Lee Martin

Help me out here. Last week, I was in the audience for Famous Writer X, who had been invited to my university, and whom said university had paid a handsome sum. We were a diverse audience, made up of community members, university dignitaries, faculty members, graduate students, and a large number of undergraduate students. In…

Recent proposals to privilege those college students who major in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), by charging them lower tuition than their peers who major in the humanities have me feeling more than a little cantankerous. I remember a piece by John Ciardi that I first encountered when I was a new teaching assistant…

I was fortunate enough to be on a panel at this year’s AWP conference in Boston with Mort Castle, Alice Hoffman, John McNally, and Sam Weller. What did we all have in common? An appreciation of Ray Bradbury and original stories published in the tribute anthology, Shadow Show. The panel, “Shadow Show: Writers and Teachers…

Benediction This morning, I finished Kent Haruf’s new novel, Benediction, and it has me thinking about how good literature requires courage on the part of the author while also asking the same from the readers. I say it requires courage because a book worth writing, and one worth reading, asks us to face our lives,…

My post last week, in which I offered some advice to those about to graduate with their MFAs, got a good deal of response along with a request to offer more information about the sorts of jobs that might be possible. I decided, then, to go to folks more expert than I, recent grads from…

I’m thinking about all the MFA students these days who are making the turn into the homestretch. Only a couple of months to go until thesis defense time and then graduation. Exciting times, but also nail-biting, teeth-grinding, hair-pulling times. I remember my own anxiety about my post-MFA life, a life that included teaching five sections…

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember the old thermometers, the ones that you had to keep under your tongue for four minutes, the ones you had to shake down with an expert snap of the wrist, the ones that made you squint in order to make out the level of the mercury that…

Mavis Gallant, in her brief essay about style in writing, says, “The only question worth asking about a story—or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall—is, “Is it dead or alive.” A piece breathes life, in part, from the style in which the writer has chosen to bring it to…

As I dream of spring on this cold January day, I’m reading through some old letters from my mother, written in her widowhood, and I’m struck by the sound of my own voice in hers and the lesson she offers the writer I’ll one day be about how to let the details evoke a life:…

I’ve always been interested in the question of where the fiction writer finds material. I’m  particularly interested in how the autobiographical gets transformed into fiction. My curiosity comes not from wanting to know about the personal lives of writers, but more from a desire to provide my students a way to increase the urgency and…