Writing about Indiana: Or, Writing about Indiana as an Act of Defiance: Or, Convince Me Why all of My Assumptions about Your Assumptions about What's Important about Your Writing are Wrong

Midway Journal Fiction Editor shares insights on what he wants to see in a story

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors all over the world.

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In a recent interview with Alex Chambers on “Inner States,” an internet broadcast which is a part of programming for Indiana Public Media, native Hoosier, Michael Martone, author, and professor of writing for forty years, spoke, among many things, about what it means to be an Indiana writer. In this segment of the interview, Martone argues the contradictory distinctions of what this means. He argues it means both that “the notion of what an Indiana writer is, is interesting,” and that “our stories, our culture isn’t worthy of artistic production.”

He makes the distinctions clearer (or necessarily muddier) just a few examples later. Here, Martone makes a point about compelling, necessary writing, which, as an editor, I’m hoping to experience from every encounter I have with every piece or writing that “crosses my desk.” Martone states what’s most essential to being an Indiana writer, and indeed essential to all significant writing: “if you’re going to really write about a place, what is it that has really shaped something that is so Indiana that it isn’t even recognizable . . . it’s the water of Indiana and you’re the fish in it. How is it that you can get to that . . .?”

As an editor, I don’t care if an author sends me a piece of writing about a topic I have read for the thirteen-hundredth time and in nearly as many forms, but I do care endlessly whether or not the author seems to care whether they have even attempted to challenge my assumptions about what I think their assumptions are about what’s important about why they’ve chosen this story to write. In other words, if I don’t believe the story in front of me is unquestionably the most Indiana of fish in the most Indiana of waters then I don’t believe they believe it either, which needs to be true if I, or any editor, should choose to share it with a larger audience.

Minimalist artist Donald Judd asserted in his 1965 essay “Specific Objects,” that “the rectangle is a shape itself; it is obviously the whole shape; it determines and limits the arrangement of whatever is on or inside of it.” Judd spent his career giving the viewer permission to ignore his work by engaging with the space around it, a space which includes the wall the work is mounted on, the museum where the work is housed, and even the viewers themselves. In essence, the viewer is asked to engage with the most rectangle thing there is by disengaging with the limits a thing’s “rectangleness” imposes on the perception of the viewer. He respects the viewer enough to forget them, concerned only with their act of viewing. And this is what editors hope their experience will be with every story they read—they want to view with the same disengagement, with the same disregard for the “rectangleness” of an author’s work.

Mary Gaitskill, author of Bad Behavior, and most recently Oppositions (a collection of essays) refers to this experience in her essay “The Deracination of Literature: We Have Fallen Out of Love with Good Writing,” published at UnHerd. Though I disagree with the premise that we have “fallen out of love with literature” (or, more to the point, the fact that the students in her writing classes have fallen out of love with literature), I do agree with one central argument regarding the antidote to “style.”

Gaitskill writes, “[great writing] is related to the rational mind but in a way that dreams are related to thought —poetically and irrationally. It is through poetic and irrational means that the unseen world of your story gets radically illuminated.” And though I disagree with the notion that fiction is dying, it is her steadfast conviction in her assumptions that makes me want to read on, that makes her essay the most Indiana of fish in the most Indiana of waters. She convinces me to put my assumptions on hold and listen.

The poet Richard Hugo, among so many others, makes it clear how “assumptions” play a crucial role in the outcomes of an author’s work in the critically acclaimed teaching text The Triggering Town. Though a single chapter bears the title “Assumptions,” the entire text provides methods for each reader to gain access to their own assumptions, and therein lies the text’s gift. The text itself is a record of Hugo’s assumptions, that goes without saying (and which can be a turn-off to many readers, as he is clearly a product of an era and trapped in many of the failings of the manners of that era), but he manages to gift the reader the opportunity to reach, to understand their own assumptions along the way.

Every chapter could bear the title “Assumptions,” as in each chapter Hugo provides, in a somewhat Daoist way, evidence of “the way,” of the path to the reader’s own self-discovery:

“The fact that ‘suicide’ sounds like ‘cascade’ is infinitely more important than what is being said”

and . . .

“The imagination is a cynic. By that I mean that it can accommodate the most disparate elements with no regard for the relative values.”

            and . . .

“He can play trombone with any sympathy orchestra in the country but when he stands up to take a jazz solo he forgets everything he knows.”

I’ve always said, in my role as fiction editor, that I am interested in language first, before plot, before anything. But what I really mean by that is I’m interested in, as Gaitskill so eloquently articulated, the “poetic and irrational means that the unseen world of your story gets radically illuminated” by the language. I hope to be persuaded to “forget everything I know” by every story I open in the submissions queue.

In the pre-apocalyptic film, The Sacrifice, Andrie Tarkovsky’s last film before his death, the main character and young son build an exact replica of the family home. In several scenes, we see the actual family home, just out of focus, looming behind and above the toy replica. In these frames, the house out of focus, the replica is, in fact, the more real, the family home the illusion, the dream, the imaginary. The family home represents an idea, an aesthetic, an unrealistic attempt the map order over a chaotic, unpredictable reality.

The two objects, when in view simultaneously, represent a crisis in the imaginary. But it is the replica, the more concrete object (more concrete by being in focus, by not having dreams of unlived lives projected onto it the way the “real” house has) that mediates the rift in consciousness. The replica momentarily harnesses the unreal and offers us a glimpse by virtue of “radical illumination” the “most Indiana of fish in the most Indiana of waters.”

What’s important to me may not be important to another editor at another journal. In fact, I guarantee it. Different journals ask for different styles or writing, so different stories may prove a better fit for a variety of journals for a variety of reasons. There are editors whose view of what they are looking for is too narrow, who are unwilling to dare an author to challenge them with good work that upends their assumptions, and the industry is worse off for this.

Every story has a home somewhere, and if the author has answered all the essential questions they themselves likely already know need to be answered about their work (though honestly asking these questions which address where the work may still lack “illumination” might be the hardest part about writing well, as responding to them requires hard labor each author fears they may not have the strength to accomplish), then it’s only a matter of time until they find that home, until they find the right body of water.

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