Lee Martin

In 1990, I bought a La-Z-Boy rocker/recliner for my study, and spent a number of years sitting in it, writing. I still own that chair, and, when I want some time to ponder or to daydream while working on an essay, a story, a novel, that’s where I go. There’s something about the gentle rocking…

Recently, I made a trip to the farm my family owned in southeastern Illinois. Yes, I was trespassing, but I took nothing but memories and a few photos, so I hope the current owners will understand. One of the photos was of the cistern behind the farmhouse. I remember, as a child, lowering a sorghum…

Today is my mother’s birthday. She’d be 101 years-old. She was a soft-spoken woman who put others before herself. Some may have thought her meek, but she had a fierce strength inside her that allowed her to endure the twists and turns her life took. She was a woman who knew how to endure, a…

My Aunt Mildred, pictured above in her youth, will be having open heart surgery on Tuesday in Springfield, Illinois. I’ll be there with her, remembering her stories of how when I was a small child, she would take me to the gravel road that ran by my grandmother’s house and patiently sit with me while…

I’ll be brief today. Just a few thoughts about prose rhythm and what a writer can gain by paying attention at the level of the sentence. Ellen Gilchrist’s short story, “A Love Story,” is exactly what it says it is, the story of a man and woman coming together in old age. Here are the…

We’re sitting in a smorgasbord restaurant somewhere north of Cissna Park, Illinois, on Easter Sunday, my parents and I, because we live in Oak Forest, a southern suburb of Chicago, during the school year now. My mother lost her teaching position downstate because the school board thought she was too lax with her discipline of…

I’m reading Carrie Brown’s wonderful novel, The Last First Day, which I somehow missed when it came out in 2013. It’s the story of an aging couple and their sweep of time. The book opens on the first day of the new autumn term of New England’s Derry School for boys, where the husband, Peter,…

I write both fiction and nonfiction, and with the latter I have an admitted preference for narrative. No matter the genre, then, I see myself as a storyteller. I like to tell stories, and sometimes I like to tell them about invented characters, and sometimes I like to tell them about real people. When I…

More and more these days, I’m convinced that how we approach our work has a crucial connection to the quantity and quality of the work we produce. Much of our writing lives are spent in solitude, both physically and mentally. We often hope for good results so desperately that we rush the process. Sometimes we’re…

Please forgive my absence this week. Sometimes, as Wordsworth wrote, “The world is too much with us; late and soon.” I hope to return next week. Until then, let this passage from Maya Angelou’s Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now be enough: “Every person needs to take one day away.  A day in which…