Posts by Lee Martin
Miami of Ohio Low-Residency MFA Program
I spent last week teaching in the low-residency MFA program at Miami of Ohio in Oxford, Ohio, making trips back to Columbus two days so I could teach my classes at Ohio State. Needless to say, if anyone needs to know the route from Columbus to Oxford, I’m your guy. During that week, I talked…
Read MoreDriving at Night in the Fog: Strategies for Beginning a Novel
E.L. Doctorow said this in a Paris Review Writers at Work interview: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” I’m sure, like me, you’ve felt that fog as you contemplate starting a new project.…
Read MoreNew Year, New Writing: Tips for Moving Ahead
Here we are at the start of another year, and though the winter weather has yet to be harsh here in central Ohio, we can safely assume that it will eventually slap us with cold and snow. We know this because we’ve lived through it before and will surely do so again. Each flip of…
Read MoreOn the New Year
Something about the current state of things in our country invites me to share this post from a few years ago, updated a tad to account for the passing of time. When I was a boy, it was my family’s New Year’s Eve tradition to gather for an oyster soup supper, followed by a rousing…
Read MoreTo Cherish the World: A Christmas Wish
I was back in my native southeastern Illinois last week, and I happened to have a little dust-up with a stranger at the local fitness center. Let’s say we should have agreed to disagree and left it at that, but we didn’t. She, a very nice elderly lady, broached a subject she shouldn’t have brought…
Read MoreAre You Writing What Matters?
My father used to tell me, when I was a small boy who liked to think he knew a thing or two about a thing or two, “You’re just talking to hear yourself roar.” Or sometimes he’d use a variation, “You’re just talking to hear your head rattle.” I’m remembering these sayings here at the…
Read MoreStory Starters: Some Prompts
Often ideas for stories can come from things we overhear people say, things that make us curious. For example, I once heard a woman say, “I’m just a drunk girl in stilettos.” Okay, I confess the woman who said it would one day be my wife. The actual facts of the story don’t matter, What…
Read MoreBlack Friday: What If?
Cathy and I were in Home Depot on Black Friday, looking at items for our front porch Christmas display, when an elderly woman with an empty shopping cart said to me, “I used to play Santa Claus.” It was a dreary night, cold and damp, but there in Home Depot surrounded by the artificial trees…
Read MoreTrouble Resonates: How to Use It in Fiction
Please don’t tell the folks who sign my checks at The Ohio State University, but my wife Cathy has always been a fan of the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team. She’s always wanted to see them in person rather than on television, and today, thanks to a game here at OSU, this was the…
Read MoreAugust, 1974
I was eighteen years old the summer Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. I was between my freshman and sophomore years of college, and I worked as a sales clerk at Sherman’s Department Store in Olney, Illinois. Each afternoon around three o’clock, my manager sent me to the drug store across the street to buy him…
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