When walking into Debra Marquart’s office, the first thing you notice is the comfortable furniture, the square area rug and shelf upon shelf of neatly stacked books.

Only one book, however, stands out — a dictionary lying in arms’ reach just above the computer. This dictionary defines what Marquart is about — words.

Poet, lyricist and vocalist Marquart, along with her husband Peter Manesis (guitar) and Tony Stevens (percussion), fuse together to form The Bone People — a project that is attempting to combine the art of music with the art of spoken word.

“We’re an unusual project,” Marquart said, adding that she considers The Bone People a project, not a band, because projects take breaks and bands break up.

“We don’t really fit into traditional rock and don’t really fit into acoustic,” she continued. “In everything we’re doing, we’re trying to challenge the boundaries between music and poetry, and we’re trying to challenge the boundary between rock and acoustic music.

“And in my performances I try to challenge the boundary between talking and singing,” Marquart added. “We’re always doing that. And it makes performance spaces more difficult.”

Challenging the fine line between talking and singing is so complex that The Bone People had to make two separate CDs to be able to demonstrate what its music truly encompasses.

“Orange Parade” (a CD that focuses on the acoustic aspects of The Bone People) and “A Regular Dervish” (a CD that features rhythmic poetry) were released last April. Both CDs detail the different aspects of The Bone People’s music and, at the same time, try to fuse these aspects together.

“We originally went into the studios to record ‘Orange Parade,'” Marquart said. “We were kind of lucky because the engineer in the studio was interested in the spoken word stuff, and he knew we had this other side. He said, ‘Why don’t you guys play one of those jazz songs?’ We said, ‘OK, we’ll play one.'”

In the middle of recording “Orange Parade,” the project began to lay down tracks of riffed poetry and thought the idea and sound were interesting.

With a new and intriguing idea of recording poetry, The Bone People decided to make a cassette of the spoken word tracks.

But in the end, this idea led to a second CD and a fusion between the different sounds The Bone People produce.

“I don’t think you can define what we do,” Marquart said. “We have this acoustic alternative rock on “Orange Parade,” and we have this jazz poetry stuff on the other side and what we’re working towards — we’re trying to pull those sounds together and the outcome is going to be something very acoustic rock with some spoken word in it.”

The goal of fusing alternative rock and jazz poetry has caused a confusing stir when trying to label the sound of The Bone People. The members have experimented in the use of adjectives to describe their sound — “acoustic fusion,” “jazz, poetry, rhythm and blues,” and “acoustic fusion, unplugged rhythm and blues.”

But the perfect description remains hidden within the alphabet.

“It’s a problem,” Marquart said. “Someone came out to see us once because [he] thought we were playing jazz fusion because it said acoustic fusion [on the poster], but the whole idea of fusion was that we were trying to take lyricism, rock and acoustic and fusing them — but someone took us very seriously and thought we were jazz.”

Although The Bone People enjoyed the experience of recording two CDs, the group also found it exhausting.

Each member has a full-time job — Marquart is an English professor at Iowa State, Manesis works at Mary Greeley hospital and Stevens is working towards his Ph.D. in education.

The strain of each member’s full-time work and driving to the recording studio in Chicago almost every weekend became harrowing.

“We came out of that completely exhausted,” Marquart said. “And when you’re done recording, you have to promote the CDs, and after you promote it, you have to go play.

“Another hard thing is to keep generating new material, to be fresh, to be original, especially in a town like Ames,” she added. “You have a core of fans that are dedicated to coming out and you want to keep it interesting and surprising them.”

Heavy metal

Marquart has had plenty of experience in the exhausting lifestyle of being a musician. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, before she become a poet and a professor, Marquart was a singer in a rock-and-roll band.

Traveling for seven years throughout the United States and Canada and performing a variety of music including heavy metal and folk, Marquart gained first-hand experience in the rewarding and frustrating music career. These experiences helped her grow and make the transition into the person she is now.

“I think it’s a pretty natural transition [from heavy metal to The Bone People] because I was really trained as a classical singer,” Marquart said. “All the way through college I was trained as a classical singer. In the ’60s, when I was a pre-teen and a teen-ager, I was really interested in folk music, and so I have that stretch from classical music to folk music.

“I really loved rock-and-roll and it was really out in the ’60s and ’70s,” she added. “I’ve always had eclectic tastes.”

But for an outsider to understand the transition, Marquart’s music history needs to be traced. Breaking into her first band in the late ’70s was no easy task. Marquart attempted to plunge into rock-and-roll and heavy metal during a time when competition was tough, especially if you were a woman.

“Back then it wasn’t very possible for a female to sing in a rock- and-roll band,” Marquart said. “And even when I did break into a rock band, it was tough to survive.

“But I really loved heavy metal,” she continued. “It is a supreme challenge to sing rock and heavy metal. Heavy metal is sheer volume and you have to compete with it. Just a drummer by himself or herself is playing at 110 decibels, and I used to play with these guitar players who had their amplifiers double stacked, and you had to try to get your voice over that.”

Sound was one of the biggest changes Marquart had to adjust to when she and Manesis began The Bone People in 1992.

“When we started The Bone People it was just me and Pete, and all of the sudden you realized you have to sing with just the guitar,” Marquart said. “You realize what you sacrifice is the drama of it all. [In heavy metal there are] five or six people all making sounds and the intercity of it all.

“We want the excitement and energy of a lot of people and the intricacy of that sound but want to do it acoustically,” she added.

Competing with the immense sound of a heavy metal band was not what forced Marquart to make her final transition from rock to jazz poetry. It took a stronger force, one that would literally force her to stop her rock career — fire.

“I was in this band, and we lost all of our equipment in a fire,” Marquart said. The equipment wasn’t insured and $60,000 of equipment was lost.

“I thought I was a person that was going to have everything go well for them through hard work and consciousness, but then the fire happened and I realized that you don’t necessarily have control over your life,” she said. “It felt like I had fallen into a deep well and there was no way out of it. We had no insurance. That was our livelihood, and we were dependent upon that livelihood.”

She continued, “You know, most people look at bands and say ‘what a fun thing to do,’ but what they don’t realize is how much money it takes to run the band, to get equipment, how much time it takes to rehearse and write songs and how exhausting the lifestyle is.

“And so that [the fire] kind of marked a transition with me, and that’s when I started writing,” she said.

Marquart began to write poetry and has since had one book published, “Everything’s a Verb,” which is easily a written accompaniment to “A Regular Dervish.” Many of the poems in the book have been compiled and set to music for the CD.

Marquart has another book waiting to be published. “Playing for the Door” is a collection of short fiction stores about road musicians.

Inspiration for Marquart’s work doesn’t necessarily come from a specific place. Small pieces of information or fragments of overheard conversations spark her imagination.

“A lot of them [song ideas] are picked out of the air, and a lot of them are from things that come out of the news,” Marquart said. “It’s so hard to say where [inspiration] comes from.

“You go to a dinner party and you hear someone say something and it sticks with you because you know there is something else with it. Then the only way you can process it is through art.”

Fusing together

The Bone People formed in 1992 when Marquart and Manesis discovered that their unique talents complimented each other well. Stevens wasn’t added to the project until 1993.

Although Marquart doesn’t remember exactly how Stevens became a part of The Bone People, she is quick to discuss what he brought to it. His immense knowledge of percussion added an underlying layer of intricate sound.

“He is responsible for percussion,” Marquart said. “But he also brought voices. The hand drums he plays have pitches, and so when he decides to play something with a song we’ve written, he chooses something with the right tone.

“You think of drums as just ‘bang, bang, bang, bang’ but it’s really not,” she continued. “It has a musical tone to it. It has pitch, and it’s really hard to figure out how to make the different pitches with more traditional music. And that’s really what he’s good at.”

Right now, the members of The Bone People seem comfortable where they’re at and don’t seem interested in heavily pursuing a touring career. They all remember what it is like to be a road musician — the time and the energy it takes to tour isn’t worth sacrificing anymore.

For now, The Bone People are concentrating on making new music and the rewards it brings.

“There’s some tangible reward, but it’s not some reward you get from hearing audiences clap,” Marquart said. “It’s the kind of reward that sometime during the performance there was a really good note or a really good passage or you had done something better than you had done before. That’s the reward.

“In some cultures singers and musicians are the most honored and revered members of society,” she continued. “It’s not so much that way in our society, except for celebrities. I think the biggest reward is being able to sing. Singing is an unusual activity.”

Also, by concentrating more on music and not on touring, the negative connotations of being in a band are pushed to the back of each member’s mind.

“There are times at two in the morning when we are loading the equipment into the van, and I’m wondering what I’m doing here,” Marquart said. “It’s like moving your apartment every time you play. You have to set it up and tear it all down and have to travel. And you don’t get paid very much. I’d say that’s the downfall of it.”

Life on the road is easy for Marquart to summarize: “Music is just made by the goodwill of foolish people. Dreamers. That’s really what musicians are.”