There is no second chance for making a first impression. Within a few seconds, it is decided whether a contact with a certain person intensifies or whether is stays superficial - and in many cases forever. Good contacts bring people in their personal, social and professional context further. Those who do not manage to win sympathy, benevolence, and respect from their fellow human beings, fight a losing battle. This book presents the most important factors of success that determine whether ...

Many tutorials and online courses transfer knowledge on interesting and important topics. Often the creators are indeed experts in their field but have no idea of how knowledge is transferred properly, and which aspects need to be considered when creating good online media. The result is often devastating. Bounce rates of up to 90% are the norm on many courses. Actual interesting content is not perceived because the form of presentation puts prospects to flight. In this book the experience...

A luminous and heartfelt collection of mourning poetry.Over the course of two decades and six books, Peter Markus has been making fiction out of a lexicon shaped by the words brother and fish and mud. In an essay on Markus's work, Brian Evenson writes, "If it's not clear by now, Markus's use of English is quite unique. It is instead a sort of ritual speech, an almost religious invocation in which words themselves, through repetition, acq...

From one of Michigan’s foremost writers comes a powerful, soulful meditation on grief, loss, the natural world, and the relationship between humans and everything around usIn Peter Markus’s new collection of poems, the loss of the father has become the river that shapes the landscape that the speaker behind these poems is looking to navigate and explore. He finds fellowship and solace in the subject that drives many of these poems: birds, fish, and the ever-present...

Twenty-three writers reflect on their experiences working with public school students as part of Detroit's innovative InsideOut Literary Arts Project.The InsideOut Literary Arts Project (iO) began in 1995 in five Detroit high schools, with weekly classroom visits by a writer-in-residence, the publication of a literary journal for each school, and the mission of encouraging students to use poetry to "think broadly, create bravely, and share their voices with the wid...

“Markus has a remarkable ability to strip life down to its basics, to the point where the metaphors we manufacture as the looking-glass for our existence end up standing in for existence itself. Fish, mud, night and river come to stand in place of family connections as fathers and sons, by giving themselves to fishing give themselves over to a lone search and to loss.”—Brian Evenson, author of The Open CurtainPeter Markus has published three story collecti...

The world of the child is a world where things aren't what they always seem to be. In The Fish and the Not Fish, Peter Markus brings us back inside that not-so-simple space and its slippery way of seeing and saying, a place that is primal and mythic in its re-making.

Peter Markus makes myth out of mud, a river, fish. By parceling his obsessions so obsessively, he creates a never-before-seen form of mud, a new species of fish, a river that flows backwards to its source: all of this rendered in a language that is uniquely and privately his own.

20 years experience as a teaching artist in the Detroit Public SchoolsEssays in the book serialized in Teachers & Writers Magazine, Michigan Alumnus Magazine, the Detroit Free PressSenior editor for Detroit nonprofit InsideOut Literary Arts ProjectAuthor of six critically acclaimed books including The Fish and the Not Fish and We Make MudPrevious novel awarded a Michigan Notable Book AwardReceived a 2015 Teaching Excellence...

The National Book Award finalist. " Limón's poems are like fires: charring the page, but leaving a smoke that remains past the close of the book." — The MillionsBright Dead Things examines the chaos that is life, the dangerous thrill of living in a world you know you have to leave one day, and the search to find something that is ultimately "disorderly, and marvelous, and ours."A book of bravado and introsp...

Dear Readers,An engaging tale about friends preparing for Winter.Every Autumn, Owle flies up the Shivery Peaks,to see the depth of Winter coming.Will it be a mild, run around winter, or a chill-the-bone winter.Already, many sniffing noses have detected a deep-snow winter,while other noses are certain it will be mild.So, some are busier than others.A soothing, amusing story. Age 5 and up.

A lovesick clown tries to explain his part in an unlikely love triangle, but is the tightrope walker of his dreams even listening? In a world where death-defying feats happen every night, the biggest dangers may be those caused by a broken heart. Equal parts slapstick and unrequited love, this story was selected by Richard Russo for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2010.