Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana

Coming September 6, 2022!!

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.

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

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Martone’s recent books are The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone, The Moon Over Wapakoneta; Brooding. His book Michael Martone is a memoir in contributor’s notes. The University of Georgia Press published his book of essays, The Flatness and Other Landscapes, winner of the AWP Award for Nonfiction, in 2000. With Lex Williford, he edited The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction and The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction.  Martone is the author of eight other books of short fiction. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, Story, Antaeus, North American Review, Benzene, Epoch, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, Third Coast, Shenandoah, Bomb, Story Quarterly, American Short Fiction and other magazines.

Martone was born and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  He attended Butler University and graduated from Indiana University.  He holds the MA from The Writing Seminars of The Johns Hopkins University.

Martone has won two Fellowships from the NEA and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation.  His stories have won awards in the Italian Americana fiction contest, the Florida Review Short Story Contest, the Story magazine Short, Short Story Contest, the Margaret Jones Fiction Prize of Black Ice Magazine, and the first World’s Best Short, Short Story Contest.  His stories and essays have appeared and been cited in the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Stories and The Best American Essays anthologies. In 2013 he received the national Indiana Authors Award, and in 2016, the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contribution to Midwestern Literature.

Michael Martone has been a faculty member of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1988.  He has taught at Iowa State University, Harvard University, and Syracuse University. In 2021, he retired as a Professor at the University of Alabama where he had been teaching since 1996.

PRAISE FOR PLAIN AIR

Martone in the News

• Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana reviewed by Dontana McPherson-Joseph in Foreword Reviews
• Book Launch hosted by Ernest & Hadley Booksellers in Tuscaloosa, Alabama (September 6, 2022)
• Reading and signing with Michael Mejia at Weller Book Works in Salt Lake City, Utah (September 8, 2022)
• Events with the Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl (September 10, 2022)
• “My Grandfather’s Riddle” was selected as a Best Small Fiction for 2023!