Martone’s giddy exploration

Michael Martone is an Indiana original. Born and raised in Fort Wayne, Martone is the author of five books of short fiction, including Alive and Dead in Indiana, Fort Wayne is Seventh on Hitler’s List and Pensees: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle. Two new books by Martone have recently been published, Unconventions: Writings on Writing (University of Georgia Press) and Michael Martone By Michael Martone (Fiction Collective2), which the publisher says “continues the author’s giddy exploration of the parts of books nobody ever reads.”

Martone currently teaches writing at the University of Alabama. NUVO recently spoke by phone with Martone, who was visiting his family in Fort Wayne, where, he said, he was driving his mom’s car and purchasing local postcards. What follows is a series of his observations.

• I think the basic myth of the Midwest is you have to get out of it.

• Bill Blass, the fashion designer, was from Fort Wayne. He went to New York and never again so much as mentioned that he was from Fort Wayne. We could never get him back to be in a parade.

• The bigger culture is sort of ambivalent about poetry and fiction, but they don’t want to get rid of it yet. So where do you store it? You store it in universities.

• I was actually in a poetry outbreak down in Alabama when Dale Earnhardt died. I was standing in the office in the English Department of the University of Alabama when the phone rang. The secretary picked up and said, “Here’s one of them now.” She gave me the phone and it was the Birmingham News. A reporter said, “We are getting a ton of poems from people about the death of Dale Earnhardt. What’s up with that?”

• The culture knows it doesn’t need epic poetry. No one does it, no one’s interested in it. But lyric poetry, the short story, the essay — those things the culture may need and so the university is a very efficient place to store them. We’re keeping this stuff alive in case it really is needed.

• In any of the other arts, if you’re playing the violin or learning how to dance, the technique of it is obvious. But the violin of writing is language and the language that I use as a writer, hence a specialist in language, is no different from my 2-year-old’s grammar.

• People will easily pay $17 for a CD in a way they will think once, twice, three times before they’ll pay that much for a book.

• I’ve been working 25 years as a writer, had a lot of books published and I usually sell about 4,000 or 5,000 copies of a book. I can count on my two hands the number of times I’ve heard from a reader. That’s why I like to give readings.