Morton Marcus writes: “For years I thought free verse was the ultimate freedom. But when I gave up the line, I experienced new ways of seeing and saying... I found that when I abandoned the line, the chains fell away from my imagination, and that has been my greatest discovery in writing the prose poem.” Unlike Morton Marcus, this Markus was never drawn to any notion of the line (the sentence itself seemed complicated and mysterious enough). What stunted my imagination, before I came to the writing of the very short pieces of prose that make up the bulk of the writing that I do, was a little thing we call story. Back when I was writing story-stories, I was writing stories that anybody could’ve written. In other words, these stories, these well-crafted pieces of crap, lacked any signature of singularity or fingerprint belonging to me. In the fiction writing workshops that I took, both at the graduate and undergraduate level, all we ever really talked about were the conventions of story, story, story. Plot, plot, character, credibility, and other conventional mistruths. What carried the story---the words, the sentences---hardly ever entered into the discussion. It wasn’t until some years later that I turned my back on writing story-stories and tuned in my ears and my eyes’ attentions to the making and the musicalities of the sentence. Once I let go of the burden of story-story-telling, I was able to let the sentence itself lead me into a place of both mystery and discovery. It was through the porthole of the sentence itself that I entered into that sublime space that is pulsating underneath the page. It was here that I found the work, the words, the sentences, and yes, the stories, that only I, I believe, could write.
 
Bio:

Peter Markus is the author of three books of short-fiction, Good, Brother; The Moon is a Lighthouse; and The Singing Fish. His stories and poems have appeared in such literary magazines as Black Warrior Review, Quarterly West, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, New Orleans Review, Third Coast, Post Road, 3rd Bed, Seattle Review, The Prose Poem, The American Journal of Print, Willow Springs, Another Chicago Magazine, Phoebe, as well as online at 5_Trope, failbetter, taint, elimae, Pindeldyboz, La Petite Zine, Eyeshot, DIAGRAM, and Eleven Bulls. His work has also appeared in numerous anthologies including New Sudden Fiction (Norton) and Fiction Gallery (Bloomsbury USA). He has taught at the Interlochen Center for the Arts. Peter holds a B.A. from the University of Michigan and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University.