Lee Martin

I’ve had a request to do a blog post about how to treat others fairly when writing memoir. It’s a challenge we all come up against, especially when we write about people who may have hurt us in various ways. Often these people are family members, and sometimes they’re still alive and our relationships with…

I’m sorry I wasn’t able to make a new blog post last week. I was in intensive care at the time with a critically low sodium level and Influenza A. As with all experiences we’d rather not have, there were some bright spots, moments that were instructive, not only for the person I am, but…

When I first arrived at the annual Associated Writing Programs conference last week, I went in search of registration. I had no idea where it was or how I was going to get there. If I hadn’t asked more than a few folks for directions, I could have spent a good deal of time wandering…

Here we are in early February, a time known as mid-winter, or so I learned from a column in this morning’s Columbus Dispatch. This same article told me that the old-timers had a saying: “Have half your wood and half your hay, and you’ll come safely through to May.” The lesson is don’t waste all…

Eudora Welty’s story, “Why I Live at the P.O.” opens like this: I was getting along fine with Mama, Papa-Daddy, and Uncle Rondo until my sister Stella Rondo just separated from her husband and came back home again. Mr. Whittaker! Of course I went with Mr. Whitaker first, when he first appeared here in China…

A large part of the memoir writer’s task is to decide what to leave out. After all, we’re talking about the span of a life, and we certainly can’t include everything. Our initial instincts with memoir tell us that a certain degree of chronology is in order. We’ll move from this point in time to…

This morning, my wife and I watch a swan gliding along on the lake near the bank, and we talk about how unusual it is to see this lone swan when we typically see two, three, as many as six. I know, because my wife passed along information she got from a game warden who…

Spring Semester classes begin this week at Ohio State University, a fact that leads me to thinking about beginnings in general and the openings of narratives in particular. More to the point, I’m thinking about the ways we get stories started when we’re not even sure what stories we want to tell. How, in other…

I often get asked how long it takes me to write a novel. My standard answer is three years, but really I have no idea. It’s hard to pin down because how do we know when the writing begins? Oh sure, I know when I first put pen to paper, or first pressed fingers to…

Garrison Keillor, in Leaving Home, says, “A lovely thing about Christmas is that it’s compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.” There’s something here that speaks to the short story form. What is a well-told story but a thunderstorm that we—writer, character, and readers—experience together. I’ve been thinking quite a bit…