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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.
By the end of this collection, you’ve been to Winesburg, Indiana. You can recall its businesses and its citizens and whatever it is that is each person’s personal business—what makes them tick, individually—what makes them get up in the morning to try, again, to live with themselves and with each other—what makes the many of them so very individual in these vivid and intricate snapshots of their souls. — Molly Gaudry, We Take Me Apart
Michael Martone is our curator of community, our impresario of Americana, our chandler of the national flame. Plain Air is a wonder. It offers history, wit, and wistfulness all at once—a portrait of a small town made whole by its citizens’ laughters and loves. — Alyson Hagy, Scribe
Plain Air puns and pranks, twists and turns with every new sketch on every page. A play on Sherwood Anderson’s classic collection, Martone takes us to Winesburg, Indiana, a post-industrial town with its dying eraser factory, and a cast of characters more alive in their passions, obsessions, and idiosyncrasies than any in contemporary fiction. What a great read. I laughed, cried, and was moved by the characters’ desire to finally take their place in the intricate web of Winesburg, all the way to their vanishing points in the mural on the post office wall. — Mary Swander, The Girls on the Roof
Michael Martone's Plain Air sketches, like prose poems, erupt sharp with insight . . . They're really weird and profound. What more could you want? — Terese Svoboda, Great American Desert
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.