Enjoying Michael Martone‘s Table Talk & Second Thoughts (2025), a delightful memoir in flashes released from Cornerstone Press. The opening piece, “Trains: Tuscaloosa, 2010,” recounts a moment that Martone shared with Adrienne Rich two years before her death:
She asked about the train trestle she’d seen crossing the Black Warrior River. I told her that the L&N, the GM&O, and the Southern all had depots here….
Martone‘s moment with Rich is especially connective and familiar. Trains and train bridges are nostalgic for many in the U.S. and it made me curious about this train trestle (think the railroad scene in Stand by Me, “Train!”), a stretch of bridge towering over water, no exit ramp. No walkway. Crossing a trestle bridge on foot is an act of faith and extreme stupidity, perhaps what it took to build the first tracks and bridges and trains moving materials cross country. This led me to the a little reading on the GM&O at the Library of Congress:
Significance: This structure represents the railroads in the District and the vital part they played in opening up mining areas, moving raw materials to processing plants and finished goods to markets. / This curved wooden trestle bridge with steel center span stretches across the Warrior River between Tuscaloosa and Northport, serving as the western boundary of the commercial portion of the Northport National Register Historic District. After crossing the Warrior River on a series of concrete reinforced sandstone piers, the trestle bridge a two deck truss with a through truss passes through a city park and just west of the site of Alabama’s second Capitol, now Capitol Park, headed to the M. & O. Shop and Yard, and points beyond.
Trestle bridges are still essential to the movement of raw materials and goods across the country, an essential infrastructure for small businesses and corporations, alike. There are many critical viewpoints to take here but in this space, I felt a nostalgia, too. Like those boys in Stephen King’s Stand by Me, those of us who grew up crossing trestle bridges on foot know the adrenaline, adventure, danger, courage, dim-wittedness of youth. If a train comes, am I close enough to sprint? Will I jump? What will happen if I jump? You find a rhythmic pattern to the step step step from one board to the next and try not to focus on the terrifying height between boards not so unlike a brilliantly spun flash or poem, as much about the spaces between as what is on the page. And in these spaces, you find unexpected connection points, perhaps the truest gifts of both writing and stupid childhood decisions.
Rich names Martone “Train Man,” a way to mark their recollections and in this, the reader might see Rich as “re-visioning” Martone, a craft she wrote with great acclaim in her 1972 essay, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”, the year I was born:
Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.
In this re-visioning, Martone and Rich dip into the structural history of American industrialism, timely in 2025, prescient in 2010. And because of it I now know more than I thought I wanted to know about trestle bridges and now understand I needed to know more about trestle bridges. I know that the GM&O Railroad Bridge replaced the original in 1924 and according to Engineering News-Record, the replacement delayed traffic for only thirty-one hours: “Handling unusual jobs like this with such ease and speed has made American Bridge the country’s number one builder of railroad bridges,” the advertisement boasts. I know that American Bridge also constructed the Point Pleasant Silver Bridge, an eyebar-chain suspension that collapsed in 1967, not so far from where I was born across the river in Marietta, Ohio. Connections.
In Table Talk, one might see Martone as “re-visioning” each of these moments with writers, all of them keyhole glimpses with that Martone wit:
“Big Love: Salt Lake City, 2010” with Lance Olsen
“Leather: Tuscaloosa, 2003” with Mary Gaitskill and George Saunders
“Nerf: Chicago, 2012” with Mark Doty, Major Jackson, Darin Strauss and Roxane Gay
“Seeds: Baltimore, 1977 & 1982” with Mary Robison, John Barth, John Gardner, Frederick Barthelme, Moira Crone, Liz Rosenberg and Molly Peacock
“Flamingoes: Madison, 1984” with Michael Wilkerson and Lorrie Moore
“Pregnant Midge: Tuscaloosa, 2000” with Cris Mazzza
“Riffs: Frostburg, 2014” with Stephen Dunn
“Cut: Baltimore, 1979” with John Irwin and Stephen Dixon
“Metamodernism: Syracuse, 1994” with Donald Barthelme
“Come Back, Syracuse, 1996” with Safiya Henderson-Holmes
“Lowest Common Denominator: Portland, 2006” with Lidia Yuknavitch
“No Pants: Tuscaloosa, 2014” with Rick Moody, Laurel Nakadate and Neal Nakadate
“Dumb: Baltimore, 1978” with Grace Paley
“Intersection: Baltimore, 2015” with ZZ Packer
“Meat and Three: Tuscaloosa, 2004” with Lydia Davis
& many more.
When Rich dubbed Martone, “Train Man…,” was this a slyness on her part? Martone seems to suggest it was. After all, this is Adrienne Rich. And I can’t help but feel a profound loss of her, now. What I would give to hear her thoughts on the new world order because it does feel like walking across train trestles, now, one board at a time, keenly aware of the long fall. I am deeply grateful for this opening memoir in flash, “Trains: Tuscaloosa, 2010,” with Michael Martone and Adrienne Rich. Highly recommended.
About Table Talk & Second Thoughts: A Memoir in Flash
