Michael Martone – Ruining a Story (January 1990)

“A story,” Michael Martone says, “ is often a littered landscape of parts of things. Where a novel is a forest fire, a story is rust.” Drawing upon the intentional efforts of two architects, Frank Gehry and Richard Rodgers, to make “ruins” of their constructions, Martone illustrates the value and vitality of the unfinished and imperfect in short stories.