Winesburg, Indiana: A Fork River Anthology
231
Winesburg, Indiana: A Fork River Anthology
231eBookBreak Away Book Club Edition (Break Away Book Club Edition)
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Overview
In the mythical town of Winesburg, Indiana, there lives a cleaning lady who can conjure up the ghost of Billy Sunday, a lascivious holy man with an unusual fetish and a burgeoning flock, a park custodian who collects the scat left by aliens, and a night janitor learning to live with life's mysteries, including the zombies in the cafeteria. Winesburg, Indiana, is a town full of stories of plans made and destroyed, of births and unexpected deaths, of remembered pasts and unexplored presents told to the reader by as interesting a cast of characters as one is likely to find in small town America. Brought to life by a lively group of Indiana writers, Winesburg, Indiana, is a place to discover something of what it means to be alive in our hyperactive century from stories that are deeply human, sometimes melancholy, and often damned funny.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253017345 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | Break Away Books |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 231 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Michael Martone is Professor of English at the University of Alabama–Tuscaloosa. He is author of many books including Four for a Quarter: Fictions; Double-wide: Collected Fiction of Michael Martone (IUP, 2007); and editor of Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fiction from the Flyover (IUP, 2009). Martone was the winner of the 2013 National Indiana Authors Award.
Bryan Furuness teaches at Butler University and is author of The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson.
Read an Excerpt
Winesburg, Indiana
A Fork River Anthology
By Michael Martone, Bryan Furuness
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2015 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01734-5
CHAPTER 1
Biddlebaum Cowley Reefy & Swift LLP
Winesburg, Ohio 44690
CEASE AND DESIST DEMAND
Pursuant to Title 17 of the United States Code
City Manager
13 Spalding Street
Winesburg, Indiana 46712
Dear Sir or Madam:
This law firm represents the Town of Winesburg (Ohio). If you are represented by legal counsel, please direct this letter to your attorney immediately and have your attorney notify us of such representation.
It has been brought to our attention that your town, Winesburg (Indiana), has been using the Winesburg trademark in association with the marketing or sale of your products and services, namely, those of meditative introspection, synthetic emotional effects, general literary malaise, and cathartic artistic performances including but not limited to confessions, covetings, secrets-keeping, and the wholesale packaging and propagation of spent signature tears. It is possible that you were unaware of this conflict, so we believe that it is in our mutual interest to bring this matter to your attention.
Winesburg is a registered trademark of our municipality, Winesburg (Ohio), and is used in conjunction with the distribution of dramatic monologues and third-person narrations to invoke the grotesque and map the psychophysiological and neurotic manifestations of its inhabitants in order to derive empathic and epiphanic pleasure and/or pain in a controlled hermetic setting. Winesburg's federal trademark registration has been in full effect for over ninety (90) years, since shortly after the publication of the book of short stories Winesburg, Ohio, by Mr. Sherwood Anderson. That Winesburg, Ohio, refers to a fictional town ofMr. Anderson's own imagination, modeled on the town of Clyde, Ohio, whose malicious libel litigation with the estate of Mr. Anderson continues to this day. The trademarked village of Winesburg (Ohio) was constructed in 1920 in southwestern Paint Township of Holt County by Austrian Mesmerists fleeing the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, aficionados of the book Winesburg, Ohio, and early practitioners and adherents of applied phrenology and Gestalt therapies. A copy of the federal trademark registration is attached for your reference as Exhibit A.
Our federal registration of this trademark provides us with certain proprietary rights. This includes the right to restrict the use of the trademark, or a confusingly similar trademark, in association with confusingly similar products or services such as the distribution of Sadness, Fear, Longing, and Confusion itself. We have patented Madness. We own Trembling. We extensively market Grief. We facilitate the Recovery of Emotionally Paralyzing Memories and the Reliving of Childhood Trauma. We distribute Dirges and provide for all manner of Despairing Confession and Ecstatic Revelation in this aesthetically framed and fictive community situated on a glacial declivity near the second-largest Amish settlement in the United States. The Lanham Act (the U.S. Trademark Act) also provides numerous remedies for trademark infringement and dilution, including but not limited to preliminary and permanent injunctive relief, money damages, a defendant's profits, provisions for the destruction or confiscation of infringing products and promotional materials, and, where intentional infringement is shown (as would be the case here), attorneys' fees and possible treble money damages.
It is urgent that we exercise our right to protect our trademark. It serves as an important and distinctive representation of the origin of our products. State and federal law supports our position that confusingly similar trademarks may cause confusion among customers. This confusion may cause substantial harm to the trademark by facilitating the loss of its effectiveness in establishing a distinct association between it, our products and services, and the town's goodwill.
Due to these concerns, and because unauthorized use of our federally registered trademark amounts to an infringement of our trademark rights, we respectively request that you cease and desist from any further use of the Winesburg trademark in association with the sale, marketing, distribution, promotion, or other identification of your products or services.
This letter is sent without prejudice to Winesburg (Ohio)'s rights and claims, all of which are expressly reserved. In addition to this certified mail, return receipt requested version, I am also sending you a copy of this letter by regular first-class mail in case you refuse to accept the certified mail version of this letter.
Please respond by letter, indicating your intention to cease and desist from the use of the Winesburg trademark, or any confusingly similar trademark, within ten (10) calendar days.
We hope that this issue may be resolved this way so we can avoid any further legal remedies as provided by state law and under federal law pursuant to the Lanham Act.
Sincerely,
Avery Nuit, Esq.
City Manager
The town of Winesburg operates under the weak-mayor system, always has. I am the city manager, a creature of the council charged by the council, five elected members, to keep the trash trucks running on time. There aren't too many other municipal services to attend to. The fire department is volunteer. The county provides the police. There are the sewers of the town, and I maintain them myself and conduct the daily public tours. The sewers of Winesburg are vast, channeling one branch of the Fork River through underground chambers and pools roofed with vaulted ceilings tiled with ceramic-faced bricks. The sewers were the last public works project of the Wabash and Erie Canal before the canal bankrupted the state of Indiana. I mentioned tours but there aren't that many tourists interested in sewers. I walk the tunnels alone, my footsteps on the paving stones echoing. The drip, drip, drip of the seeping water. The rapid splashing over the riprap. There is the landfill as well to manage, the heart-shaped hole where the fossil-rife limestone of the sewers was quarried, punched in the table-flat topography of a field north of Winesburg. We are located on the drained sandy bed of an ancient inland sea. Sea birds from the Great Lakes find their way to the pit, circle and dive down below the rim, emerging with beaks stuffed with human hair, for their nests, I guess. Indiana has complicated laws concerning the disposal of cut hair. Much of the state transships its hair here. A thriving cottage industry persists, that of locket making, using the spent anonymous hair to simulate the locks of a departed loved one. The lockets are afterthoughts, fictional keepsakes. The locket makers can be seen rummaging through the rubbish of the dump, collecting bags of damp felt. Winesburg was the first city in the country to install the emergency 911 telephone number. J. Edward Roush, member of the House of Representatives, was our congressman and was instrumental in establishing the system. I manage that too, taking a shift, at night usually, in the old switching room, to answer the calls of the citizens of Winesburg who more often than not do have something emerging. Usually not an acute emergency but more a chronic unrest. An anxiousness. Not a heart attack but a heartache. I listen. The switches, responding to the impulse of someone somewhere dialing, tsk and sigh and click. I manage. I am the city manager.
* * *
I am not sure what to do with the cease and desist order I duly received from the town of Winesburg, Ohio. I am not sure I understand how to cease and desist the steeping municipal sadness here. It is not as if I or anyone here can help it. Years ago, Fort Wayne, the state's second-largest city twenty miles to the east, decided to exhume its dead and to become, like San Francisco, free of cemeteries and graveyards. The consequence of the decision meant transporting remains to multiple necropoli on the outskirts of Winesburg. The newly dead still arrive daily, carried by a special midnight-blue fleet of North American Van Lines tractor-trailers, escorted up the Lincoln Highway by the Allen County Sheriff's Department. I must admit, it is our biggest industry, bigger than the box factory, the eraser works, and the cheese product plant. We tend. We tend the dead. And the funereal permeates this place in the way fluoxetine, in all its manifestations, saturates the sewers of Winesburg, the spilled and pissed SSRIs of the citizenry sluicing into the water table beneath the fossil seabed of an ancient extinct inland sea. Our deathly still suburbs. Our industrious dust. Our subterranean chemistry. Our tenuous analog telephony. Our thin threads of wistful connection. What am I to do? How am I to cease, desist? Manage?
Amanda Patch
It all started innocently enough when I petitioned the Most Reverend Leo, bishop of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, to initiate the beatification of Father Herman Heilmann, founder of the monastery, Our Lady of the Circumcision, here in Winesburg. Father Herman made a home for his brother fathers, who come from all over the country to this quiet cloistered retreat — a collection of cabins initially converted from the rundown Rail Splitter Motor Court off the old Lincoln Highway — to study and pray and meditate on that old Old Testament story of Abraham having to sacrifice his son Isaac to establish the covenant with the Lord. I just thought the Father's work needed to be recognized, so in addition to my letter-writing campaign, I convinced my reading group to concentrate on one book for a year, deeply meditating on the martyrs, spending each meeting discussing a life of a saint we read in Butler's Lives of the Saints. It was difficult, to say the least. The litanies of the deaths and the dying, the various methods of torture and the infliction of pain, seemed organized in such a way as to demonstrate the excruciating genius of Satan, working through his minions on earth, to exact utter and endless agony. My reading group, made up of several of the neighborhood's ladies and ladies from the church, also met on Wednesdays each spring to follow the March Madness of the basketball tournament, suspending our usual stock club meetings to substitute the brackets for the fine print of the big board. We were, perhaps, predisposed to such communal excitement, some might even say hysteria. As we read and reported on the lives of the saints, our presentations became more elaborate, the distinction between the mere abstract recounting of the material and actually living the lives of the Lives of the Saints became confused for us, and very soon we became enamored by the very particular narratives of the sainted virgins. We were impressed with the passion of their passion to remain undeflowered, intact, innocent, and dedicated to Jesus to the point of taking Our Savior as a wedded yet chaste husband. There were (I remember, how could I forget) multiple incinerations at the stake, crucifixions, beheadings, stonings, rapes, and sodomies with a variety of implements and animals in an effort to pry from these devoted young women the most special jewel in their possession. It was all quite thrilling. We were moved. The antique prose of the text added a musty patina of gothic authenticity to the recitations of anguish, courage, and ecstatic exultation. All of us, by this time, were far from our own corporeal purity, having given birth to nearly four dozen children among us. Many of us now were grandmothers as well. We had long suffered both the pangs of birthing and the fandangos of sexual intercourse, procreative and not, at the hands of our husbands and, dare I say, lovers. I am not sure whose idea it was initially, as many of us have used the skilled services of Dr. Minnick for other plastic operative rearrangements, but we somehow reached a consensus that all of us would participate in a kind of tontine in reverse. We would not so much wait to unstop the cork of a pilfered "liberated" brandy but to stop it all back up again in the first place. You have heard of women's clubs, such as ours, creating calendars of their members photographed tastefully nude, a fundraiser for charity. Our idea was only, we thought, a slight variation on such projects. Perhaps it was Dr. Minnick himself who suggested it, inviting us to consider reconstructive surgeries "down there," commenting that labia reduction was now his most performed and profitable operation, the norming and neatening up, if you will, of the pudenda to the standard folds and tufts, bolsters and grooves, of the ideal cosmetic model. Again, we were thrilled, that such miracles could be performed relatively painlessly in an outpatient setting. But I did know for a fact that this would not suit us. We proposed to Dr. Minnick that he attempt to go beyond the mere landscaping of what could be seen but also seek the unseen, to take us back in time. To state it simply — to reattach our long-gone maidenhoods, cinching closed once more the orifice of our experience, virginal once more. And this he did, was anxious to do. Inventing a kind of embroidered helmet for the task, he wove the cap together from multicolored and multigauged sutures, a kind of monofilament cartilage tissue. The truth is when we are together now, reading further into the lives of the saints and the endless mortifications of the flesh, we continue to admire, in great detail, during our break for cookies and tea, his handiwork performed on each and every one of us, and how such emendations have delivered us all, strangely beautiful and pristine, one step closer to God.
Cleaning Lady to the Stars
Call me Isobelle — at least, that's what my card says. I'd like it better if you call me the cleaning lady to the stars, a.k.a. the professors at St. Meinhof's. They move in here trailing a van full of kitchen gear they don't know how to use, wearing their attitudes like tiaras. One of them got the card made up for me 'cause she thought it was cute. I thought it was embarrassing, but she was right about one thing: you got to have a business card if you want to scrub professors' toilets. They check references, too.
"How you like the Midwest?" I ask the new customers, first time I show up with a mop.
"You mean the Midwaste?" They ask me where you go to eat around here. You go to your well-stocked kitchen, is what I'm thinking, but I point them to Albert's Seafood Lounge, and it's not entirely my fault if they swallow a little botulism with their sushi. We didn't have sushi till Albert thought to bring it in and (in case you hadn't noticed how far we are from the ocean) we survived without it.
The land that time forgot, the professors call Winesburg. They say they'll probably only be here a couple of years, 'cause they're really East Coast people or West Coast people, or if they're truly obnoxious, Texas people. Twenty years later, here is where they're still parked, with their tenure and their season football tickets, and the same forty pounds the rest of us put on since high school. Meanwhile their paychecks have been getting fatter, too, not that they ever do any work I can see, and they've moved on out to the subdivisions with the fruity-tooty gazebos and the house-moats just in case a marauding army's passing by. I haven't noticed no raise in my hourly.
All right, I say to myself. All right, let me play me some Taylor Swift nice and loud as a consolation: nothing like a little young blood to perk up your spirits while you're brushing the high-paid shit off her highness's throne. But if somebody's doing her "research" at home, I'm not allowed even that consolation. "Oh, Izzy, just a smidge lower. Well, maybe a little lower than that."
You find all kinds of things slipped behind their beds and it's another consolation that we're all the same under the skin, only you know they're paying way too much for a vibrating riding crop to arrive in a plain unmarked package when Doug could get one at Boys Will Be Boys out by the bypass for half the price. But this new customer downtown in the miserable Victorian with the sagging floors is more Girls Will Be Boys, anyway. Her name's Betty, old-fashioned and plain like you'd never expect with her purple-tipped spikes. She's as buff as the boys' wrestling coach and she spends a whole lot of time on Craigslist, if you catch my drift.
She's in English where they put all the troublemakers, I've learned over the years — so good, she's feisty, let's ask her to Trivia Night. My pardner Lucille and me been begging professors to go to Trivia Night at St. Casimir's for as long as we've been cleaning, 'cause that's the scam around here: you get you some PhDs and you've got you a winning trivia team. Not that they could do it without us. Lucille and me got to cover TV shows, sports teams, astrology, politics, radiology, and quantum mechanics. But you can count on pretty much any professor, no matter what they claim to teach, for geography, cooking (naturally), gardening, the Kinks, and foreign languages. When they're doing accents it's embarrassing to even be sitting at the same table with them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Winesburg, Indiana by Michael Martone, Bryan Furuness. Copyright © 2015 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contributors include:
Michael Martone, Susan Neville, BJ Hollars, CJ Hribal, Barbara Bean, Kate Bernheimer, Lee Martin, Porter Shreve, Robin Black, Karen Brennan, Brian Buckbee, Shannon Cain, Sherrie Flick, Bryan Furuness, Roxane Gay, Andrew Hudgins, Sean Lovelace, Sam Martone, Erin McGraw, Joyelle McSweeney, Valerie Miner, Kelcey Parker, Ed Porter, Ethel Rohan, Valerie Sayers, Greg Schwipps, George Singleton, Deb Olin Unferth, Jim Walk and Claire Vaye Watkins.
What People are Saying About This
"The concept behind Winesburg, Indiana seems almost impossible to pull off: asking an all-star roster of small and major press writers to contribute work to a fabulist linked story collection. . . .The collection makes the argument that Indiana—not to mention the greater Midwest—is more than just flyover country."
Winesburg, Indiana may, or may not, speak with a forked tongue, or, at least, a tongue planted firmly in a cheek, but this compelling compendium also accomplishes the necessary task of surprising readers with an alternate Indiana. Here you will find thirty of Indiana's most articulate observers and writers full of sass and humor as they take on a host of contemporary stereotypes, spinning them on their heads and leaving any reader dizzy with admiration.
The concept behind Winesburg, Indiana seems almost impossible to pull off: asking an all-star roster of small and major press writers to contribute work to a fabulist linked story collection. . . .The collection makes the argument that Indiana—not to mention the greater Midwest—is more than just flyover country.
This book is funny as hell, and beneath its humor are contemporary grotesques who deepen our understanding of the human condition, making us look unflinchingly at the darker side of human nature and human loneliness, that universally felt alienation common to isolated, repressed Midwestern towns and therefore to almost any small town anywhere in the world.
You may be able to fly over Winesburg, Indiana, but more challenged to take it at ground level, where the Fork River cuts like a knife through the flat terrain. You may find that Winesburg, once discovered, is not easy to leave. A host of characters give voice to their wildest dreams, their dreariest defeats, their sweetest triumphs. The voices of forty denizens hold you in their home town, page after page.
This book is funny as hell, and beneath its humor are contemporary grotesques who deepen our understanding of the human condition, making us look unflinchingly at the darker side of human nature and human loneliness, that universally felt alienation common to isolated, repressed Midwestern towns and therefore to almost any small town anywhere in the world.
Michael Martone, Bryan Furness, and their team of cartographers have taken their pens and knives to the town of Winesburg, Indiana to map out the varieties of human experience lived on the Fork River. They have succeeded in drawing a new prime meridian by which we may chart our joys and sorrows in these short fictions—plotting the intersections of trains and post office murals, cats and young lovers, faith healers and former high school football stars—finally discovering our own selves counted among the townspeople.
You may be able to fly over Winesburg, Indiana, but more challenged to take it at ground level, where the Fork River cuts like a knife through the flat terrain. You may find that Winesburg, once discovered, is not easy to leave. A host of characters give voice to their wildest dreams, their dreariest defeats, their sweetest triumphs. The voices of forty denizens hold you in their home town, page after page.
The concept behind Winesburg, Indiana seems almost impossible to pull off: asking an all-star roster of small and major press writers to contribute work to a fabulist linked story collection. . . .The collection makes the argument that Indiana—not to mention the greater Midwest—is more than just flyover country.
'Virginal' reconstructions, alien scat collectors, manchildren and toenail-eating reverends. Winesburg, Indiana reads like a lung—it expands and holds the big emotions of its many lives; each exhale is an inhabitant, inhabiting. It exists. It will continue to exist, cease and desist demand be damned.
Michael Martone, Bryan Furness, and their team of cartographers have taken their pens and knives to the town of Winesburg, Indiana to map out the varieties of human experience lived on the Fork River. They have succeeded in drawing a new prime meridian by which we may chart our joys and sorrows in these short fictions—plotting the intersections of trains and post office murals, cats and young lovers, faith healers and former high school football stars—finally discovering our own selves counted among the townspeople.
Winesburg, Indiana may, or may not, speak with a forked tongue, or, at least, a tongue planted firmly in a cheek, but this compelling compendium also accomplishes the necessary task of surprising readers with an alternate Indiana. Here you will find thirty of Indiana's most articulate observers and writers full of sass and humor as they take on a host of contemporary stereotypes, spinning them on their heads and leaving any reader dizzy with admiration.
'Virginal' reconstructions, alien scat collectors, manchildren and toenail-eating reverends. Winesburg, Indiana reads like a lung—it expands and holds the big emotions of its many lives; each exhale is an inhabitant, inhabiting. It exists. It will continue to exist, cease and desist demand be damned.