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Zone 3 Literary Journal Spring 2010, Volume 25, Issue 1
Volume 25, Issue 1
Spring 2010

Anton Chekhov Writes To His Friend, William Sydney Porter, In The Columbus, Ohio, Federal Penitentiary

My Dear Porter,

I write to you from my own prison, my hothouse Siberia, Yalta. Olga has already returned to the city. By all means, I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her. Oh give me a wife who, like the moon, won’t appear in my sky every day. Here the work is hard, and I write with much difficulty. I long for the days before the consumption and before I turned inward, generally, thinking myself the artist, before that, when I wrote serenely, the way I eat pancakes now. It is the oppressive heat of these environs that has informed my mood, made me moody, propels me to create, in this theater, a theater of mood. Nothing happens here and yet everything does. There, it happened there, right there at the “yet,” the fulcrum of the previous sentence, when things, things, turned. Turned inside out. Turned outside in. The secret, we know, is the animation of that thing called “nothing,” its loco-motion. Like that actual engine, which moves and at the same time moves. The whole contrivance propelled forward while the mechanism of movement—the driving wheels, the pistons and rods, their hubs and bearings—furiously spins. So our texts move and move. The plot on its rails hems and haws while the clockwork of character, the true motive power, the underlying organic lubrication for such incremental perturbation, supplies the real leverage, the play in the works. I think of you, my dear Porter, there in the hospital wing of your prison mixing potions. Incarcerated, proscribed from action, you, trustee, still live, do you not? Inside, you are inside. Inside, you are forced upon your inner resources. Penitent. And I, stewing here in my Yalta, stew too. My doctors tell me both my lungs are now fully involved. I have, Sydneyvitch, a very active inner life. That is a joke, a joke. My silences? No longer silent. Hear that rattle in my breathing? The express train, a stutter of steel wheels over the joints in the steel rails. We see these things differently, you and I. As a druggist you find the world all chemistry. The reagents and reactants in your reactions acting predictable, your doses dose, and do-see-do. As a doctor, I think, what more is there for me to do now—now that we have stopped the blood-letting, returned the leeches back to the wild—but, after a careful read of the symptoms, to diagnose. And then, after that, to sit, to wait and see how it all comes out. How it all comes out. Before you are your mortar and pestle. The ingredients, atomized and combined, a direct result of the pressures of your own hand, your eye for measurement, the proven formulas. Here, there is my patient, taking the airs on the boardwalk with his family, oblivious, the grape clusters of alveoli in his lungs mildewing as he speaks, more rusty with each breath until when one day… My dear Porter, one day you must settle on a name. It is not difficult to follow you through the pages of McClure’s as your distinctive stories and style are your signature even as you disguise yourself from yourself name after name. It is perhaps our greatest work, our most telling character, the one we construct for our own inhabitation. Our fictions are mere fashion, our wardrobe, even when tailored without prison stripes. Our work a kind of portable prison, Monsieur Porter. We all come from beneath the overcoat, my friend. Imagine there in your many prisons, your prisons inside prisons, a final name, a finished character, the world can alter with a proper suffix, ironic, surprising in a good way, something to hang an     -esque onto.

I remain yours, etc.

Antasha

About Michael Martone

Michael Martone’s most recent books are Brooding essays, The Moon Over Wapakoneta: Fictions and Science Fictions from Indiana and Beyond, and MemorandaWinesburg, Indiana Four for a QuarterNot Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fiction from the FlyoverRacing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins, a collection of essays, and Double-wide, his collected early stories, Michael Martone, a memoir in contributor’s notes, Unconventions, Writing on Writing, and Rules of Thumb, edited with Susan Neville, are other titles in print. He is also the author of The Blue Guide to Indiana, published by FC2. The University of 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 Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. Martone is the author of five other books of short fiction including Seeing EyePensées: The Thoughts of Dan QuayleFort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s ListSafety 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’sEsquireStoryAntaeusNorth American ReviewBenzeneEpochDenver QuarterlyIowa ReviewThird CoastShenandoahBomb, and other magazines.

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. He was awarded the Mark Twain Award by The Society for the Study  of Midwestern Literature. He is the winner of the Indiana Author’s Award in 2013. His stories and essays have appeared and been cited in the Pushcart PrizeThe Best American Stories and The Best American Essays anthologies.

Michael Martone is currently a Professor at the University of 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. 

from the University of Alabama

Zone 3 Literary Journal Spring 2010, Volume 25, Issue 1
Zone 3 Press, the literary magazine of Austin Peay State University
Volume 25, Issue 1
Spring 2010

Anton Chekhov Writes To His Friend, William Sydney Porter, In The Columbus, Ohio, Federal Penitentiary

My Dear Porter,

I write to you from my own prison, my hothouse Siberia, Yalta. Olga has already returned to the city. By all means, I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her. Oh give me a wife who, like the moon, won’t appear in my sky every day. Here the work is hard, and I write with much difficulty. I long for the days before the consumption and before I turned inward, generally, thinking myself the artist, before that, when I wrote serenely, the way I eat pancakes now. It is the oppressive heat of these environs that has informed my mood, made me moody, propels me to create, in this theater, a theater of mood. Nothing happens here and yet everything does. There, it happened there, right there at the “yet,” the fulcrum of the previous sentence, when things, things, turned. Turned inside out. Turned outside in. The secret, we know, is the animation of that thing called “nothing,” its loco-motion. Like that actual engine, which moves and at the same time moves. The whole contrivance propelled forward while the mechanism of movement—the driving wheels, the pistons and rods, their hubs and bearings—furiously spins. So our texts move and move. The plot on its rails hems and haws while the clockwork of character, the true motive power, the underlying organic lubrication for such incremental perturbation, supplies the real leverage, the play in the works. I think of you, my dear Porter, there in the hospital wing of your prison mixing potions. Incarcerated, proscribed from action, you, trustee, still live, do you not? Inside, you are inside. Inside, you are forced upon your inner resources. Penitent. And I, stewing here in my Yalta, stew too. My doctors tell me both my lungs are now fully involved. I have, Sydneyvitch, a very active inner life. That is a joke, a joke. My silences? No longer silent. Hear that rattle in my breathing? The express train, a stutter of steel wheels over the joints in the steel rails. We see these things differently, you and I. As a druggist you find the world all chemistry. The reagents and reactants in your reactions acting predictable, your doses dose, and do-see-do. As a doctor, I think, what more is there for me to do now—now that we have stopped the blood-letting, returned the leeches back to the wild—but, after a careful read of the symptoms, to diagnose. And then, after that, to sit, to wait and see how it all comes out. How it all comes out. Before you are your mortar and pestle. The ingredients, atomized and combined, a direct result of the pressures of your own hand, your eye for measurement, the proven formulas. Here, there is my patient, taking the airs on the boardwalk with his family, oblivious, the grape clusters of alveoli in his lungs mildewing as he speaks, more rusty with each breath until when one day… My dear Porter, one day you must settle on a name. It is not difficult to follow you through the pages of McClure’s as your distinctive stories and style are your signature even as you disguise yourself from yourself name after name. It is perhaps our greatest work, our most telling character, the one we construct for our own inhabitation. Our fictions are mere fashion, our wardrobe, even when tailored without prison stripes. Our work a kind of portable prison, Monsieur Porter. We all come from beneath the overcoat, my friend. Imagine there in your many prisons, your prisons inside prisons, a final name, a finished character, the world can alter with a proper suffix, ironic, surprising in a good way, something to hang an     -esque onto.

I remain yours, etc.

Antasha

Volume 25, Issue 1
Spring 2010

Anton Chekhov Writes To His Friend, William Sydney Porter, In The Columbus, Ohio, Federal Penitentiary

My Dear Porter,

I write to you from my own prison, my hothouse Siberia, Yalta. Olga has already returned to the city. By all means, I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her. Oh give me a wife who, like the moon, won’t appear in my sky every day. Here the work is hard, and I write with much difficulty. I long for the days before the consumption and before I turned inward, generally, thinking myself the artist, before that, when I wrote serenely, the way I eat pancakes now. It is the oppressive heat of these environs that has informed my mood, made me moody, propels me to create, in this theater, a theater of mood. Nothing happens here and yet everything does. There, it happened there, right there at the “yet,” the fulcrum of the previous sentence, when things, things, turned. Turned inside out. Turned outside in. The secret, we know, is the animation of that thing called “nothing,” its loco-motion. Like that actual engine, which moves and at the same time moves. The whole contrivance propelled forward while the mechanism of movement—the driving wheels, the pistons and rods, their hubs and bearings—furiously spins. So our texts move and move. The plot on its rails hems and haws while the clockwork of character, the true motive power, the underlying organic lubrication for such incremental perturbation, supplies the real leverage, the play in the works. I think of you, my dear Porter, there in the hospital wing of your prison mixing potions. Incarcerated, proscribed from action, you, trustee, still live, do you not? Inside, you are inside. Inside, you are forced upon your inner resources. Penitent. And I, stewing here in my Yalta, stew too. My doctors tell me both my lungs are now fully involved. I have, Sydneyvitch, a very active inner life. That is a joke, a joke. My silences? No longer silent. Hear that rattle in my breathing? The express train, a stutter of steel wheels over the joints in the steel rails. We see these things differently, you and I. As a druggist you find the world all chemistry. The reagents and reactants in your reactions acting predictable, your doses dose, and do-see-do. As a doctor, I think, what more is there for me to do now—now that we have stopped the blood-letting, returned the leeches back to the wild—but, after a careful read of the symptoms, to diagnose. And then, after that, to sit, to wait and see how it all comes out. How it all comes out. Before you are your mortar and pestle. The ingredients, atomized and combined, a direct result of the pressures of your own hand, your eye for measurement, the proven formulas. Here, there is my patient, taking the airs on the boardwalk with his family, oblivious, the grape clusters of alveoli in his lungs mildewing as he speaks, more rusty with each breath until when one day… My dear Porter, one day you must settle on a name. It is not difficult to follow you through the pages of McClure’s as your distinctive stories and style are your signature even as you disguise yourself from yourself name after name. It is perhaps our greatest work, our most telling character, the one we construct for our own inhabitation. Our fictions are mere fashion, our wardrobe, even when tailored without prison stripes. Our work a kind of portable prison, Monsieur Porter. We all come from beneath the overcoat, my friend. Imagine there in your many prisons, your prisons inside prisons, a final name, a finished character, the world can alter with a proper suffix, ironic, surprising in a good way, something to hang an     -esque onto.

I remain yours, etc.

Antasha

About Michael Martone

Michael Martone’s most recent books are Brooding essays, The Moon Over Wapakoneta: Fictions and Science Fictions from Indiana and Beyond, and MemorandaWinesburg, Indiana Four for a QuarterNot Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fiction from the FlyoverRacing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins, a collection of essays, and Double-wide, his collected early stories, Michael Martone, a memoir in contributor’s notes, Unconventions, Writing on Writing, and Rules of Thumb, edited with Susan Neville, are other titles in print. He is also the author of The Blue Guide to Indiana, published by FC2. The University of 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 Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. Martone is the author of five other books of short fiction including Seeing EyePensées: The Thoughts of Dan QuayleFort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s ListSafety 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’sEsquireStoryAntaeusNorth American ReviewBenzeneEpochDenver QuarterlyIowa ReviewThird CoastShenandoahBomb, and other magazines.

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. He was awarded the Mark Twain Award by The Society for the Study  of Midwestern Literature. He is the winner of the Indiana Author’s Award in 2013. His stories and essays have appeared and been cited in the Pushcart PrizeThe Best American Stories and The Best American Essays anthologies.

Michael Martone is currently a Professor at the University of 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. 

from the University of Alabama