Interview with Sam Martone, On Fiction No. 3

In this interview, Former fiction editor Lydia Munnell chats with Sam Martone. Martone’s fiction story “Night Watch at the House of Death” appears in Volume XXXVI, issue 1.

I’m interested in the way ideas happen for writers—do stories start with an image or a character or a situation or are they fully formed for you? How about “Night Watch…” in particular? What kicked it off?

For me, it’s usually some glimmer of a concept or image. I’ll stumble across the Wikipedia page on spite houses or build off a pun I made on Twitter. For “Night Watch…” specifically, I think a lot of it came from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain. It’s been so long now since I read it, but I’m almost sure there’s a section about bodies being rigged up with bells to ensure they were dead. Not sure if it’s one of his stories-within-the-story or if it was based on an actual past practice, but it certainly got my attention, and from there I placed it in the anachronistic setting and expanded on why one might have to do this with the recently deceased.

In some sense you seem like a project-based writer. Your two chapbooks, for instance, both seem to have been conceived as projects. Is that true? If so, talk about the way that process is similar to or different from writing an individual piece. 

 I definitely do tend to work on things with projects in mind, although I often have too many projects I’m juggling at once, which means nothing gets done, or whatever fragments do get done end up coalescing into a new project. That was kind of the case for the first chapbook (from Corgi Snorkel Press). Some of those stories were conceived as parts of other projects, others were just individual pieces, but they all shared a number of similar concerns and ended up working well together. Thinking toward the greater whole is just how my mind works, but I actually think it’s a bit inhibiting. For example, I’m working on all these stories set in Arizona right now and realizing how repetitive all the talk about the heat and the desert landscape will read when they’re put together. Probably my favorite stories, the stories that have been the most fun to write, were ones totally independent of any bigger plan.

What role does the internet play for you? Video games? (of course I’m thinking of your most recent chapbook here but also stories where it might be less apparent) If these places are particularly fertile why would you say that is? And what about a story like  “Night Watch…” that’s less obviously connected?

 I really love the internet and video games and pop culture/media of all kinds as raw material of sorts for fiction. In large part I think they’re fertile grounds for writing because so many writers actively avoid pop culture and contemporary technology in their stories for fear of dating their work or cheapening it somehow, but I think, for example, a Netflix binge is such a familiar part of most of our lives, that to purposefully exclude that stuff from fiction ends up limiting our ability to write about what it means to be human in the U.S. today. Lately I’m finding that I love fictional works within fiction almost as much as I love the fiction itself. Mike Meginnis’s novel Fat Man and Little Boy depicts these great invented movies throughout the second half of the book. They complement (and eventually connect to) the “real” story very well, but they’re also just an immense pleasure to read on their own. “Night Watch…,” even though it doesn’t talk explicitly about any real-world pop culture, still has a narrator who’s deeply affected and driven by the stories he sees in film. I think that’s what I’m most often interested in, in a lot of my work: how the stories we see in art and entertainment cause us to reinterpret and reconstruct the world around us, for better or worse.

 

You’re an editor at Origami Zoo Press. At MAR we see all kinds of (probably coincidental) trends pop up among submissions and work we read. What are you calling out as trendy right now (for better or worse)?

We’ve been closed for submissions for a while now at Origami Zoo, but I recently served as a guest editor for SmokeLong, which meant I read a week’s worth of subs and selected one story to be published in their weekly installments. Among those submissions, I don’t know if it’s something about the 1,000 word limit, but I received a number of fishing stories. Also a tendency toward one word titles that played with archetypal stories (i.e., “Myth,” “Fairy Tale,” “Urban Legend”).

Now, things I’d like to become trendy is another story: 1) lasers. 2) heists. 3) someone saying “you’re going to want to see this.”

 

“Night Watch at the House of Death” is, at least in part, a story about love and connection and loss. What’s a favorite love story? (please use that apply that label as broadly as you’d like)

I’m pretty drawn to love stories in general, both as a writer and a reader, so this is hard to narrow down, but I think “The Ballad of the Sad Café” by Carson McCullers is my favorite story that pretty explicitly examines love and what it means to love.

 

The monotony of work and the waiting associated with work almost make the world of “Night Watch…” feel like a kind of purgatory. Talk about a terrible job. 

Yeah, it’s interesting you mention this, because a lot of my stories involve narrators working terrible, tedious, but nonetheless life-consuming jobs. Oddly enough, in real life I’ve been fortunate to never really have a particularly monotonous job. Maybe I’d be a bit less fascinated with writing such stories if I actually had to experience it on a daily basis…

Accepted: “No Paper Cowboys” by Bryn Agnew

In our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, Fiction Editor Tom Markham discusses the marvelous “No Paper Cowboys.”

Genre: short fiction

Title: “No Paper Cowboys”

Author: Bryn Agnew

MAR Issue: 36.1

First Line: “Your parents stand on the porch as you park your car under the awning where the chicken snake ate the baby swallows.”

The evocative image in the opening line of Bryn Agnew’s “No Paper Cowboys” sets the stage for a tale of consumption. That the story is told in 2nd person—“Your parents stand on the porch”—brings us close to the affected character, allowing us an interiority crucial to understanding the unavoidable struggle that consumes this main character.

The setup is one we’re all familiar with—a young college student returns home for a family Thanksgiving celebration—yet the insight here feels fresh, cutting to the core a young person’s first real identity crisis: feeling like a stranger both in that new living environment as well as in the old. This sense of having one foot in one world and one in the other is brought out nicely through the italicized lines that are interspersed throughout the narrative. These lines, usually quotes from, we can assume, texts and situations the boy encountered at school, are often direct, internalized responses to the actions or requests of this main character’s family. Sometimes the interactions between internal and external are simple—“’Why don’t you go for a walk?  Get some fresh air.’  It’s plain to see, the sun won’t shine today, but I ain’t in the mood for sunshine anyway”—while other times they are a little more abstracted, pointing to the unease deep within the main character’s psyche.

The main character, the “You” in the story, is doing his best to reconcile his estranged world of the past with his new fresh but ultimately unsatisfying frame of mind, but the efforts are fruitless. The futility is shown most starkly in his family’s frustrated attempts to cheer him up with mundane, homey tasks. Sandwiched into this doomed task of fitting his new self back into his old life is the revelation that things don’t appear to be going so well socially at college, either, so at the story’s core, we are given this bit of insight—the boy is unhappy in both worlds—and we watch it eat away at him while his family attempts, always uselessly, to rescue him.

When the boy finds himself relating to a hunted deer shot by his family for the meat we know things won’t end well. The boy gets injured wrangling a cow on the family farm, a task his father conscripted him to, and in the final moments of the story, a fleeting image of the deer comes across the boy’s visage, leaving us with one lingering italicized thought: “You cannot believe such a monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing.”

“No Paper Cowboys” is a poignant look at the inexplicable pain that comes in periods of life’s tough transitions. It ends on a very somber note, but it is one that leaves us strangely hopeful, for we come back to the 2nd person voice, reading these words with our own voices echoing in our heads, realizing we’re not alone in this struggle, even though it sometimes feels that way.

What MAR editors said about “No Paper Cowboys”:

“I really enjoyed the narrator’s silence when everyone else is constantly discussing him. I feel like this was a very effective way of seeing inside this character.”

“The second person is done really well, and to a wonderful effect. Lovely prose, lovely energy, lovely sadness; it packed a punch for sure.”

Accepted: Night Watch At The House of Death by Sam Martone

In our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, Fiction Editor Lydia Munnell discusses a story that appears in our Fall 2015 issue.

Genre: Short fiction
Title: Night Watch at the House of Death
Author: Sam Martone
MAR issue: 36.1
While reading or discussing work with the MAR staff this past year, I’ve occasionally thrown a fit about what I call “Boring Couple Stories.” Of course this is ridiculous; Some of the best stories we’ve told since we started telling stories deal in the currency of love and heartbreak. We love an affair. We love a breakup.

But I will stand by the fact that, in general I could do without another interior rendering of here we are, in the same house, and it’s ending, and we both know it’s ending, and what’s going to happen? I could do without another thinly veiled short story about a lurid affair between an aging professor and an airy undergrad.

But I can always, always read more stories that frame old love anew, that teach me something I feel like I always should have known.

That’s what Sam Martone’s “Night Watch at the House of Death” manages to do, and, ultimately, why the story warranted such an enthusiastic acceptance in my first semester as Fiction Editor. Martone’s is a story about the sublime nature of love because it’s also about death, or maybe just loss, or maybe just being alone.

The speaker in “Night Watch…” is a worker. He is a sentinel at a death house whose responsibility it is to wait for the likely-dead to show signs of life. In inventing that job, Martone captures the all-too-familiar drudgery of work, the language of waiting and work that colors the kind of purgatorial world that’s so beautifully rendered here.

Martone does a remarkable job with all the intricacies that mandate life inside and outside the death houses. Medicine, in this world, is a kind of alchemy, and as the speaker’s relationship with Hannah emerges, it’s clear love is governed by alchemy as well. Writes Martone, “I imagined Hannah undressing, one garment at a time, and seeing all the things she stole spilling from her clothes: waffle irons, withering cabbages, hand soap dispensers, step ladders, until she was completely naked atop a mountain of all she had taken, and I was clambering up toasters and ironing boards to meet her.” The world of “Night Watch” is sketched with clear lines, but love is about trial and error, a combination of semi-precious objects that, for the speaker, seem like they might add up to something.

But the other element here is time (manifest in the form of a stolen clock), and Martone’s moves in the second act fulfill the story’s promises about what it means to wait. After some too-enjoyable-to-spoil-here twists, “Night Watch at the House of Death” grants us this: we can see work and breakups the same way. They’re both about waiting, the nebulous space between.

The worst kinds of love stories leave sullen characters brooding on a rainy New York City boulevard. But the best kind—and Sam Martone’s is the best kind—leave them cleaning gutters and listening to the wind. They end the way they start without promise of death or happiness or sure resolution. And uncertainty becomes its own kind of loss, and it aches the way a good love story should.

 

Lydia is a native of rural western Pennsylvania who has spent the last several years on the east side of Cleveland coordinating the after school program at Lake Erie Ink, a non-profit writing space for youth. While in Cleveland, she was DJ of a folk radio program, Revival and previously did freelance writing for Cleveland Scene Magazine.

Contest Deadlines Extended!

the hands of timeThe weather’s changing, the clock hands have been struck back an hour, and the winter darkness is upon us. But there’s a bright spot on the horizon: MAR has extended the deadlines for the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award and the James Wright Poetry Award until November 15.

That’s right – you still have some precious time remaining to submit to these two contests. With a $1,000 prize + publication in each category, and with Alissa Nutting judging fiction and Oliver de la Paz judging poetry this year, you don’t want to miss out. The entry fee is only $10 (hey, compare it to other contests — $10 for a $1,000 prize is not too shabby) for each story up to 6,000 words or up to three poems. So learn more here and enter now!

Photo: stnorbert

Accepted: “War Stories” by Lesley Nneka Arimah

war stories

In our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, Fiction Editor Laura Maylene Walter discusses a story that appears in our Spring 2014 issue.

Genre: Short fiction
Title: “War Stories”
Author: Lesley Nneka Arimah
MAR issue: Spring 2014
First line: “This time, my mother and I were fighting about what I had done at school to prove with no question that Anita Okechukwu was not wearing a bra.”

“War Stories” opens with an immediately compelling conflict: the narrator, twelve-year-old Nwando, has exposed her classmate Anita not only for her lack of a bra, but also for the pretenses that allowed her to become the dictatorial leader of the school’s exclusive Girl Club. Thanks to her actions, Nwando finds herself an unwitting hero and the head of a new “girl army” regime. As Nwando experiences the rise and fall of her own power at school, she listens at home as her father covers new ground in his wartime memories and reveals more than he perhaps intended.

Along with many other Mid-American Review fiction readers, I was immediately engaged by the story’s premise and read on with increasing interest as Nwando’s struggles at home and school escalated. The story illustrates adolescent tension in fresh and surprising ways, and author Lesley Nneka Arimah masterfully blends Nwando’s schoolyard conflict with her father’s recollections of his time in the war.

The language in “War Stories” is also infused with a reflective quality that expands Nwando’s story into more universal territory. For example, when Anita experiences her fall from social graces after the bra incident, Nwando considers the broader consequences for her classmate: “What I hadn’t expected were the boys who ran behind her during recess and lifted up her skirt, as though my actions had given them permission, as though because they had seen her bare breast, they were entitled to the rest. It was a boyish expectation most would not outgrow even after they became men.”

The storytelling is also lively and takes surprising turns. Take, for instance, the scene that occurs after Nwando is punished for punching her classmate: “During dinner, which I wasn’t permitted to share with my parents, I sat on a stool in the kitchen, soothing the shrapnel sting on my behind with daydreams of how upset my real parents would be when they discovered these temporary guardians had used me ill. I tried very hard not to think about the little girl and her nose, how it crackled beneath my fist.” The vivid language and storytelling gain momentum throughout the story as Nwando’s father begins sharing his wartime experiences.

“War Stories” is more than a gripping, beautifully told story about a young girl navigating the poisonous social structure at school and a haunted father at home – it’s also about the power of the many kinds of stories we tell.

What MAR editors said about “War Stories”:

“…strong and engaging…an example of well-managed realism. Touching without being sentimental and a light touch with humor. A quirk without being crazy.”

“This story offers a lot in these nine pages about the pain this family has experienced with loss. It may not follow a traditional path, but I enjoyed the details of this family connecting. The emotion feels authentic, the details engage, and the flaws of people trying to be leaders to those around them – moving.”

Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor

Photo: legOfrenis