Lee Martin

It’s recruitment season for MFA programs, and I’m thinking of all the folks who’ve committed, or soon will, to this degree despite the fact that a 2013 Poets & Writers index says that full-time teaching positions at the university level are available, on average, for well less than one percent of creative writing program graduates.…

These late winter mornings, I hear birdsong. I hear birdsong even though the temperatures have been in the single digits or below zero, even though a new snow storm sweeps through every few days. The birds don’t know how to doubt. The turning of the earth tells them that spring is closer each day. It…

Let’s admit it: Anyone who writes memoir does a song and dance with the facts. Even if we’re determined to be completely faithful and only include the verifiable when it comes to event, chronology, and dialogue, our memories are fallible and sometimes they’re the only thing we can rely on to say “This is the…

I have a piece of wood, nearly six-feet in length, taken from the debris of a farmhouse fallen in on itself. The farmhouse that belonged to my family, the house in which my mother first read to me, the house where I listened to my father and my uncles swap stories, the house where I…

I think often about the objects people handle and how they can pay off for us when we craft narratives. Today, I’m thinking about a story by David Leavitt, “Gravity,” the story of a young man, Theo, who has AIDS. He’s opted for a sight-saving drug over the medications that will prolong his life. He’s…

I’m a writer who runs. I run because it calms me. It creates a quiet, peaceful place from which I can think more clearly, feel more deeply, write with more energy. “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois,” Flaubert said, “so that you may be violent and original in your work.” To…

My mother died on a brutally cold day in January in 1988. She was a grade school teacher for forty-one years, starting at a small country school when she was eighteen and retiring at the age of fifty-nine, the age I am now. Nights, when I was a small boy on our farm, I sat…

I’ve been asked to offer some further thoughts on designing and leading a creative writing workshop, and to respond I thought I’d talk a bit about how I do the novel workshop that I’ve been teaching in the summer at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Conference. This will give me a chance…

This week’s request to talk a bit about leading a writing workshop is timely because the Spring Semester begins at Ohio State today, and this evening, I’ll be meeting with my MFA fiction workshop for the first time. Here are some things I promise to do as I lead this workshop. I offer them here…

I remember on New Year’s Eve, when I was a boy, my father’s side of the family would gather for a supper of oyster soup and games of cards—usually either Pitch or Rook. This was in a day when we didn’t have cell phones that took pictures, when we didn’t live in a society that…