Lee Martin

Did you hear about the toddler who was served alcohol at an Applebees restaurant in Michigan? Apparently, some left-over mixed cocktails ended up in the apple juice. Now there’s a zing for your tyke to put a little extra giddyup in his roll! How interesting that when I first typed the last sentence above, I…

Sometime this past autumn Mort Castle, a writer near Chicago, asked me if I’d consider contributing a story to an anthology that he and co-editor, Sam Weller, were putting together. The anthology, Live Forever!, was to be a tribute to Ray Bradbury. I just learned yesterday that the anthology sold at auction last week to…

I just got back from the Western Carolina Literary Festival at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina, from where I’d hoped to do a new post, but, gosh-darn it, the lit fest was just too hoppin’ of a place. So now, back on flat land, I write to report on the festival, the climate…

A non-teaching day for me today, so I spent some time this morning looking at the draft of what I hope will be my next novel. I finished the draft back in October, and I’ve been letting it rest all this time. I hadn’t looked at it until recently. Now I’m going through it chapter…

Yesterday, the first meeting of my Spring Quarter classes, I shared a Barry Lopez piece with my creative nonfiction workshop, a short piece of memoir called “Murder.” The essay opens with the then twenty-year-old Lopez setting forth from New Mexico on his way to see his girlfriend in Salt Lake City. He’s carefree, enjoying the…

Sundays often tempt me to give in to nostalgia. Probably because I’m getting older and there’s more to look back on than there used to be, or maybe there’s something about the day that’s still a day of quiet for me, the way it was when I was younger and Sunday meant church and then…

In a recent post, I told the story of my aunt and uncle and the evening they went out for dinner, and in front of the restaurant, before they could go inside, a young woman got into their backseat and said she needed them to drive her somewhere because the police were after her. My…

‘Tis the blurb season. . .but then when is it not? Each book accepted for publication sets off a chain of editors and authors asking other authors to please read an advance copy, and, if they feel so inclined, offer a few words of support. A “comment,” or “a promotional quote,” is we’re being tasteful…

The Spring issue of The Georgia Review arrived today. It’s a special issue that celebrates the fiction published in that journal during the past 25 years. I’m humbled to see my name included with the following writers whom I’ve long admired: Lee K. Abbott, Margaret Benbow, Kevin Brockmeier, Frederick Busch, Robert Olen Butler, Phil Condon,…

I just got back from a visit to the University of Indianapolis where I did a reading and visited an Editing and Publishing class. Just like at my school, Ohio State, some of the undergraduates were already thinking about applying for MFA programs. We’re in recruitment season now, trying to convince those who received offers…