Unconventions : attempting the art of craft and the craft of art : writings on writing / by Michael Martone.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Martone, Michael.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Authorship.

Martone, Michael--Authorship.

Martone, Michael.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (205 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Athens : University of Georgia Press, c2005.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Unconventions is a quirky and provocative miscellany that reveals Michael Martone's protean interests as a writer and a writing teacher. Martone has, shall we say, a problem with authority. His chief pleasure in knowing the rules of his vocation comes from trying out new ways to bend, blend, or otherwise defy them. The pieces gathered in Unconventions are drawn from a long career spent loosening the creative strictures on writing. Including articles, public addresses, essays, interviews, and even a eulogy, these writings vary greatly in form but are unified in addressing the many technical and artistic issues that face all writers, particularly those interested in experimental and nontraditional modes and forms. Martone's approach has always been to synthesize, to understand and use any technique, formula, or style available. "I find myself, then," he writes, "self-identifying as a formalist, both and neither an experimenter and/or a traditionalist." In "I Love a Parade: An Afterword," Martone writes about not fitting in-and loving it-as he recalls the time he marched alone in a local Labor Day parade, as a one-person delegation from the National Writers Union. Elsewhere, in writings formally, stylistically, purposely at odds with themselves, Martone's expansive curiosity is on full display. We learn about camouflage techniques, how a baby acquires language, how to "read" a WPA-era post office mural, and why Martone sold his stock in the New Yorker and reinvested his money in the company that makes Etch A Sketch®. Unconventions, then, is Martone's "Frankensteinian monster," a kind of unruly, hybrid spawn of the mainstream writing enterprise. "Writing seems to me an intrinsic pleasure, an end in itself first," says Martone. "The question for me is not whether my writing, or any piece of writing, is good or bad but what the writing is and what it is doing and how finally it is used or can be used by others."

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Acknowledgments

I Love a Parade: An Afterword

Be Seated: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art

Whose Story Is It? Framing the Frame or Writing Bad on Purpose Purposely

Pygmies Dressed as Pygmies

The Tyranny of Praise

Welcome to Baltimore (aka) Charm City (colon): A Charm Bracelet of Half-Baked Delicacies, or Xenophon's Anabasis and the Collapse of the Avant-Garde into Waves of Ecstasy

My Situation

Selling Stories Short

Space Dome

Four Factual Anecdotes on Fiction

Mount Rushmore: Four Brief Essays on Fictions

Trying: An Introduction to Introduction: Four Found Introductions

Make Nothing Happen

The Moon over Wapakoneta

Appliances: Domestic Detail and Describing Rituals of the Ordinary

The History of Corn

Ruining a Story

How to Hide a Tank: Camouflage, Realism, and Believing Our Eyes

The War in the Forest: The Collected Work of James B. Hall

Adventures on the Cultural Landscape: An Epistolary Interview

In Memory of Richard Cassell

After Words: A Foreword.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

ISBN:

9786612726064

9781282726062

1282726064

9780820330778

0820330779

OCLC:

647895346