Lee Martin

This is the time of year when summer is starting to feel a bit shabby. We’ve made the turn to August—the dog days—and the heat, the sun, the humidity have begun to feel oppressive. Here in the Midwest, the grass is brown, the daylilies are fading, the leaves of trees curl for want of rain.…

Last week, I posted about how a fiction writer knows when to unpack what a character is carrying around inside him or her, and when to stay outside the consciousness and let the details do the work. Today, I offer a writing activity designed to let you practice both. The objective is to try two…

You know that feeling; you get home from a trip with this suitcase full of stuff, and you have to decide whether to unpack right away, or whether to postpone the chore in favor of plopping down in your favorite chair, or on your favorite sofa, or in your favorite bed, just to rest. And…

A brief post this week from the Antioch Writers Workshop. When I see the high school students here who were awarded scholarships to attend this workshop, I remember what it was like when I, too, was young and trying to find a way to express everything that I was carrying around inside me. When I…

Whenever I started to get fussy as a child, on the verge of a meltdown, or worse yet, a bona fide tantrum, my mother would say to me, “Don’t make a scene.” I knew, then, it was time to settle down, to rein myself in, for fear that I’d provoke my father. “Cool your coppers,”…

Here’s a simple story. I go to an independent book store in a Midwestern town of around 14,000 people to talk about, read from, and sign copies of my new novel, Late One Night. The location isn’t far from where I grew up. I’m back in the part of the world I know best—those small…

When I was a younger writer, just starting to figure out what my vision of the world was and how to translate that onto the page—heck, it was a revelation to me to know that short stories and novels, and later for me, essays and memoirs, reflected the way a writer saw the world and…

My new novel, Late One Night, has been out now for nearly three weeks, and I’ve been doing a few readings, and have some more to come. It’s got me thinking about this thing we writers do in order to drum up interest in our books, this selling, if you will. We sell online, we…

My Aunt Mildred passed away last week, so I’m rerunning this post from two years ago as a tribute to her. When I was a small child, she took me to the gravel road that ran by my grandmother’s house and patiently sat with me while I hunted for rocks, which I found, for whatever…