LECTURE: Friday, November 21, 12:00 noon
Forestry Building Room 106, The University of Montana
PROSE READING: Friday, November 21, 7:00 pm
The Dell Brown Room, Turner Hall, The University of Montana
Visiting Prose Writer MICHAEL MARTONE
The University of Montana Creative Writing Program is pleased to announce the seventh and eighth events in its Fall 2008 Series: a lecture by Visiting Fiction Writer MICHAEL MARTONE, Friday, November 21, 12:00 noon in the Forestry Building Room 106 on the University of Montana campus entitled Homer on Homer Or A Bunch of Stuff that Happens: An Episodic Meditation on Anecdote, Melodrama, Twists and Turns of Fate, Surprise Endings, Gods from Machines, Dead Horses and Shaggy Dogs, Seasons of Television, the Turning Out, the Winding Up, the Coming to Pass-ness, the Picaresque, the Point, and the Plot followed by a prose reading Friday, November 21, 7:00 p.m. in the Dell Brown Room of Turner Hall, on the University of Montana campus.
MICHAEL MARTONE was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and grew up there. He is the author of several books most recently Racing in Place, a book of essays, Double-wide his collected early fiction, and Michael Martone, a memoir done in contributor's notes. He also has edited a series of fiction and nonfiction anthologies. He currently teaches at the University of Alabama and has taught at Iowa State, Harvard, and Syracuse Universities.
Of Martone’s work, Barret Hathcock has said it is hard to classify—Racing in Place reads like a series of experimental essay-like memoirs (or memoir-like essays); Michael Martone is a collection of fake contributor’s notes, except that they were all published as real, true contributor’s notes; The Blue Guide to Indiana includes tours for landmarks and attractions that don’t exist in Indiana, but should. Taken as a whole, Martone’s work doesn’t so much explode convention as expose it and then re-arrange it, as if literature were some vast modular housing structure, so that every day, when you came home from work, someone had re-arranged not just your furniture but the layout of the rooms, the architecture of the house, everything. Today you enter through the front door, tomorrow through the chimney.
Each semester, the Creative Writing Program presents readings by acclaimed writers. This Fall’s series features Visiting Fiction Writer Beverly Lowry, Prose Faculty, poets Robert Pack, Rusty Morrison, Melissa Kwasny, and Poetry Faculty, as well as talks by Charles Altieri and Paul Mariani. All of the events are free and open to the public.
For more information on the Creative Writing Program and its Fall 2008 Reading Series, visit http://www.cas.umt.edu/english/creative_writing/readingseries.html or contact the information above.
Age Group: All Ages Venue: University of Montana Address: Forestry Building Room 106 Phone: (406) 243-5267
University of Montana
