Posts by Lee Martin
Using Photographs in Memoir: An Illustration
In the photograph, my mother isn’t looking at the camera. Instead, she’s looking down on her nephew, who must be about two at the time. He holds onto her hand. He’s dapper in his playsuit, his chubby legs bare from knees to ankles where his short white socks and his baby shoes anchor him. Still,…
Read MoreUsing the Figurative to Deepen the Prose
I love Jill Christman’s essay, “The Sloth,” so much, I’m going to quote it here, as published in Brevity, in its entirety: There is a nothingness of temperature, a point on the body’s mercury where our blood feels neither hot nor cold. I remember a morning swim on the black sand eastern coast of…
Read MoreBelieve
Last night, Cathy and I braved the cold and snow and ice to hear the music of Phil Dirt and the Dozers, a band who plays, as one member says, “songs from the nineteen-hundreds.” In other words, an oldies band that first formed in 1981and has kept going ever since. One member is approaching eighty;…
Read MoreSmall Moments of Joy
Here in central Ohio, we’re in the heart of winter. Snow on the ground. Cold temperatures. Fierce winds. Dark longer in the mornings. Gray days. Early nightfalls. It’s enough, at least for me, to invite despair. Especially at night, just before I close my eyes for sleep, I’m prone to wander into what I call…
Read MoreIn Memoriam
When I met Carter Taylor Seaton, we were in her hometown of Huntington, West Virginia. I’d driven down from Ohio with my wife Cathy because Eliot Parker had invited me to do a reading and an interview with a show on local cable television. He introduced me to Carter, a wiry, white-haired woman who reminded…
Read MoreUsing Liminal Spaces to Create Narratives
Here we are at the end of another year, and soon we’ll be beginning a new one. These liminal spaces, where we stand at a threshold, one foot in the present and one in the future, can be fruitful for character exploration in our writing. Consider a character who buys something new. Maybe it’s a…
Read MoreWhatever Happened to Fast Starts?
I read a lot of student-written short stories, and these days I’m left to wonder whether opening amid significant action, and with just a touch of mystery, has fallen out of favor. “I was in bed when I heard the gate.” So begins Raymond Carver’s story, “I Could See the Smallest Things.” Tobias Wolff’s “Next…
Read MoreWhat to Write When You’re Not Writing
Intrigued by the title of this post? So am I because I have no idea what it means. It came to me as I was thinking about what to write for my weekly blog. This post comes as a very busy semester is winding down for me, and still I have tasks to complete such…
Read MoreA Beautiful Day
Cathy and I had a wonderful day—a little exercise, a good breakfast, a short road trip, a little shopping. Not a thing went haywire. A little laughter, a little conversation, a little flirting, a little of this, and a little of that. Nothing memorable outside the blessing of our time together. I mention this because…
Read MoreMirror Characters
In 1964, when I was eight, a high school basketball team from Southern Illinois made it to the championship game of the state tournament. This happened at a time when all the schools in the state, no matter their size, competed for the crown. For tiny Cobden, population 918, to make it all the way…
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