How to disable all Markdown processing except newlines?

Hello, Gravitons :)

I'm using my Grav Quark-theme blog to publish some of my poems and short stories. Markdown messes things up when I have dialogs with dashes etc. symbols that have special treatment in Markdown.

I tried to turn Markdown off for those blog items, but then it removes all the newlines and I would have to use HTML br to get them back. Currently, I have the global setting auto_line_breaks = true and it works really well to have proper newlines for my texts.

I really don't want to adjust my stories and poems to Markdown syntax, it would be a bit too much work.

Is there any way to configure Markdown to ignore everything except newlines? I would also appreciate coding-related advice, I'm not afraid of doing some PHP/yaml/twig stuff if needed.

I believe you're using a minus sign (-) and not the actual dash (–), correct?

Yes, some of my texts have minus signs. It depends on inspiration, I guess - sometimes I write things in Word (which tends to replace minus with dash) and sometimes in any text editor I have available.