Posts by Lee Martin
Trick or Treat: Hokey Smoke!
When I was eight years old, my parents and I lived on the second floor of a duplex just off Cicero Avenue in Oak Forest, Illinois. We’d moved there at the end of August in 1963 because my mother had accepted a teaching position in Arbor Part District 145. She taught third grade at the…
Read MoreEverything Felt Different
Here we are in the fall of the year, a time that always takes me back to Sunday afternoons when my father, at ease on his day of rest, suggested we go for a ride in the country. My mother in the front seat and I in the back, he pointed his Delmont 88 down…
Read MoreWhat’s in a Name?: Plenty
Holly Golightly, Holden Caulfield, Jay Gatsby. These are just a few memorable names from American novels. I don’t mean to say the names alone make the novels remarkable, but I would like to suggest names matter when it comes to our characters. A name immediately hints at a particular kind of person. Holden Caulfield? A…
Read MoreAdding Texture to Our Narratives: A Writing Prompt
Let’s say you, or one of your characters, is supposed go somewhere, but it turns out, for whatever reason, you or they can’t make the trip. Maybe the travel was only a distance of a few doors down to a neighbor’s house, or maybe it was a short drive to the mall or the grocery…
Read MoreFive Ways We Keep Ourselves from Writing
The time in the semester has come when I’m overwhelmed with reading student work. That’s what I’ve been doing on this rainy day, and now I’m worn out, so I’m going to repost this section from my craft book, Telling Stories: I was thinking recently of all the ways that we sometimes keep ourselves from…
Read MoreLost Objects: A Writing Prompt
When I was in the fourth grade, my parents gave me a first baseman glove for my birthday. We lived in Oak Forest, Illinois, a southern suburb of Chicago. One of Chicagoland’s forest preserves, Yankee Woods, stretched out along the edge of the village, and that’s where my parents threw a party for me. My…
Read MoreSome Thoughts on Beginning a Story
Ernest Hemingway’s story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” opens like this: It was very late and everyone had left the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the daytime the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the…
Read MoreNo Explanations
At the end of Katherine Mansfield’s story, “The Garden Party,” a young girl, Laura, tries to explain to her brother, Laurie, what she’s just experienced. After an extravagant garden party at Laura’s home, her mother sends her down the hill with a basket of leftover food for the family of a young workingman who that…
Read MoreIt Could Have Been: The What-Ifs of Narrative
Cathy and I have been watching reruns of the old sitcom, My Three Sons, which first aired in 1960. At that time, I would have been around the same age as the youngest son, Chip, so watching the show has been a bit nostalgic for me. I remember the toys and board games I see…
Read MoreYard Sale: Let’s Start a Story
Cathy and I got some great bargains at Kroger today. Oak milk, two cartons for four dollars; quarts of vegan ice cream, buy one, get one free. Sometimes it takes so little to delight us. Thank goodness for the upright freezer in our basement. So that’s it. That’s the end of the story. It isn’t…
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