The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone

by Michael Martone

Overview

Winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize
Finalist for the the Big Other Award for Fiction

The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone is a Midwestern mythology that celebrates facts, fiction, and the impermanence of art. Inspired by the real-life pioneer of early aviation who invented the art of skywriting, the brief stories in this collection by “editor” Michael Martone follow the adventures of Art Smith and his authorship in the sky. In the spirit of Kurt Vonnegut and Hayao Miyazaki, The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone recreates the wonder of the early flying machines as it reimagines the unwritten stories we tell about the daredevils who flew them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781950774210
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	10/13/2020
Series:	American Reader Series , #35
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he learned at a very early age, about flight. His mother, a high school English teacher, read to him of the adventures of Daedalus and Icarus from the book Mythology written by Edith Hamilton, who was born in Dresden, Germany, but who also grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Martone remembers being taken by his father to Baer Field, the commercial airport and Air National Guard base, to watch the air traffic there. He was blown backward on the observation deck by the prop-wash of the four-engine, aluminum-skinned Lockheed Constellation with its elegant three-tailed rudder turning away from the gates. At the same time, the jungle-camouflaged Phantom F-4s did touch-and-goes on the long runway, the ignition of their after-burners sounding as if the sky was being torn like blue silk. As a child growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Martone heard many stories about Art Smith, “The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne,” and the adventures of this early aviation pioneer. In the air above the city, Martone, as a boy, imagined, “The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne” accomplishing, for the first time, the nearly impossible outside loop and then a barrel-roll back into a loop-to-loop in his fragile cotton canvas and baling wire flying machine he built in his own backyard in Fort Wayne, Indiana, whose sky above was the first sky, anywhere, to be written on, written on by Art Smith, “The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne,” the letters hanging there long enough to be read but then smeared, erased by the high altitude wind, turning into a dissipating front of fogged memories, cloudy recollection.

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: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins, a collection of essays; and Double-wide, his collected early stories. Michael Martone, is a memoir in contributor’s notes. Unconventions: Writing on Writing and Rules of Thumb, edited with Susan Neville, are craft books. He is also the author of The Blue Guide to Indiana, published by FC2. The Universityof Georgia Press published his book of essays, The Flatness and Other Landscapes, winner of the AWP Award for Nonfiction, in 2000. With Robin Hemley, he edited Extreme Fiction. 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 Seeing Eye; Pensées: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle; Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler's List; Safety Patrol; and Alive and Dead in Indiana. He has edited two collections of essays about the Midwest: A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest and Townships: Pieces of the Midwest. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper's, Esquire, Story, Antaeus, North American Review, Benzene, Epoch, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, Third Coast, Shenandoah, Bomb, Story Quarterly, American Short Fiction and other magazines.

Martone was born and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He attended Butler Universityand graduated from Indiana University. He holds an MA from The Writing Seminars of The Johns Hopkins University.

Martone has won two Fellowships from the NEA and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His stories have won awards in the Italian Americana fiction contest, the Florida Review Short Story Contest, the Story magazine Short, Short Story Contest, the Margaret Jones Fiction Prize of Black Ice Magazine, and the first World's Best Short, Short Story Contest. His stories and essays have appeared and been cited in the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Stories and The Best American Essays anthologies. In 2013 he received the national Indiana Authors Award, and in 2016, the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contribution to Midwestern Literature.

Michael Martone is currently a Professor at the Universityof Alabama where he has been teaching since 1996. He has been a faculty member of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1988. He has taught at Iowa State University, Harvard University, and Syracuse University.

Table of Contents

Some Early Ephemera

Postcards with Captions, Undated Photography with Notes 9

Panama 15

Hell 26

The Ampersand 29

Benday 31

A Father's Vision 35

A Field Guide to the Birds of Indiana 42

Mom 50

Further Writing 53

When 58

The Tragic Elopement 62

If 65

The Unknown 69

String 75

WOWO 80

Scale 85

Word Cross 92

Instructions in War Time 95

Iced Air 102

Influenza 105

Still 110

Mayday, Mayday, Mayday 115

O 118

Thin 130

Birth 135

Nothing 137

Roses 140

The Moon 145

Lucky 147

The Falling Leaf 149

Gas City 155

Rest 160

The Border 167

A B C 175

Metro Day 186

Terre Haute 191

Ohio 198

French Lick 208

Good Night 213

Acknowledgments 217

About the Author 221

Colophon 224

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Michael Martone's clever, hilarious prose soars in this faux biography of a real person, Art Smith, an early Fort Wayne aviator who invented skywriting. A necessary minimalist, Art spends his life spinning through blue skies leaving words, punctuation marks, even math formulas. Martone charts Art’s fictional flights through major historic moments of the twentieth century. We meet Gertrude Stein, Buffalo Bill Cody, Presidents Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. With his signature wit, Martone pilots meaning from Art’s skywriting, making poetry out of writing which disappeared almost as soon as it was written.”

—Margaret McMullan, author of Where the Angels Lived

“There is plenty of play in this enchanting and haunted book—the play of language is rich, for example, but there are much deeper layers of play as well, with the literature of an earlier era, with world events of that time, and the implicit knowledge of the world to come, our own. By spending time with the American history of a more innocent time, this wondrous book offers something vital to our present, a key to explain who we are, and the wishful logic fanning our airy aspirations. Despite modernity and the rise of industry, as this exploration makes plain, our long-standing divide is a pastoral dilemma.
Our actual belonging place is the earth, and there we know each other. But often we find that the desire of the human spirit, however it is housed, is to soar, Icarus-like, above the firmament, into the nameless air of the air, to see our home from above. It is fitting that the protagonist of this richly imagined book, upon his youthful launch, becomes a ‘citizen of the sky.’ And a phrase like that follows along at the end of any number of sentences in this book, fleetingly and ephemeral, like a contrail.”

—Maurice Manning, author of Railsplitter

“Unlike the subject of this book—skywriting—Martone's words do not swiftly dissipate but instead imprint in our imagination. Are these real, dreamed, haunted, or encoded messages? It hardly matters in this convincing and fanciful lyric. We go into the cloud of words and punctuation in a flight of unlikely maneuvers, in daring associations of land and air, often mediated by birds on the wing, and we read as if augers of old. What is our future? What hath he writ, this Bird Man of Fort Wayne?”

—Heid E. Erdrich, editor of New Poets of Native Nations

Editorial Reviews

08/31/2020

Martone (The Moon over Wapakoneta) offers a high-flying faux biography of Art Smith (1890–1926), the so-called Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Ind., an early stunt pilot and pioneer in the field of skywriting. In 39 vignettes, each accompanied by a grainy photograph of Smith’s varied inscriptions on the “transparent medium of the sky,” Martone tracks Smith’s progress from crafting crude advertisements to eccentric works of art and cryptic messages of his own devising (including arcane designs and palindromes). In a Zelig-like odyssey, Smith appears at the opening of the Panama Canal, inspires the Great Straw Hat Day Riot of 1922, visits Japan, meets Gertrude Stein in Paris, and inspires a rare smile in Franz Kafka. Sidelined from serving as a combat pilot during WWI, Smith nevertheless ushers in the age of the aeroplane, frequently crashing but managing to cheat death right up to his fatal final flight in 1926 while carrying mail over the Midwest (but not before completing a final airborne inscription reading “good night”). Though the assortment of encounters with early-20th-century luminaries can grow exhausting, Martone succeeds at crafting brilliant images in his descriptions of Smith’s stunt work. The result makes the reader appreciate the descriptions and photographs of Smith’s aeronautics as its own kind of poetry. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Michael Martone's clever, hilarious prose soars in this faux biography of a real person, Art Smith, an early Fort Wayne aviator who invented skywriting. A necessary minimalist, Art spends his life spinning through blue skies leaving words, punctuation marks, even math formulas. Martone charts Art’s fictional flights through major historic moments of the twentieth century. We meet Gertrude Stein, Buffalo Bill Cody, Presidents Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. With his signature wit, Martone pilots meaning from Art’s skywriting, making poetry out of writing which disappeared almost as soon as it was written.”
—Margaret McMullan, author of Where the Angels Lived

“There is plenty of play in this enchanting and haunted book—the play of language is rich, for example, but there are much deeper layers of play as well, with the literature of an earlier era, with world events of that time, and the implicit knowledge of the world to come, our own. By spending time with the American history of a more innocent time, this wondrous book offers something vital to our present, a key to explain who we are, and the wishful logic fanning our airy aspirations. Despite modernity and the rise of industry, as this exploration makes plain, our long-standing divide is a pastoral dilemma. Our actual belonging place is the earth, and there we know each other. But often we find that the desire of the human spirit, however it is housed, is to soar, Icarus-like, above the firmament, into the nameless air of the air, to see our home from above. It is fitting that the protagonist of this richly imagined book, upon his youthful launch, becomes a ‘citizen of the sky.’ And a phrase like that follows along at the end of any number of sentences in this book, fleetingly and ephemeral, like a contrail.”
—Maurice Manning, author of Railsplitter

“Unlike the subject of this book—skywriting—Martone's words do not swiftly dissipate but instead imprint in our imagination. Are these real, dreamed, haunted, or encoded messages? It hardly matters in this convincing and fanciful lyric. We go into the cloud of words and punctuation in a flight of unlikely maneuvers, in daring associations of land and air, often mediated by birds on the wing, and we read as if augers of old. What is our future? What hath he writ, this Bird Man of Fort Wayne?”
—Heid E. Erdrich, editor of New Poets of Native Nations

From the Publisher