new book, and Nancy taking her creative writing/biology major students on a week-long camping field trip on Mt. Hamilton.

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NANCY AU: I think about the generative Tzara’s Hat exercises that we did in North Bay Writers Workshop when you taught me to draw inspiration by pulling a word from a pile, and digging into stories utilizing that word or the image it evoked. This is still something that I do on a regular basis, both for my own writing and in my workshops!

Note: The Tzara’s Hat exercise derives from Tristan Tzara, who, during a Dadaist rally in the 1920s, offered to create a work on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat.

PEG ALFORD PURSELL: Not everyone enjoys exercises when it comes to writing, so it makes me especially happy that you do, too. Doing something like “Tzara’s Hat” can make generating new work feel playful, and that sort of approach is really helpful if one is experiencing anxiety about getting something down on the page. It’s interesting that creative anxiety is thought to be a crucial step of the creative process: the anxiety builds until the creator begins to make something, relieving that pressure. A kind of necessary evil, it seems. But some can find that anxiety intolerable. An exercise, a game can help a writer out of their own way.

I would love to know if any of the stories in Spider Love Song and Other Stories had their genesis in this Tzara’s Hat method. And if not, how did you begin your stories?

NA: For SLS, I loved using “Tzara’s Hat,” which helped me to begin writing both stories, “The Unfed” and “Mom’s Desert.” I also experimented with different poetic constraints, such as variations of abecedarian exercises and, my favorite, using word cut-ups (with science textbooks, bird field books, recipe books, books about mammals, etc.) The cut-ups helped me to generate material for dialogues between characters, to use words that are not part of my everyday vocabulary, to find unique word pairings, and to use words in strange and new ways. I also used ekphrasis exercises. At museums, while studying the art, I wrote in my notebook using words to describe what I saw. Ekphrasis helped me to envision colors, settings and composition, textures, lighting, clothing, facial expressions, physical movements, and gestures for my characters.

I love your description of the playfulness of writing exercises, and how this can alleviate a writer’s anxiety. I carry a lot of anxiety, both within my writing/professional life and within my everyday life, and I often struggle with feeling confident about finding my words, using words, even in the context of just speaking with others …. With exercises, like cut-ups, it helps me to feel like words don’t have to be so serious, that language can be malleable and forgiving and funny. I think this is the reason why the writing exercises that you taught me at North Bay Writing Workshop have been so invaluable and inspiring and generative for me.

I want to talk about A Girl Goes into the Forest. In the story “Iguana,” there is a moment that took my breath away, when the protagonist “lifted her face to the sky. She wanted rain to mist her face, wash down her neck, thrum on her throat. Water she would wipe away.” This moment, like so many impossibly beautiful and heartbreaking moments throughout AGGITF, feels like we are witnessing a person’s dreams, in the way that a person wakes with their heart still pounding, the scents and tastes so real they keep their eyes squeezed shut, afraid to lose the dream.

I was heartbroken by the intensity of the character’s desire to reach her daughter, to be seen, heard, to hear her daughter speak before disappearing into the van. I wanted the dreams, these stories, each one, to go on forever. I believe that this intensity, the hyper-realistic, fully immersed, fully felt dreams, are what makes flash so magical. In a related sense, I wonder if there a catalyst/impetus for your book? Was it a vision? A dream? An image?

PAP: I need to make up an exciting story about how this collection came into being! If I were to do that, I’d say I’d had a sort of vision, one that came to me in a dream in the middle of the afternoon while I was in a liminal state, perhaps lying on my back in a meadow surrounded by buzzing bees and nattering squirrels, excited songbirds, catfish jumping in a nearby stream, while the cumulus clouds scuttling overhead formed the catalytic images. But the reality is, I almost never have any idea what I’m setting out to write. I plunge in, going with some impetus or another, most often the sound of a phrase that came from who knows where. I write early in the morning and often wake with words in my head that I need to set down on the page. Sonics are important to me, and in revision I’m careful about preserving and building upon the sounds of language.

A related question for you, Nancy, about revision: Throughout your stories certain motifs appear and I’m curious about whether they appeared organically in the individual stories, or if it was a matter of revisiting the stories after they were collected and then injecting the motifs into them—or a combination? For example, all the creatures in your book! Have you compiled a list of all the animals that show up in your stories? “The Fox Spirit” contains, besides foxes, a woodpecker, beetles, an orange tiger, hoary goats, dying fish, just to name a few. Can you talk about the significance of the animal world in this book?

NA: I love that you ask this because I love how in AGGITF, you dove so beautifully into the natural world, the “arched sky… so blue,” the “closer to earth darkness churned like sea reeds,” the excitement of animals lurking … in the surrounding darkness.” Each piece in the collection reminds your reader that this entire world and our experiences through it is a wilderness. A wilderness surrounds the teenage daughter who travels alone across the country to live with her father, and another daughter when she secretly marries and proclaims that she is moving to Chile to raise horses with her new husband. There is a deep and beautiful wilderness within the protagonists themselves, within the complexities of parenthood, of daughterhood, of love, of marriage, of separation.

With my use of the natural world in SLS and for much of my writing, I am inspired by my husband who is an educator and a biologist who deeply loves the insects that he studies. I often think about the time when he and I were on a hike, and he suddenly shouted out, terrified, “Watch out!” to a mayfly just as it was eaten by a dragonfly in midair. I know that he loves dragonflies just as much as he loves mayflies, and I always imagine the turmoil he must have felt in this moment, rooting for one bug who has captured another bug as its meal, and simultaneously wanting to save the bug from being eaten. I think about the tenderness, the awe, and concern. And, the science! I’m a science lover (aka a science nerd without a science degree), and I love to read about birds and animals and insects. I use my fiction writing as an excuse to spend hours wiggling my way down the endless Wikipedia informational wormhole, to learn about anything ranging from the mating habits of lions, or the flight patterns of damselflies, or the origins of television static.

One of the guiding principles that I’ve lived by, with regard to publishing as a short story writer, was something that you taught me early on: write stories, publish stories, work on building a collection this way. Was this something that you did for AGGITF? Was AGGITF always envisioned as a story collection? Or were the individual stories written over time, and a theme began to show up?

PAP: Many of the stories were written over time. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t usually know what I’m creating, and that’s particularly true about a book, a collection. I wouldn’t have it any other way! The mystery is essential. It takes time and stories before I can discover what my obsessions are about, what they may be adding up to. Once I have an idea, more stories flow, though, in the end, I will cut quite a few that don’t enhance the overall collection. Also, once I have a sense of the overall project, I’ll realize that there are other stories, stories written earlier that already held the seeds, and with my eye and ear trained on them through the new focus, I’ll look into how I might tend to them in such a way that they can take their place in the collection. I really love that process of investigation and discovery and of culling and assembling.

Will you talk about your process in writing your book? Many of the stories have been published individually, too. Did you have a larger idea about writing this particular book before writing the stories? And then set out to publish each? Or did you assemble that book after you felt you had enough stories to form a collection? How did you develop such a wonderful cohesion between these stories?

NA: I love that your process involves this wonderful mystery, this incredible discovery! I think that the entire process—beginning with my very first writing class that I took with you at the College of Marin, and later with our NBW workshops—has been such a beautiful discovery and adventure! I didn’t know, when I first started writing, that I wanted to be a writer. I knew that I wanted to express myself creatively, and I knew that I wanted to connect with others, but I wasn’t sure how. I’ve been a visual artist for years, and writing creatively was something that felt new and exciting.

For SLS, a few of the early drafts of the stories were first written during my time in the workshop. I remember when I wrote my first story, that I wrote my story to you and my wonderful workshop peers. I think that this was because I loved all of my workshop peers so much. And, because before the workshop, I didn’t know how to write knowing/imagining that someone else would read my work, and at the same time, I didn’t know how to write to myself, for myself. I loved being a part of that wonderful group of writers, I loved each week when we met, (even though I was so nervous about sharing my work and receiving feedback), to know that my words and my imagination were being heard, seen by others. I felt connected and alive.

The stories in SLS include ones that I wrote and published individually over the past several years while at both the workshop and at my MFA program. It was when I wrote the title story (during an Oregon State University-funded writing co-residency with my friend, Carson Beker), that I began to see the possibility of putting together a collection. The cohesion might come from my constant interest in (aka obsession with) writing stories about Chinese heritage within multi-generational immigrant families, death, and daughterhood.

My dream is to write a story collection as taut and meaningful as AGGITF. I’m working on a linked flash fiction collection. What advice would you give to someone who is thinking about writing a linked flash fiction collection?

PAP: That’s so exciting that you’re working on a flash collection! You’re one of my favorite flash fiction writers, and I still remember discovering your flash with its unique vision when you came to my class. Your fresh way of seeing and originality of expression was so thrilling and invigorating. I hardly need to give you any advice about writing a linked flash collection. You are teaching me.

If pressed, however, to share my thoughts about collections of flash and other hybrid forms like those in AGGITF, I’d say that it’s important to consider how the reader will experience so many distilled stories one after the other. What is the nature of each flash? When you’ve got highly compressed and condensed stories—and here I mean stories, not anecdotes or vignettes—which, arguably, is what defines flash and/or sets apart those stories that best deliver—it’s worthwhile to think about the demands on the reader. How to adjust pacing? How to allow the reader to take a breath when needed? How to create the larger rhythm? These are the kinds of problems each flash fiction writer will need to solve for themselves, according to the kind of book they’re hoping to create, whether the flash stories are linked or stand alone.

Is this your next writing project? Or are you working on something different? Maybe more than one project at a time?

NA: You are one of my most favorite flash fiction writers, one who’s had such a tremendous influence in so much of what I write. In answer to your question, I think completing a linked collection of flash will challenge me as a writer and artist, to think about pacing, rhythm, and breath. I love how you described earlier the culling and assembling of AGGITF. That was something that I felt so strongly while reading your gorgeous book—the way you dove so deeply into the minds of your protagonists, into their desires and uncertainties, especially those uncertainties with family members, partners, and selves—while simultaneously opening up space for the reader. You did this with the brilliant use of titles, of spacing, of moving into and then later outside of the protagonists’ interiors, your shifts in point-of-view.

I am still in the discovery and mystery phase of writing the linked collection of flash. I agree with you that “mystery is essential.” As a writer, I love structure (deadlines and assignments), but I also thrive in the unknown, in the experimental nature of writing exercises that allow me to laugh at myself, at language.

I’d also love to know about what you’re working on next! Are there pieces of another collection that you’ve been working on? A novel?

PAP: I have two nearly complete manuscripts I’ve been working on over the years. The one that feels most ready is a novel told in flash, “Blow the House Down.” The second is also a novel—I think—though it may revert back to its original form of a linked story collection, stories of a traditional length. I’ve also started a long essay about laughter, with over 63 pages of single-spaced typed notes. Like you, I love to research, and it’s been the best part about the essay. Writing nonfiction is an extreme challenge for me, and I’ve published exactly one essay to date! Meanwhile, in my daily practice, I continue to write occasionally more of the hybrids that you find in AGGITF, and we’ll see what comes of them.

This Ark’s Not Going Down—Or Is It?

Imagine that it’s 2020, and you’re under the dim lights of your cozy multiplex with a bucket of the best butter-slathered popcorn that money can buy. It’s the premiere of Wes Anderson’s latest colorfully stylized masterpiece in comic absurdity. You’ve been watching carefully, and it’s already maybe scene ten, and amidst all the beautiful frames, you keep seeing a book in the background that is absolutely stunning. Anderson’s giving some major praise. The book’s cover is pink and baby blue. Maybe there are some Manhattan buildings in the background—yeah, that’s what it is. It has a thick, brush-like font written in white, bold letters. I’ll go ahead and tell you: the book is Julian Tepper’s Ark, and it, in all of its quirky eccentricities, is downright brilliant.

Set in the aforementioned city of Manhattan, Tepper’s sophomore novel, Ark, follows three generations of the Arkin family who have mostly lost at life. Ben is the (extremely) wealthy patriarch, and he’s a helpless and hilarious mess. His children—Sondra, Doris, and Oliver—run a record label, and they’ve never had any success. Ben has rescued them on countless occasions from shutting down. Tepper tells us that Ben “put at least two million into Shout!” The reason he gave them the money wasn’t that he actually believed in the business; no, it was because it was a way “just to keep the kids busy.”

Ben’s a lot of things, but mostly he identifies as a self-proclaimed artist. Tepper writes of Ben, “His art supplies alone were seven to eight thousand a month.” There’s a big problem with his expenses: he’s never sold any of his work.

For most artists not selling anything—literally nothing in a lifetime—would be emotionally defeating, but that’s not the case for Ben. He, with the help of his assistant Jerome, likes to create for the sake of creating: “You see this? These paintings? These sculptures? They are perfectly meaningless things. And yet in making them, I have felt what it feels like to be a king. And that stimulus to my brain, that knowledge of creation which I have gained… that, Jerome, is what all this making is about.”

Tepper never misses a beat throughout Ark. The pacing is quick, and the dialogue snaps. The fictional setting in which Tepper plants us feels as vibrant and alive as the New York that I know and love.

Where Tepper’s at his very best is in the novel’s early scenes with Ben, when the artist is at work. Tepper gives us a glimpse at how Ben creates:

He filled a pot with water and placed it on the stovetop. Once the water was boiling, he dropped the chicken carcass, as well as the bones that had been on his plate, into the pot. For just over eight minutes he stared into the pot, thinking. Then, he drained the water, cleaned the remaining meat off the bones and brought them into the studio, found a shallow wood box one foot wide by one foot long, took some short nails and a hammer from a drawer, and put everything on his desk, and began arranging the bones inside the box. The legs were along the edges, the breastbone was placed centrally, the wings stuck out from beneath the breastbone. He hammered the nails through the bones into the wood. After which he went into a back closet and found a bag of sand, and poured it over the bones until they were halfway submerged. Then he had Jerome cut a piece of glass, which the artist glued to the box, closing the bones and sand.

The description is almost breathtaking, both in the scope of artistry and in the level of strangeness in which Ben exists. The odd patriarch could come off as being aloof and unlikeable in other hands, but Tepper gives him a genuine, dynamic dimensionality that transcends any kind of flatness.

As Ark progresses, there’s more to savor. Rebecca, Oliver’s daughter and also the only ‘successful’ member of the Arkin family, enters the picture after a lawsuit involving the family’s record label. She struggles to understand her family, and she doubts that she ever will. Rebecca is a strong character and helps to ground the novel in its more far-reaching moments.

Tepper’s novel is about art, for sure, but it’s also about the bonds that tie families together. How deep can blood really run? And, even more importantly, how deep should it run?

Ark has it all. There is heartbreak: we wind up at a cemetery. There is laughter: we encounter a fight at the cemetery. There’s also a sense of hope. By Ark’s end, the Arkin family has endured about as much as any family could take. Still, however, they remain a family. They are the Arkins. They’ve always made it, and there’s no reason to give up on them now.

Compromised Lives of One Sort or Another: A Review of Jen Michalski's Could You Be With Her Now

I doubt that anyone would argue that the two novellas of Could You Be With Her Now are not different stories. I mean, “I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner” focuses on danger experienced by a mentally challenged fifteen year old, told in his own words. To the contrary, “May-September” omniscient tracks the romance that blooms between much-older woman and the young writer the much-older woman hires to work on her memoir blog.

Sure, these two stories have a relationship (compromised lives of one sort or another) and combine together into an interesting whole. However, there is an impressive range of writing ability between the two.  They are crafted quite differently, function differently, and impact the reader in different ways.

A brief sample from each demonstrates the variance of the two prose styles. Contrast the following “I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner” sample:

I watch the TV for my girlfriend Megan. She’s fourteen and I am fifteen and every day she’s on the show that I watch about her. She’s pretty and I wish we could hold hands and kiss. My brother Josh is seventeen and doesn’t play with me and doesn’t like Megan. His girlfriend is not on TV and she’s not pretty. Josh and his girlfriend call me retard and laugh. My name is Jimmy but I laugh too.

with the following “May-September” excerpt:

In the living room Sandra found the sheet music, Concerto in F by Gershwin. For years she had known most music by heart, but the last few years a note would fall out here, there, and she could not find it, would stop playing and begin again, only to drop a note someplace else. She began to forget entire songs altogether. Sometimes she could not reach quickly enough to the high notes or the lower notes, and her soles hurt when she pressed on the foot pedals. She had had enemies in her life, surely everyone did. But she hadn’t expected her hands or her piano to turn against her.

Obviously, the prose of “I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner” is much simpler than that of  “May-September.” It has to be, since the former is told through the voice of mentally challenged Jimmy whereas the latter alternates between the heads of the older woman, Sandra, and the young writer, Alice. Regardless, I was impressed by the prose difference between these two novellas. For me, this was a significant part of the joy of reading the book.

Of course, variety in prose style is not the only aspect in play in these two pieces. As I mentioned, they operate differently, though both in ways that I enjoyed.

“I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner” seems to function by contrasting the innocence of Jimmy’s voice with what the reader understands about Jimmy’s situation. Jimmy is a good kid, but there are bad things around him (or involving him) that he cannot understand:

I am on the deck now. I want to hug her goodbye. She pushes at me.

“Get away, you retard!” She screams and I put my hand on her mouth.

Megan bites my hand. I push her away. She is smaller than me and falls against the glass door. I feel bad and put my arms around her to pick her up. We are up half the way. She hits me in the chest and the face. I get mad like I get when Josh hits me and leaves marks. She hits me in the face again and it hurts bad. I put my hands on her neck and twist real hard, back and forth. She puts her hands on my hands but I am bigger. Her face turns all red and it’s kind of funny how red. She keeps moving and kicking and I try to stop her. We are up half the way when she falls asleep on me. She is so heavy I let her fall and then I wait for her to stop make-believing because people on TV are always doing make-believe. The way Josh fake sleeps until I go away.

We understand, but we know that Jimmy does not. This creates an amazing amount of tension despite Jimmy’s pleasant and simple talking. We want to yell to Jimmy to protect him, but he couldn’t understand us anyway.

On the other hand, “May-September” waves back and forth between Sandra and Alice, between their past and their present:

Oh Sandra, you’re never any fun. Georgi got in on the passenger side, pulled on the radio knob. Do you know the way to San Jose, I’ve been away so long. Come to Bali without Jack. We can do girl stuff.

Alice met Sandra by the closet. She moved so quickly, from couch to closet, that Sandra dropped the coat.

I’ve got it. Alice threw it onto the couch and then put her arms around Sandra.

Sandra leaned over and cupped Georgi’s right cheek in her left hand, brushed her left cheek with her lips. She could smell Georgi’s hair, her breath.

Sandra, stop. Georgi pushed at her.

Sandra stood stiffly, feeling Alice against her.

The resulting effect is as complex as Sandra’s and Alice’s emotion. Through that slipping between the two lovers, and between their situation and their history, what they feel and how they act against it, the reader gets closer to experiencing life as Sandra and Alice.

Really, I am not sure which story I prefer. “I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner” crafts Jimmy’s voice marvelously and brings me to the edge of my chair. However, though “May-September” doesn’t have the same simple charm, the more sophisticated story is captivating. I guess I’ll just have to like Could You Be With Her Nowas a whole and not worry which novella is better.

Peter Markus's We Make Mud

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’s 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 realize 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 fairy-tales 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.

We Make Mud is a great and short book.

Something About A Keeper—Peter Markus’s We Make Mud

When I was a kid, my dad and his brother and his brother’s sons and I would go fishing for trout a lot. We’d go out to a lake in Eastern Washington. We’d catch a lot, throw back a lot. Keep a few to barbecue. We used a lot of charcoal. My dad and his brother would send us cousins and brothers out for paper plates and the small kind of grills they sell for twenty bucks at the bait shop.

I don’t remember learning how to gut a fish but I remember the gutting. I remember having a dream once out there at the lake, about being gutted myself, a knife running me up from asshole to mouth, some giant thumb the size of a knee cleaning me out and running me under an enormous hose. I remember telling my dad and cousin-brothers and uncle about it. One of them said, Yeah, I’ve had that dream.

This, for me, was some way of defining family.

Reading Peter Markus’ most recent book, We Make Mud, I felt myself again and again reeled back to those fishing trips, and I’ve been trying to figure the why. It’s a marvelous thing, this book, one that makes good on the promise of the shorter, previous story books Good, Brother and The Singing Fish. And like those, in We Make Mud makes much music out of a deliberate, repetitive river-language of fish and brothers. From the title story:

“Us brothers, we kept reaching down, with our hands, down into the mud. We kept on with our hands reaching down, into the mud, and when we did, us brothers, we kept on pulling up mud. But then once, when we reached with our hands down into the mud, us brothers, we pulled up Girl. We pulled Girl up, out of the mud, until Girl became a tree. Us brothers, up this girl tree, up, us brothers, we climbed.”

But like a muddy river, you can’t step into the same Peter Markus sentence twice. The continually torquing and repeating language wraps you up, disorientingly, more like lahar than river, until all you see is the river and the fish and mud. And perhaps this is what it is that reels me back to childhood. From “The Singing Fish”:

“Look here: there was a dirty river in our dirty river town. There were dirty river fish in this here dirty river that us brothers liked to catch. There was a house, just up from this river, with a back-of-the-yard part where, us brothers, we liked to take the fish that we’d catch out of this dirty river and, us brothers, we liked to chop off the heads off these fish.”

It’s childlike, this simplicity, in which a world forms slowly, and out of repetition. As kids we do the same thing every day. We wake. We play. We eat. We play. We sleep. We wake. We play. One day we’re playing and Boy appears. One day we’re playing and Girl appears. It seems as if by magic. Like the first time we tossed dirt into water and made mud.

On Peter Markus’s Bob, or Man on Boat

I’m usually late getting to books, because I have this dramatic assumption that books are responsible for finding you. I might have stolen this idea from the Lester Bangs of Almost Famous rather than the Lester Bangs who I used to want to be. I didn’t like Almost Famous but at the time it came out I wrote music reviews and interviewed bands for the now defunct Salt for Slugs, and I would read old reviews by Bangs and Hunter Thompson, in the hopes that, I don’t know, I could grow up to be somebody.

Yesterday I read Peter Markus’ Bob, or Man on Boat. It’s as thin as the skin of a blister, and as warm as cigarette’s cherry. It’s a fish tale. Moby Dick is referenced — “Call me Bob” — there’s a fish who should be caught. There are relationships that pulse and jangle, bob as though on the water.

I’ve never read the word Bob so many times, and not got offended. It’s a peaceful name to me now.

There’s a scene in Great Expectations where Pip discovers Joe can’t read. That, while Joe often sits by the fire with a book, he is merely finding the letters of his own name. If there is a Bob out there, with a similar condition, this book is assuredly for him.

But there is a greater quality to this work than this. A repetition fantastic. A rose is a rose is a rose. A fish is a fish is a fish.

Markus’ story telling is elegantly out of focus. The aperture of his imagination is wide. The characters in the scene are seen, but all else on the perimeter is blur. This is unique for a story that takes place outside.

The river is a river. It’s not a ribbon of wet green slung between to hills as though a length of rope dangling from the branches of a tree.

The fish is a fish. It is not a shiny fleck of flesh beneath the surface of the choppy water, smiling mildly with the flash of sun.

Or some shit.

There is an agenda: to catch a fish.

There is a complication beyond that: families buckle beneath the strain of addiction to river.

After that, there are lovely muted hues. Blues and greens, yet somehow piquant with emotion.

The story stretches on beyond the 133 pages. The conclusion is in absentia.

What is it then?

A fish tale, where the fish is not gutted.

A story about two men on one river hunting to find a thing they know they’d only throw back.

So what are the 133 pages: a fish on a boat, naked in the absence of water, its gills fumbling for something to breathe, its eyes wild with fear.

But nothing is greater than almost dying. And while Markus might not produce a carcass with this thin novel — or a trophy well mounted — he allows us to catch and release the moments in our own way. He gives us a story to hold.

Pamela Ryder's A Tendency to Be Gone

“I had him once to hold. I have a stone to hold. From this day forward. We go forward, we watch the road, we listen for the hills. I listen to the stone: there is no singing. Once there was singing; we were singing. We were kneeling and we sang the words we knew. There was a ringing bell, fingered rings, him never to be slipping through my fingers, my folded hands. There was a hymn, a hollow sound. There was a joyful noise. There was a moon-white paper marked with my name, his name. The paper was unfolded, unfrayed. We were not afraid. We would take a chance. We would last. We would stay awake, see signs.”

The words move you and the stories carry you away. That’s what they’re for, to take you somewhere else, maybe somewhere new, whether it be down the road or a thousand years ago. Stories create new worlds or they make our world new, imbued with magic, with wonder.

My mother asked me for the hundredth time in the almost month since I’ve been back what I want to do, what interests me. I told her, Nothing matters so much as stories.

“My father is out on the curb, picking through the throwaways. He is what I have folded. He is holding a shirt to his shirtlessness. He is showing me what to save by taking a stitch in time.”

Pamela Ryder’s A Tendency to be Gone offers stories that matter, the kind that transport you, that move you, emotionally, geographically, temporally. No two stories are the same in terms of style or even content — from lyrical to declarative to almost Victorian, she builds reality around us. And though the collection is diverse, it is cohesive.

The title sticks in my head and it’s very appropriate for the collection. There is a strong sense of things past, of something gone, of leaving, as well as a greater force at work, whether it be god or devils or the enormity of nature, the insistence of Time. Within these she weaves lives, sometimes broken, other times breaking, but always searching. For what?

Ritual and repetition, signs, significance of any kind: these are people possessed. They need something, anything, and maybe they don’t know what it is. Maybe they never knew or will never know. Maybe they had it and can only hope it will come again. The enormity of their surroundings swallows them as the prose hits all senses and we fall into it, into these worlds, these places, completely consumed by a collapsing house, the neverending wilderness, the countless rocks and hills.

“She takes me under. Pushes me into the place she wants my mouth. She wants me drinking from the river. She wants me head-down in the water, mouth to stone and split-legged in the dark. She finds the pebble of me, the slippery banks of me where I am winged and unescaping. Where I am sliding stream-bottom stones, stirred on by the scent of something wounded. I am face down and willing. I am unfolding, unstruggling, undone.”

Her ability to describe settings, to allow that setting to seamlessly become a body, a human body, to be sexy and profound at the same time continually impresses me. I read the collection again this last weekend, and it’s better than the first time — richer, fuller. The stories opened up to me in new ways, differently than the first read where I was mostly just riding the prose, enjoying its sound, its texture. But this time, this time the stories are more than just beautiful: they’re real and they matter.

“I will have a bed. I will make an unmade bed of stone. I will pretend a pillow for my head. I will pretend the stones will keep me safe and where I am: face down to the rock, powdered with the ashes where the rock was burning.”