Lee Martin

On this Memorial Day, I’m thinking about peonies, which, for some reason, folks in my part of southeastern Illinois always called “pineys,” with a long “i” as in “pine,” meaning to long for. On our farm, when I was a boy, we had peony bushes along the edge of the side yard where each summer…

In my last post, a question and answer session about my soon-to-be released novel, Break the Skin, that novelist Dani Shapiro conducted for Amazon.com, I respond to a question about how the experience of writing a novel differs for me than what happens when I write memoir. I say that the memoir perhaps allows me…

Here we are, a little over three weeks until the publication date of my new novel, and Amazon.com has posted a Q & A that I did with novelist, Dani Shapiro. Many thanks to Dani for making time to pose some questions. I hope you’ll find my responses of interest. Please feel free to leave…

Some of you may have read my previous post about the soldier in Iraq who emailed me to ask whether I’d inscribe one of my books for his girlfriend on her birthday. “Sure,” I said. He sent me the book, a book by another Lee Martin, and I looked up that fine gentleman on the…

I had a very pleasant experience last week. I serve as the Fiction Editor at a literary journal, which means that every so often, the Managing Editor sends me a packet of stories that have made it through the first readers and now get my consideration. I choose a few each time that I think…

Here on the day before Mother’s Day, I feel like writing a little bit about my own mother who has been gone now for 23 years. She was a grade school teacher for 38 years, beginning when she was 18, as was possible in 1928. She taught during the school year and then went to…

Oh, Lordy, here I go again, a splinter under my skin that I just have to worry up to light and air. This time, it’s the term, “trailer trash,” that’s got me worked up. A name for those folks in economic dire straits with fewer and fewer chances to rise above their circumstances. A category…

Yesterday in my fiction workshop, I was talking about the value of having something for the main characters of a story to do. I’ve always thought that jobs were useful in this regard. A character in a story can engage in all sorts of interesting activities on the basis of his or her job alone.…

An article in this morning’s Columbus Dispatch regarding e-readers and the downloading of library books has me thinking about how we’ve been quick to exchange an aesthetic experience for convenience. I already have nostalgia for the now defunct card catalog in libraries. How close are we to only having virtual libraries and no printed materials…

Last Thursday, I did a reading at Indiana University-East in Richmond, Indiana. The reading was in the library on campus, and the podium was in front of a wall of glass that looked out onto a grassy area at the edge of woodlands. Just as my excellent host, TJ Rivard, called me to the podium,…