Lee Martin

Feeling a little disorganized around the holidays? Imagine the way writers of memoirs must feel when faced with the task of giving shape and structure to the experiences that they’re trying to render on the page. I’ve had a request to talk about such things, so here goes. When writing a memoir, we’re faced with…

This week of Christmas, I’m responding to a request to talk a bit about publishing with independent presses. This is becoming an increasingly valid form of publication with several examples of small-press books garnering critical acclaim. The small presses exist to do what many New York houses are becoming leery of doing, namely giving a…

Continuing to respond to your requests for blog posts about particular topics, I turn my attention this week to the question of how I’m able to write about my parents again and again while coming at that material from fresh angles. To be honest, sometimes I worry about my returning to the story of my…

I remember a story about Yogi Berra trying to explain the fine arts of hitting a baseball to another player and then realizing that he really couldn’t explain. “Let me show you,” he said, and he proceeded to demonstrate. Yogi was also known to say at some point, “How can you hit and think at…

I want to thank everyone who responded to last week’s invitation to submit requests for future posts. I received some really good suggestions, and I meant to respond to one of them in this post, but then I saw the sad news that Kent Haruf, author of Benediction, Eventide, Plainsong, The Tie That Binds, and…

I’ve recently seen a Facebook post that allows you to track all of the states that you’ve visited. That got me wondering about how many states I’ve visited to do a reading or to teach a workshop. The total is twenty-eight and spans from Alaska to Florida to Vermont and a whole lot of other…

A brief post after a power outage on a snowy day. I’ve been thinking about the fact that teachers of creative writing often teach us something when they don’t seem to be offering much instruction at all. When I think of all the workshops that I’ve taken, it occurs to me that what I remember…

This is a passage of fact and nostalgia: As we make the turn toward Thanksgiving, I’m thinking about my mother’s side of the family and how each year we gathered for a holiday meal at one house or the other. My mother always brought a chiffon cake. My Aunt Myrtle made bread pudding. My Aunt…

This is a post about teaching, but it starts with a visit to my doctor’s office to have some blood drawn for a routine check of my thyroid levels. I smile at the nurse who draws my blood because she seems just a tad weary, or harried, or both on this cold, rainy day just…

My cousin likes to tell the story of the time when she was a girl, about ten years old, and she was on vacation on Sanibel Island with her parents. They went to a gator farm, and there she was given a stick with a marshmallow on the end and told to hold it out…