This month, we continue the celebration of our state's literary heritage with a new post by Michael Martone in our Indiana Bicentennial Bookshelf blog series. This series is written by Hoosier authors about their favorite Indiana books and writers.
By Michael Martone
This was the Indianapolis of the 70s, “Nap”town. It lived “down” to its name—before all the new building, the athletic events and venues, the malls and Mass Ave makeovers. On Sundays, for excitement, I drifted downtown, to McCarty Street to Shapiro’s bathed in static-y florescent light, had a tongue sandwich and celery soda. The sky was low and lowering. The bells at Butler tolled out “Back Home Again in Indiana” ended with “...where the sun refuses to shine.” Spring brought the exhausted coughing of tire tests at the track, steeped in general sleepiness. Yet, here in the gloaming, I started writing, holed-up in my room in limestone-clad Ross Hall (students had, in their boredom, attached a “G” to the name) writing the first sad dark sentimental stories of Indiana.
Years later, things changed. I had gone away to teach and write in Iowa, Massachusetts, New York. I wrote about Indiana even as I wandered. I stayed in close touch with Susan Neville, back home, an Atlas of a writer, also writing about Indiana and her hometown of Indianapolis. There, she shouldered the labor of culture-making at Butler with a new reading series and an invigorated creative writing program. She asked me back to give a reading, and, as she drove me into the city, I could not help but notice how Indy had shrugged off its napping past, overnight it seemed, a city of big shoulders now, transformed.
“Susan,” I asked, “what the heck happened?”
Without missing a beat, keeping her eyes on the road (a new expressway!), the pristine crystalline skyline heaving up into a blue blue sky, she answered, “Prozac!”
I know, a long ironic anecdote. The world’s depression and Eli Lilly’s attempt to cure it put the step back in Naptown’s stride, put a civic smile on the face of Circle City.
Really, I recount it here to shine a little light on that wit, that writer Susan Neville. Much of Indiana, as we know is flat. For me I am taken by that telling surface. But Susan, in her work, is all about the submerged, the interior of the interior.
I think of her as the cartographer of the Hoosier sub-conscious, unconscious, a soul-searcher for sure. You can sense this sense and sensitivity just in the titles of the books—Sailing the Inland Sea, Iconography, In the House of Blue Lights, Indiana Winter. She is our fearless Odysseus, underworld spelunker, constantly in motion, a centripetal vector turned inward to the depths of our denials, our ecstatic depressions, our gloomy yet buoyant gumption. Her work is a unique site-specific concoction of specific gravity and unbearable lightness of being. She writes in the stories of The Invention of Flight about flight, yes, but mostly of the beautiful hard landings, controlled crashes, the collapsed longings for this condensed and congested home, always at a crossroads. There is a basketball book too, of course, charting the poignant trajectory of winning loss.
Let me end by saying it’s incumbent upon us all to read Susan’s masterpiece, Fabrication, the essay that takes us to the warehouse of caskets in Batesville. Endless storage of eternal storage. The beauty of empty box after box. And the sudden brilliant revelation that everyone, all those capsules, all of them, will, one day, be occupied.
Michael Martone is Professor of English at the University of Alabama–Tuscaloosa. He is author of many books including Four for a Quarter: Fictions; Double-wide: Collected Fiction of Michael Martone (IUP, 2007); and editor (with Bryan Furuness) of Winesburg, Indiana: A Fork River Anthology (IUP, 2015) and Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fiction from the Flyover (IUP, 2009). Martone was the winner of the 2013 National Indiana Authors Award.
Next month, Norbert Krapf will be blogging for us in the Indiana Bicentennial Bookshelf series. Check back in June for his post!
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Posted by: Bella Williams | September 15, 2016 at 08:18 AM