Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art

Adventures on the Cultural Landscape: An Epistolary Interview

I have done many interviews—by telephone, e-mail, and in person. In this one, conducted by Fred Arroyo, we used the regular mail. Fred had been my student at Warren Wilson, and conducting such business by mail was an extension of the teaching that goes on in a low-residency program where packets of work are exchanged six or seven times between the instructor and the student. The interview was first published in Purdue University’s Sycamore Review and later republished in an anthology of interviews called Delicious Imaginations edited by Sarah Griffiths and Kevin J. Kehrwald. Curiously, I was asked to provide a recipe to be published with the interview, though in the end it wasn’t published in the book. I contributed a recipe for making marshmallows. 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. Adventures฀on฀the฀Cultural฀Landscape ฀ AN฀EPISTOLARY฀INTERVIEW 157 Question 1. Readers will see two general notions concerning your fiction and your life. First, you steadily write new stories, but in your most recent collections—Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List and Seeing Eye—you combine new stories with work previously published in your first two collections. Second, you spend a lot of time teaching fiction writing. Could you talk about the relationship between writing and teaching? Does teaching adversely affect your writing, or does teaching help your fiction? It seems, in the two parts of your question, that what you are really getting at has to do with a correlation between the amount of time and effort one spends on one’s work and the corresponding expenditure of time and effort on one’s job. Also that the amount of “new” writing is somehow connected to the writing that is somehow “good.” I have been writing and publishing for twenty years and have produced a limited (it is always limited in some way) amount of work; republishing some of it from book to book implies that the creation of new work is more time-consuming than the republishing or the maintaining in print work previously published. I am not sure that is the case. The creation of places to publish is as timeconsuming to me and just as creative. The way I view publishing is that it is up to me to keep as much of all my work in print as long as possible. Who else will? At the same time I am creating new work, I am maintaining the old. Maintaining is a difficult thing to do. After the Troy Tool decision rendered by the Supreme Court, commercial presses were forced to refocus their business. The backlist, which had been their asset, was now a liability. My first book published by Knopf was in print only nine months before it was remaindered. Given this kind of environment, it seems to me the author must take on more of the responsibility of publishing his or her own work and maintaining its availability. I have had more success in that way of course with university and nonprofit presses and in publishing my own work. More theoretically, I do think of all this work, all these individual stories, as part of one big work that is constantly evolving 158฀ Adventures฀on฀the฀Cultural฀Landscape and mutating. Also many of the individual pieces are themselves constructed in a collage style, by arrangement of components. So juxtaposition on that micro level is important to me as it is on a macro level. The Dan Quayle pieces read differently in their chapbook from when they are the middle third of Seeing Eye. Both readings interest me and I hope will interest readers. I like to think I do not just create objects that are separate from their contexts. I also create or help create their contexts. To make the transition to teaching, I believe that this is one thing not taught so much in workshops or in writing programs...