Lee Martin

Our lives are made up of many strands—some of experience, some of memory, some of meditation and reflection, some of ongoing action. Those who write memoir must find the appropriate forms for ensuring that the textures of life will have their full expression. What we know about the braided essay offers us a plan for…

Flannery O’Connor famously said, “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” Granted, there’s probably more than a nugget of truth in what O’Connor said, but this quote has…

I’ve often reported a saying of my father’s: “If if’s and but’s were candies and nuts, we’d all have a merry Christmas.” For a man who didn’t read any book but the Bible, he had a way with language. His saying takes me into the land of if-only’s, and I start to think about how…

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about memoirs that don’t tell their stories in traditional narratives. Maybe they shake up chronology. Maybe they fragment it. Maybe they let it spin off into patterns of association. For the sake of convenience, I’ll call these lyric memoirs, though I suppose we could just as easily call…

I just came back from a weekend in my native southeastern Illinois where it’s harvest season. Combines are cutting soybeans and picking corn. Sixty years ago, my father made the mistake of trying to clear a clogged shucking box without first shutting down the power take-off. The spinning rollers in the shucking box pulled in…

So You Want to Be a Writer: Ten Tips for Handling Disappointment I remember a time when I was frustrated with the whole writing game because it was just too darned hard, and I wasn’t seeing the results I wanted when it came to publication. Now was that thirty years ago, or last week? My…

To begin, a confession: I never wanted to write a blog. A few years ago, when I was getting my first web site, my designer, who specializes in authors’ web pages, said, “You’ll need to do a blog.” I told him I didn’t want to do a blog. He said, “But you have to. That’s…