MICHAEL MARTONE is the author of twelve books of fiction and non-fiction, including Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art and Double-Wide: Collected Fiction of Michael Martone. His work has been recognized with two NEA Fellowships and the AWP Book Award for Non-Fiction. He teaches in the program for Creative Writing at the University of Alabama.

His contribution to the RE:Telling anthology is “Borges in Indiana,” which is equally about Borges and Indiana. I misled Michael Martone when I requested this Q&A. I promised him a few “softballs,” but then I started him off with a question about his life as a fictional character named Michael Martone. Fortunately, there are no questions that Michael Martone cannot answer. I should have asked more…

In addition to being a contributor to the anthology, you are also one of its subjects. Quoting from Josh Maday’s “Distractus Refractus Ontologicus: The Dissemination of Michael Martone”: “Michael Martone is a mantra, a rosary, a repetition, an incantation that grows slippery…” How does it feel to be the product of another writer’s imagination? Particularly, a “mantra, rosary, incantation”?

How does it feel?  And this, you suggest, is a softball question I am to hit out of the park? This semester in Alabama, I offered a graduate class in plagiarism. So your question arrives not just with an anthology that appropriates appropriation but also as another zephyr in the zeitgeist. We are just reading Lewis Hyde’s new book As Common as Air that worries the notion of the cultural commons and intellectual property. Most striking to me is the true radical history of Adams, Jefferson, Franklin who went so far as to write, invent, think things in order to give them away before someone else could copyright or patent those same things. Jefferson’s metaphor is of lighting a candle with the flame of another not diminishing the light, not taking, but adding to the light. It is about the exchange, the transmission.  I have felt, for a while, that the machine I am using right now and this network it is connected to will far more efficiently deconstruct the author than any continental essay ever could. Subject? Object? Author? It feels like a warm bath to me, moving from the personal to the massed mass.  I feel of the new magazine, The New Anonymous, with its namelessnesses. It feels like the future to me. I just checked. There are 62 Michael Martones on the Facebook right now. I have friended them all. They are all my friends. A Michael Martone, not this Michael Martone, granted an interview published in Meridian. There is another one in Hayden’s Ferry. They are not me, it seems, but they are me. Or they are not I but they are I.  I think that if we do this—me, you, Josh—if we are artists at all, the work we do is along the borders, between the boundaries, and the spaces in between. We redraw them. Redefine them. Break and shape the spaces in between.  I love the smell of osmosis in the morning. It feels like iodine. It feels like CO_2. It feels sublime.

You’ve written stories from the point of view of Derek Jeter, Dan Quayle, Mark Spitz, Audie Murphy, and other figures from pop culture. How do you develop an interior voice for a living character who is so familiar to readers? The Spitz voice is very childlike. Where did that come from?

See above.  I steal the voice or perhaps more accurately I tap into the one voice that runs through us all.  I like to think that what I do is mythology. I am a mythologist.  I am not a writer of new things but only a shaper of shared things already here. No one owned or originated or copyrighted Oedipus and so Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and all the unnamed playwrights could use the circulating story, shape its sonic wave. Oedipus is essentially voiceless, a vessel to be filled. We only think we know someone’s voice. It is ventriloquism and the desire on the audiences’ part to provide the inflection.  Spitz, the character himself, is body surfing the wave. His child-like voice is being downloaded from the magazine he is reading, Highlights. Osmosis again. Permeable.

One of the archetypal characters from “Borges in Indiana” is The Comp Lit Student Who Had a Car. I’ve met maybe a dozen writers who have stories of picking up visiting writers at the airport or train station and driving them to campus. Did you ever taxi any famous authors when you were a student? (If not, can you talk about a younger Michael Martone meeting a writer that he admired?)

I drove Czeslaw Milosz from Des Moines to Ames, Iowa, who spoke only in Polish with the Iowa State math professor who came along for the ride. I drove Wendell Berry out to Maurice Talleen’s draft horse farm in the middle of winter, there to inspect Percheron mares and their yearlings steaming in the middle of the night, snow swirling through the flashlight beams. I smuggled Tomaz Salamun across the Mexican border. Driving Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., to a commencement speech in Syracuse.  I am sorry I missed a chance to hear John Barth and James Michener talk about the Maryland blue crab.

What are you working on now or what’s on the horizon for you, writerwise?

Four for a Quarter, a book of fictions, comes out this fall. I am finishing a project called Winesburg, Indiana, a hybrid book that is anthology and collection of stories that take place in the town of Winesburg on the Fork River in Northeastern Indiana. I am working on science fiction fictions called Amish in Space. I am working on a book called Philo T. Farnsworth in Fort Wayne. The inventor of electronic television lived in my hometown. A play, Alive and Dead in Indiana,will be produced in several Indiana cities over the next few years. I have begun a new book that rewrites and re-imagines southern icons like the battles of the Civil War and books like To Kill a Mockingbird. And I want to do a book of interviews I have done. I am thinking of calling it You Can Say That Again.