Posts by Lee Martin
Bookstores, a New Novel, and the Heartland
My first experience as a book buyer came in grade school when I eagerly attended my school’s Scholastic Book Fair where I spent my allowance on paperbacks. In those days, I was interested in sports novels, especially ones that featured underdogs overcoming great odds. Looking back now, I imagine my connection to those underdog stories…
Read MoreThe Last Time
Cathy and I took advantage of the good weather today to do our outdoor winterization chores. We carried patio chairs to the basement, brought in the umbrella, covered the patio table, and cleaned out flowerpots. It always makes Cathy sad to see an empty patio, knowing as she does, it signals winter is almost here,…
Read MoreElection Day
I’m five years old, and I’m sitting in the back seat of my father’s Ford sedan, which is a dull brown and dust-covered from driving up and down our township’s gravel roads. We’re parked alongside one of those roads near a country church, its clapboards painted white. Next to the churchyard, there’s a wire fence…
Read MoreTrick 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…
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