University of Iowa

Michael Martone

Michael Martone’s recent books are The Moon Over Wapakoneta; Brooding; Winesburg, Indiana; Four for a Quarter; Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fiction from the Flyover; Racing in Place; and Double-wide, his collected early stories. Michael Martone is a memoir in contributor’s notes, and The Blue Guide to Indiana is a fictional travel guide. The Flatness and Other Landscapes won the AWP Award for Nonfiction. With Lex Williford, he edited The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction and The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. Martone is the author of five other books of short fiction including Pensées: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle and Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler's List. He has edited two collections of essays about the Midwest: A Place of Sense and Townships. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper's, Esquire, Story, North American Review, Epoch, The Iowa Review, Story Quarterly, American Short Fiction and other magazines. He has taught at the University of Alabama, Warren Wilson College, Iowa State University, Harvard University, Syracuse University, and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

Instructor Events

The Cross-Section Workshop for Stories and Essays

Weeklong June 14 to June 19 2020
Instructor(s): 
Michael Martone

In the traditional creative writing workshop, individual stories and essays are critiqued one at a time. This means in a weeklong session such as ours the writer will be thinking of herself or himself as a writer for one period of, say, 45-60 minutes and the rest of the time will be attending the workshop as a critic of others’ work. In the cross-section workshop, we will look at all our pieces at the same time. We will take “cuts” through each work, beginning with our titles and the theory behind titling. Then we’ll move on to first lines, first paragraphs, first pages, etc.