The Complete Writings of Art Smith

Book Reviews

This book review by Margaret McMullan about fellow Indiana Authors Award-winner Michael Martone’s newest book has us racing out to purchase our copy.

Monthly reviews of books written by Indiana authors are made possible by the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Awards and Indiana Humanities. Opinions expressed in this review are solely those of the reviewer, not any affiliated entity.

At first, you think the author Michael Martone is 100% serious in this faux biography about Art Smith, an early Fort Wayne aviator who invented skywriting.

Art Smith (think of a wordsmith with a plane) performs his skywriting stunts, flying for, over, and sometimes through major historic moments of the twentieth century.

He’s the entertainment at the opening of the Panama Canal, where he brokers a meeting with Presidents Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill Cody, who gives him a gold nugget made into a stick pin.

Smith’s real life was, in fact, exceptional. His parents mortgaged their home for $1,800 so that he could build a plane. Art Smith went on to crash many of his planes. After surviving one such crash, Smith and his flying partner Aimee Cour (yes, that’s her real name) keep fainting during their hastily arranged marriage ceremony.

Throughout this rollicking story, Martone steers us through Art Smith’s travels in short chapters that read like prose poems. The airlift comes from Martone’s flights of fancy.

A necessary minimalist, Art spends his life spinning through blue skies leaving a word, a punctuation mark, or a math formula wafting in the air. His words (Iced air, Flew, Star dusting, Still, Nothing) vanish almost as soon as they’re written, but Martone breathes life back into them and into Art, his story and the unforgettable characters of his wife, his mother, and his father gazing with “clouded eyes upon the cloudless skies.”

There are anecdotes tucked within anecdotes. Even the spaces in space have meaning: “the punctuation of the fading letters accentuating the empty empty distance between those letters that remained temporarily suspended in the cold cold stratosphere.”

With his Vonnegut-like wit, Martone transports us, wrestling on the page with Art’s words and formulas, mapping hashtags and asterisks in blue skies from Indiana’s past.

The Complete Writings of Art Smith the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne is a remarkable Indiana story about an Indiana aviator recorded by an Indiana writer who pilots meaning from words long gone. Art Smith met his match. You’ll want it all to be true.

Monthly Indiana book reviews delivered straight to your inbox

About Michael Martone

Michael Martone’s book, The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone will be published by BOA Editions Ltd., in October of 2020. His newest book, Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana, will be published in September of 2022 by Baobab Press.

Recent books are The Moon Over Wapakoneta; Brooding; Memoranda; 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.

He is also the author of The Blue Guide to Indiana. The University of Georgia Press published his book of essays, The Flatness and Other Landscapes, winner of the AWP Award for Nonfiction, in 2000.

Martone was born and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He attended Butler University and graduated from Indiana University. He holds the 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 from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature.

Michael Martone is recently retired as a Professor at the University of Alabama where he had been teaching since 1996. He has taught creative writing classes for 40 years. He has been a faculty member of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1988. He also taught at Iowa State University, Harvard University, and Syracuse University.

About Margaret McMullan

Margaret McMullan is the author of nine award-winning books including In My Mother’s House and Sources of Light. She received an NEA Fellowship and a Fulbright in Hungary to research her memoir, Where the Angels Lived. She taught at the University of Evansville for 25 years before retiring to write full time in Pass Christian, Mississippi.