Lee Martin

(In memory of my mother on Mother’s Day, I re-post this from a couple of years ago):   My Mother’s Hands Because my father lost his hands, my mother made a gift of hers. Cuticles ragged, knuckles scraped, fingernails smashed—farm work showed her no mercy. Her hands were made for more delicate things, but she…

It’s that time of year again—graduation—which means the time has come to bid a fond farewell to another class of MFA students. On Saturday night, here at The Ohio State University, we celebrated, as we always do, with a gala event at which twelve poets and prose writers showed us exactly what they’d been up…

I’m posting early this week because I’ll be in West Virginia visiting two campuses of Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College, a land of mountains and switchbacks and steep roads that don’t run straight. On Monday, I’ll be talking to the students there—students who have been reading my work—even though it means I won’t…

Writers, like long-distance runners, tend to hit the wall at some point of the composing process, that point where the writing threatens to shut down, when we feel totally disengaged from our material, and the words are wooden, or won’t come at all. In my own case, this has led to hours of staring out…

I spent my teenage years in the small town of Sumner, Illinois, a town of around a thousand people. Before that, except for the six years my family spent in Oak Forest, a southern suburb of Chicago, where my mother taught third grade, I lived on a farm ten miles southwest of Sumner in Lukin…

When we construct a narrative, either in fiction or creative nonfiction, we have to build a believable world from the particulars we create or remember. Our first obligation, then, is to notice everything. Joseph Conrad says, “My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you…

In 2003, the University of Nebraska Press published my book, Turning Bones, as part of their nonfiction series, American Lives. The book was a blend of fact and fiction. I used information gathered about paternal ancestors I never knew to invent them on the page and to find the intersections between them and me. Part…

Today, I start with a memory of my mother in the kitchen on Sundays. She has prepared as much of our noon meal as possible before church, but she still has work to do. This is her day of rest, a day she doesn’t work in the laundry or the kitchen at the nursing home,…

I’m on leave and not teaching this semester, but in many ways it seems that I am, and that’s okay. Teaching is something I love. Sometimes I love it as much as writing. Sometimes I love it less. Sometimes I put on my crabby pants and grumble about all the time that being a teacher…

I’ve always thought that writing memoir, in some ways, is easier than writing fiction because the plot is already in place. We know the major players. We know what they did or didn’t do. We know the narrative arc of a certain slice of experience. We don’t have to make anything up. But, of course,…