Lee Martin

Last week’s entry featured my advice that undergraduates delay their applications for MFA programs, but if those undergraduates are still intent on making their applications, it’s time to think about how to choose where to apply. Of course, this advice will work for any applicant, no matter his or her age. Follow the Money There…

‘Tis the season when undergraduates’ thoughts turn toward applying for admission to an MFA program, which has me thinking of how different the culture is these days than it was when I got my B.A. in 1978. Although I knew I wanted to write, I also knew I needed a bit more seasoning. In those…

After years of writing both fiction and nonfiction, I’ve come to believe that the term, “storyteller,” best fits what I do. Sometimes I tell stories about things that really happened in my life, sometimes I tell stories about things that really happened but with a healthy dose of invention added to the tale, and sometimes…

My mother, when she was in her last years, had a habit of sitting in her chair, her hands on the arms, her fingers lifting and pressing down, one by one, as if she were playing scales on the piano. She’d never played a piano. In fact, she had no musical talent at all. She…

My elderly aunt has a neighbor who doesn’t like the way “the college kids” speed by his house with their cd players blasting and thumping. He’s ready to take action. One day, my aunt and her friend saw this man sitting in a lawn chair in his driveway. As usual, he was grousing about those…

The farmers are picking corn here in the Midwest. I drove along I-70 today, past corn fields ready for the harvest, and I thought about my father. It’s impossible for me to see dry cornstalks in the fields without thinking of him on Election Day in November, 1956, when he tried to unclog the shucking…

Brenda Miller writes about how paying attention to form in creative nonfiction can invite the writer to make “inadvertent revelations where the writer no longer seems in complete control.” She says, “Form essentially becomes the writer’s inky courage.” Here, then, is a writing activity I developed that asks the writer to work with metaphor as…

I grew up in a place where people came to town on Saturday nights to do their trading. My father  loafed with the other men in Tubby’s barber shop, or Buzz Eddie’s pool hall, and then went out to sit on the bench on the corner, still shooting the shit, while my mother and I…

As someone who writes both fiction and creative nonfiction, I’ve long been interested in the intersections between the two. More specifically (and this is probably more the teacher in me than the writer), I’ve been curious about how using both forms to approach the same material can deepen the writer’s intellectual and emotional responses. To…

(Autumn Semester classes have begun here at The Ohio State University, and my MFA workshop in creative nonfiction is off to a fast start. We talked last week about writing vertically down into the material to find the story of the writer’s thinking. Using Naomi Shihab Nye’s brief essay, “Mint Snowball,” as our model, we…