The unit in front of me is a freshly detailed Ford Mustang convertible transporting (the hand-painted sign reads) Little Miss Cutie Pie of Western Alabama. Behind me is another gleaming convertible, a pastel Caddy this time, where, in its backseat, the reigning Miss Junior Petite Darling of Tuscaloosa County purposely practices her waving. I constitute a unit of one, on foot, standing in the middle of the street between the idling cars packed with beauty contest princesses, cooling my heels in the staging area, waiting for the annual Labor Day parade to begin.

Some explanation is in order. Yes there...

For a while there, I lived in Syracuse, New York, in the Westcott neighborhood not far from the university and a few blocks from the house that had been built and then inhabited by the designer and philosopher of the Arts and Crafts movement, Gustav Stickley. The distinctive furniture Stickley designed over a century ago is still produced in the same manner in factories around Syracuse. You perhaps know it as Mission Oak (“Mission” for the founder’s belief in the mission of his designs as well as the influence of hand-hewn, honest pieces found in Spanish missions). It is sturdy...

I have my students write bad stories. It is, of course, very hard to do, perhaps even more difficult than writing (as they assume they are doing most of the time) good stories. That is to say, it goes without saying that a workshop is about producing a good story. Assigning the task of creating a bad story actually makes the transparency of the default assignment (you are to write a good story) readily apparent. To ask for the bad in a workshop is a way to confront what is meant by the good. And shouldn’t it be easier to...

“I don’t know, what do you want to do?” So begins an amazing scene recorded in The Forest People, an anthropological record of African forest pygmies Colin Turnbull lived with for several years. These forest people, as you might guess, were hunter-gatherers living in primeval jungle. Groups such as these also traded with people of a nearby agricultural settlement on the forest’s edge, their connection with the larger world. On what was a long pygmy weekend, Turnbull is sitting around with his informants as they discuss the impending leisure time.

“I don’t know, what do you want to do?”

“Don’t...

I was standing in line waiting to use an outdoor ATM built into the wall of the Schine, the student activity center at Syracuse University, where I used to teach. Waiting behind me was a colleague, a poet, from the creative writing program, and I turned to talk with him. It was spring, a truly lovely and rare couple of minutes in the yearlong perpetual gloom that the lake effect generates. So there I was. And there was sunlight, a bit of warmth, maybe even some birds chirping. And I turn to remark upon this fact to my colleague standing...

What brings us to Baltimore? We can thank a forward-looking piece of legislation at the end of a war, the GI Bill, as the material impetus for moving this art of writing into the university — for our university affiliation, the professionalization of our activity, the tribal organization of our guild, the expected enaction of academic ritual as expressed by conventions. Voilà: Baltimore. The story of the literary artist and art and its now sixty-year integration with an institution founded in the Middle Ages would be an interesting story if I had time or if that were the task. Instead, consider...

For the last few years I have been writing fictions that attempt to pass as nonfictions. I recently published a book called The Blue Guide To Indiana, which is a fake travel guide. Passages from the book have been published in Indiana newspapers as actual reporting, feature articles on what to do this weekend or suggestions for family vacations. These pieces are published without any indication that they are made up (bogus history, invented places, false directions, etc.) and I have attempted, with all my skill, to make the particulars seem plausible. The audience, then, is a general newspaper-reading one...

A few years ago I learned that the New Yorker was traded publicly over the counter. I bought a few shares. And over the years, whenever I had a little extra money, I’d buy a few more. All that time I was sending my stories to the same magazine, but the magazine wasn’t buying.

My motivations for investing in the magazine weren’t very subtle. I often think that the only story is the revenge story, and this was a kind of revenge. During my brief time working as a writer, a time marked by the disappearance of general interest magazines,...

Where are you when you are on hold? And when you finally get through to that 800 operator, where do the two of you meet? I always ask now when I do get through to order from a catalog or make a reservation. Where are you? The answer comes back. Omaha, say, or Rapid City, or some fringe city outside Atlanta. But, we know, we are meeting somewhere else, at a crossroads that is becoming quite familiar to us all.

You catch yourself there as you navigate the ever-branching logic trees of your ATM or as you channel surf along...

1. At the end of the Second World War, my grandfather responded to a radio appeal broadcast by General Mark Clark, who was governing occupied Austria, for Americans to send packages of food and other vital necessities to the refugees, displaced persons, and homeless civilians of a devastated Europe. That very day my grandfather sent his first care package. He told me, years later, that he tried to imagine what a family in circumstances he could not imagine would want or need. He sent potted meat, paper and pencils, chocolate bars and gum, evaporated milk, a pack of playing cards,...

Freud fucked us up, this Father business. The Mother business as well. He, Sigmund, is the inventor of the modern novel, is the novelist of the twentieth century, the founder of the form. He is the Father — that again — of the notion of Character and even more importantly the notion of the character of Character, this business of depth, this business of three dimensions, this business of complex. The forefather of the epiphany of The Epiphany and the transformation of transformation of Character that follows. He, Freud, elicits in me a kind of envy, yes, Envy, that I have not,...

I.⁶

The inferior should always be introduced to the superior — ladies take precedence of gentlemen; you will present the gentleman to the lady, not the lady to the gentleman.

II.

If on paying a morning visit you meet strangers at the house of your friend and are introduced, it is a mere matter of form, and does not entitle you to future recognition by such persons.

III.

Be very cautious of giving a gentleman a letter of introduction to a lady — it may be means of settling weal or woe of the persons for life.

IV.

If you wish to...

I write about Indiana. I consider myself a regionalist. “The Moon over Wapakoneta” is from a new book of short fiction called Planet Indiana. It is my attempt to remain true to my regional subject matter while combining it with a new, for me, genre. In this case, that would be science fiction. Science Fiction Regionalism, then, is where this contribution aspires to be catalogued.

My basic take on this particular hybrid fiction is that, in the future, Indiana will be pretty much the same as it is in the present. My Indiana is a pleasant, unexciting place where nothing...

1.

There is the moon, full, over Wapakoneta, Ohio. Everybody I know has a sister or a brother, a cousin or an uncle living up there now. The moon is studded green in splotches, spots where the new atmospheres have stuck, mold on a marble.

2.

I’m drunk. I’m always drunk. Sitting in the dust of a field outside Wapakoneta, Ohio, I look up at the moon. The moon, obscured for a moment by a passing flock of migratory satellites flowing south in a dense black stream, has a halo pasted behind it. That meant something once, didn’t it?

3....

As a writer of short fiction, I am interested in the monologue. Recently I discovered a book, Narratives from the Crib edited by Katherine Nelson, which is the first extensive study of language acquisition and its relationship to the private babble a child makes before sleep. Other studies of language acquisition are derived, usually, from research done with scripts of conversation between a parent and child. Narratives from the Crib is an anthology. The contributors all worked with one extensive transcript of the same child. It’s pretty amazing stuff. In her monologue the child does different voices, teaches herself how...

Above the postmaster’s door, you see a picture of one kernel of corn. It hangs there as large as a side of beef and painted in those tequila sunrise hues, yellow blending to orange shading to a reddish brown, that are also the stripes of candy corn. At the same time, you can see into the seed through a heart-shaped cutaway, into the germ coiled there heart-shaped as well, white and shiny, the actual size of a small animal brain. Foiling the kernel, adding to the rounded relief of the swelling, the fertile grain, is a thicket of cornstalks sewn...

The following is the first aesthetic argument I can remember having.

I was in the third grade and had just seen, with a group of my friends, the movie A Hard Day’s Night starring the Beatles. We were much taken with the movie and the Beatles, so we decided to put on a show at Bill Stuckey’s house using the garage there because it was the only one we knew that opened automatically. We could employ the door as an impressive and professional curtain, revealing to the neighborhood kids sitting in the driveway our version of a lip-synched concert. Mark...

His head was the size of a pea, the carved furrows of his beard like the wrinkles on a raisin. I crossed my eyes, focusing on the point of my 000 sable brush. There trembled a speck of gloss-black paint, a droplet smaller than the period at the end of this sentence, that would become the pupil of his eye once I applied it to the center of the fleck of already painted blue iris scuffing the base smudge of white. I would shape the eye later, coaxing the flesh beneath it into a cheek, adding a mascara dash that...

I have been thinking about Audie Murphy. Murphy was the most decorated American soldier of World War II and died in a plane crash in 1970. I was thinking about him because Norman Schwarzkopf has been in the news again, this time submitting to interviews on television and in newspapers about his new autobiography. General Schwarzkopf always talks about parades. The parades in New York and Washington, D.C., that followed the conclusion of the Gulf War were very important to him. In talking about those parades, he always contrasts the homecoming of Vietnam War veterans who were not so honored,...

This interview is the product of two separate written documents. Fred Santiago Arroyo mailed Michael Martone a series of questions, some of which focus on his own aesthetic obsessions and some which he thought were “appropriate for an interview.” Michael Martone then wrote out his responses to Fred’s questions and sent them to Sycamore Review. There was only one exchange between Fred and Michael; this epistolary interview seeks to preserve the friction and energy between what Fred asked and what Michael chose to answer — or ignore.

Question 1. Readers will see two general notions concerning your fiction and your life....

When I was going to school at Butler in the mid-1970s, I lived in Ross Hall on the third floor in the front, above the main door, with a window that looked out onto Hampton Street and the campus beyond. My roommate, Bob Sullivan, another English major, was trying to decide whether to follow Thomas Merton into the Trappist monastery or pledge the Tekes. To help him decide, he would make retreats to the abbey in Kentucky from time to time or disappear for days after a party at the house. Consequently, I was often left alone, perched in the...

Anna Leahy asked me to write this afterword for an anthology she was putting together called The Authority Project that collected papers on the pedagogy of creative writing. I wrote it last summer, the summer of 2004, beginning on Memorial Day while the war was going on in Iraq, at about the time of the first revelation of American torture in the prisons there and at the same time the massive World War II Memorial opened in Washington. As I was putting together this book, I got word from Anna that her publisher thought my contribution was problematic and requested...