Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana

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Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana

by Michael Martone

In Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana, Michael Martone places steady fingers on the arrhythmic pulse of the Flyover as he conjures Winesburg, Indiana, a fictional town and all of its inhabitants’ lyric philosophies, tales of the mundane, and the sensation of being “lost” in the heart of the heart of the country. But here, in over one-hundred and thirty short fictions,  even as there is much sadness, the citizens continue to tinker and create, marvel and wonder in the midst of ruin and rust. These stories may capture lives of quiet desperation, but in so doing, they create a kind of hobbled poetry in the spontaneous sketches of the ordinary made extraordinary, the regular irregularities, the familiar knocked off-balance with a glancing blow. From the overly overworked City Manager, to Margaret Wigg’s obsessively collected collection of library stamps, to Blanche’s air-filled aluminum ice cube tray, the town is a community of everyday odd-balls rife with isolation and idiosyncrasy. They are people trying to get by; that question loss as well as passion, devotedness, childhood wonder, and kinship in their observations and daily routines. With undeniable humor, intelligent quirk, and earnest longing for a pastoral passing into the annals of deep Midwestern time, Michael Martone crafts an unforgettable panoply of characters whose perspectives invite us to alternatively interpret our own commonplaces.

An excerpt from Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana

My Grandfather’s Riddle

My grandfather’s riddle appeared again out in the garden once the snow melted. There it was—a lozenge of a warped wooden moon mired in the mud. I had forgotten it was there, that it has always been there. I bet its screen is all rusted out. Sifting, he spent hours back there sifting that rough dirt fill. Winesburg is smack dab in the middle of a glacial plain, and the dirt that granddad riddled was dirt that had been snowplowed to Indiana from regions half a world away. The glaciers themselves are a kind of sieve, sorting boulders from rocks, sanding them all into pea pebbles that remain in the creases of the rusted old riddle, a kind of fruit or fruit’s stone. My grandfather would serve up the leavings to me in the riddle, telling me where they came from, that world away, how the grit wound up at our feet. After all the sifting, they would wind up, a random wreck, sprayed on my dresser top, a dresser I need to re-stain, that was my grandfather’s and that has come down to me here on this fine fine earth.

-originally published in Five Points as part of “Fifteen Winesburg, Indiana Stories”, the winner of the Paul Bowles Prize

PRAISE FOR PLAIN AIR

By the end of this collection, you’ve been to Winesburg, Indiana. You can recall its businesses and its citizens and whatever it is that is each person’s personal business—what makes them tick, individually—what makes them get up in the morning to try, again, to live with themselves and with each other—what makes the many of them so very individual in these vivid and intricate snapshots of their souls.

Michael Martone is our curator of community, our impresario of Americana, our chandler of the national flame.  Plain Air is a wonder.  It offers history, wit, and wistfulness all at once—a portrait of a small town made whole by its citizens’ laughters and loves.

Plain Air comprises a collage of municipal sadnesses—a poverty of tourists, an amalgam of quiet losses, a blank billboard, an abandoned floss factory, a low-grade apprehension in the face of something already passed, an inventory of forlorn hearts, a docufiction about the exceptional mundane. His Winesburg, Indiana, metaphorizes Flyover as an existential condition with innovative lyricism, meticulous intelligence, and an always-arched eyebrow.

Plain Air puns and pranks, twists and turns with every new sketch on every page. A play on Sherwood Anderson’s classic collection, Martone takes us to Winesburg, Indiana, a post-industrial town with its dying eraser factory, and a cast of characters more alive in their passions, obsessions, and idiosyncrasies than any in contemporary fiction. What a great read. I laughed, cried, and was moved by the characters’ desire to finally take their place in the intricate web of Winesburg, all the way to their vanishing points in the mural on the post office wall.

Michael Martone’s Plain Air sketches, like prose poems, erupt sharp with insight . . . They’re really weird and profound. What more could you want?

Misfits rejoice! Michael Martone’s Plain Air gives voice, vision, and velocity to the ordinary and quiet lives of people overlooked, undervalued, and sometimes erased. Each sketch of humanity draws a reader in to the heart of the matter–a curation of basic being. I laughed, I cried, I held my breath, I felt at home. What beautiful little heart bomblettes.

Martone in the News

Book Details

Title: Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana

Author: Michael Martone

Publication Date: September 6, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-936097-42-5

Paperback

$16.95

Dist. by Publishers Group West
www.pgw.com, 800-788-2123

Available at your favorite local bookstore, on bookshop.org

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