Michael Martone

Michael Martone is the author of several fiction and nonfiction collections, including The Blue Guide to Indiana, Seeing Eye, Pensée: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle, Fort Wayne is Seventh on Hitler’s List, and The Flatness and Other Landscapes, a collection of essays about the Midwest which received the 1998 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction. Praised for his wit, sarcasm, and passionate language, Martone often writes about Indiana life with what Louise Edrich describes as a “deep affection for the ordinary.”

In The Blue Guide to Indiana, Martone sites Indiana as home for such remarkable places as a cemetery for nudists, the Eugene V. Debs Pro-Am Golf Tournament, and the Tomb of Orville Redenbacher. Though satirical, The Blue Guide to Indiana, along with the more serious The Flatness and Other Landscapes, criticizes urban development and its destruction of Indiana’s natural terrain. In a passage of The Blue Guide to Indiana that ridicules the excessive expansions of local corporations, Martone writes, “Over the last several years, an Indianapolis drug company has been quietly purchasing a wide swath of swamp land and marginally profitable farms near the town of Martinsville. Recently, this bucolic setting has been transformed by a prodigious collection of construction equipment—earth movers and cranes, dump trucks and bulldozers—as the pharmaceutical giant breaks ground for an unprecedented new project opening in the spring of the year 2003: Eli Lilly Land.”

“Martone is...a fabulous inventor of history,...memory, landscape and people. His...magical tours...cross...borders between fact and fiction.” —Melanie Rae Thon, author of Visions on the Cooke City Highway

“In the alternate universe that Michael Martone inhabits,...the state of Indiana is the most exotic spot on the planet.” —Robert Boswell, author of American Owned Love

“[The Blue Guide to Indiana is a] creative tour of an unassuming yet truly vital place . . . Here, in no-nonsense, deeply felt, and dryly humorous essays, he rejects the tired image of the heartland, suggesting that the Midwest is more like skin. . . . Martone parlays this arresting observation into captivating meditations on flatland life.” —Booklist

“This delightful train ride across the Midwest is highly recommended. . . . [Martone] writes about everyday towns, filled with everyday people. He describes the landscape with such passion that his essays become like word-paintings, and its inhabitants seem like characters in a film.” —Library Journal

Martone, who was born in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, attended Butler University, Indiana University, and John Hopkins University. He has previously taught at Iowa State, Harvard, and Syracuse, and currently teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Alabama.

The recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize, Martone has served as editor for such anthologies as The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, Extreme Fiction: Fabulists and Formalists, A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest and Townships: Pieces of the Midwest. Martone lives in Alabama, where he and his wife, poet Theresa Pappas, edit Stone County Books.

Michael Martone will teach a combined fiction and creative nonfiction workshop at the 2004 conference.

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