Experiment #8 was heavier lifting at the time, what with needing to find the Martone texts in the special coursepack in the English Dept. office, so I'm glad it worked out to meet Michael in person at the 2013 Writers at Work conference and to see him again there this year. He's very entertaining, and the lifting is light indeed when you get to listen to him read or talk. He's likely to make you laugh. Pretty hard.
I want to note that I saw Michael Martone and Melanie Rae Thon in conversation during a break in this year's conference at least once, and I realized the situation: both of their names end with the syllable "tone." So, of course. Not that many names do, after all.
Michael Martone, University of Alabama
Website: http://english.ua.edu/user/84*
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_A._Martone (not the hockey player)
Workshop title: The Four C’s: Cut, Compress, Context and Collage
*a website that appears to contain an actual bio rather than a fictional "contributor's note," however yesterday the site was down and who knows about today?
June 4, Opening Faculty Panel: Why are we writing?
Michael got the conversation going with a reference to William Stafford, who said if you can't write, "lower your standards." Writing is not the same thing as writing in a publishing-oriented way. In fact, Michael deplores the displacement of our sense of the pure value of text. In schools now, children receive coupons for pizza as a reward for reading a book. Not great, Michael says. It used to be that "reading was the pizza."
Michael brought up the "everybody writes" vs. "special people write" divide exemplified by Jack London on the one hand and Henry James and Edith Wharton on the other. He cited critic Frank Norris' dismissal of the "tragedy of the broken teacup" in works such as those of James and Wharton. I located a discussion of this idea in Michael Martone's 2005 book, Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art. I won't pretend to have read the full discussion there, but I share the title because it's emblematic of the sort of thinking Michael does on a rigorous and regular basis: What can be reversed and thought about completely differently?
The idea of publishing is in flux, Michael says. The old "publication equals validation" equation is fading. Now the "means of production" are in the hands of the writers. The concept of vanity publishing is not the same as self-publishing. Roles are intermixing--writer, editor, publisher--cultural "gate-keeping" is less a power of the publishing industry.
The panel ended with comments about genre specialization being too extreme (Robin Hemley) and Ellen Bass' comment that you're a writer if you're writing and not if you're not. Michael gave a push for innovation: look for a new way everyday; the greater culture expects progression.
What I learned about Michael's workshop from my "spies"
As with the fiction workshop, my infiltration of the multi-genre workshop was somewhat desultory. I knew from friends on the inside that things were interesting and fun, but exactly what they were up to, I can't say for sure.
One day at lunch, Chelsea Blackman walked through the dining room with a handful of paint samples, four colors on a strip of paper. She was distributing them for an exercise in the Martone workshop. “I’ll take one!” I said, greedily. I love colors, and paint swatches are a great place to look for color names. So is the Wikipedia List of colors (although it’s alphabetical, not by actual color, which can be tedious) and the Wikipedia List of Crayola crayon colors (which is a trip back into deep memory).
What I forgot to do was ask about the exact assignment. I expect Michael had something specific and perhaps counterintuitive in mind. Nonetheless, I’ve done the exercise. I did it this way: use all four color names in a text. What I enjoy about this sort of prompt is the way it challenges me to imagine things I've never seen before and to play them out for a little while. Here's my text.
Luncheon
A silver half dollar, soldered on the underside to an unseen ring, gleamed from its perch atop the rolled cloth napkin, next to a setting of silver salad fork, fork, empty white plate with dimpled rim, knife, and soup spoon. A Kennedy profile, staring off to the left: round and round the table, the Kennedy napkin rings stared.
The napkin, sharply pointed top and bottom, slid out from the ring and opened as a white diamond, corners folded toward the middle like envelope flaps. A veritable lap robe, so large and crisp and white.
Tall cylindrical glasses, filled moments ago with water over perfectly square cubes of ice, sweated in a ring at the interior of the table, just inches from a silver platter beneath the central arrangement of lilies. Light from the window bounced off the platter, pierced the glass, and projected a peculiar illusion: iced cube silver.
Knees and thighs brushed against chantilly lace. Ice rattled in glass. John F. Kennedies rolled sideward. Crisp damask sails snapped open and disappeared. Lilies dropped crumbly dark pollen. Teeth thudded on silverware. Forks clanked against porcelain. Breadcrumbs lodged in crochet. Ice vanished. Coffee spoons dripped. Napkins fell like white mountain ranges when knees pulled back and away from lace.
(Now I wonder if I ought to have included or not included a broken teacup...)
June 6, Reading by Michael Martone on Friday night
I spent Michael's reading being a pleasing mixture of baffled and entertained--so much so that my notes are spare. He gets you thinking, for example about "the four nows." That's the now of the story, the now of writing, the now of reading, and the now of talking about the above. Concepts like "now" find themselves on shifting ground. Michael led off the reading with a few "Contributor's Notes," familiar from his reading last year and fun to hear again. He's created a small genre: false or perhaps semi-true biographies that follow the form of the literary bio. When asked for an "actual" contributor's note for the real back section of a book, he tends to send another of this genre instead.
Michael read from a series of 25-word memos, a form that derives at least half its power from the titles (which are exempt from the word limit and tend to be hilarious). No notes; I was laughing.
Ditto for whatever he read called "Amish in Space"--a collage piece that falls under "Indiana Science Fiction" and puts Amish space travelers in no gravity with livestock.
The Martone book I purchased at the conference is The Blue Guide to Indiana. I believe he read from it (about the Bob Ross Museum) because my notes indicate that and I've heard Michael read that bit before, but I have a blank spot in my memory from this particular evening--could I have been so completely entertained as to not remember it? (So it goes). The Blue Guide is a "fake" travel guide. I haven't read it the full book yet, so I'll just give you Melanie Rae Thon's blurb from the back jacket: "Michael Martone is a man with a mission, a fabulous inventor of history and memory, landscape and people. His quirky, magical tours hurl the reader across the borders between fact and fiction into a country of the mind where what we desire and fear fills our senses. Take the tops of your convertibles and fly! Trust The Blue Guide to Indiana to point you to some of the most delightful places on the planet."
Michael concluded his reading with something quite new: Four for a Quarter (as in the old-style photo booth where the camera took four separate shots in rapid succession). He called it fictions of things in fours. The piece he read is called "Four in Hand" and talks about knots in neckties: Windsor, Bow, Half-Windsor, and Four in Hand. The piece is very touching--how he knotted ties over the years for his father, who died earlier this year. Michael told me my own reading the evening before about my son's death had given him a nudge to present this work.
More on this topic, Michael has just had a photograph called "Curtains: My Father Dying, April 8, 2014" published by Ascent magazine, complete with a contributor's note.
June 8, Closing faculty panel: How we got here and where do we go from here?
Michael presented collage, one of the topics addressed in his workshop, near the opening of the panel discussion. It's about juxtaposition and recontextualization. Found objects, natural collaging, randomness, fragments, association, improvisation. It favors velocity (not perfection). One of my favorite quotes of the conference: "Quantity not quality." To underscore the point, Michael cited Joseph Stalin's position on military tanks: "quantity has a quality all its own." Michael advised us to think of the work as expansive. "Write this and move on."
Another favorite one-liner I've already shared with writer friends: "Remember, a page a day is a book a year."
When asked about stepping out of genre, Michael said the human impulse is to order and sort. He encouraged us to confuse and rearrange. Rather than accepting categories like "good" and "bad," he said we need to "worry the categories." He stressed, as he had in the opening panel, to find in writing a different value than commodity.
I now see that my notes do not contain a "favorite exercise" from Michael Martone. Is this another black hole in my note-taking, or have we in fact been short changed here? Some category worrying going on right now...
I can report that I applied learnings from Michael almost immediately (in addition to the stolen paint chip). The day after the conference ended, my last day on US soil for an undetermined period of time, I finally made it to Nordstrom Rack, where I tried on some summer dresses. In the end, I couldn't make up my mind. So, I bought three. That's what you meant, Michael, about quantity and tanks, right?
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