Season 04
Episode 12
Air date: 11/11/2011, 1 PM CST
On this episode of the Lit Show, co-host Ben Mauk talks with Michael Martone about teaching, writing, and the Midwest.
Martone’s large body of work confuses the boundaries of fiction and fact, memoir and essay. At the same time he has emerged as a defining chronicler of the Midwestern experience, and he has edited several collections of essays and photographs in an effort to define that amorphous region.
Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and is currently Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama. He is the author of, most recently, Four for a Quarter, a work of fiction whose subject and structure are defined by the number four. He is also the author of Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins; Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft And the Craft of Art; Michael Martone, The Blue Guide to Indiana, and Double-Wide: Collected Fiction of Michael Martone, which includes five of his earlier books.
Joining Martone for this episode is a roundtable of former students–fiction and nonfiction alumnae of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop–to discuss their experiences studying with him, and their own teaching and writing lives. Rachel Yoder, Dylan Nice, and Zachary Tyler Vickers join us at the half hour.
