Lee Martin's Blog, page 73

Rainy Day Chatter

It's a stormy day here in Columbus, Ohio. One of those days that starts out hot and humid and then by mid-afternoon the skies darken and for a time everything goes still. Solar landscape lights come on in people's flowerbeds, the clouds deepen, the scent of the rain to come is just a whiff in the air. Before long, the raindrops start. At first, they're large and far apart. Then the thunder rolls, and the lightning cracks, and before long it's a summer thunderstorm in earnest, the rain coming in sheets, and all you can do is hunker down and wait for it to end.

Such stormy weather makes me think of days on our farm in southeastern Illinois when I was a boy. A summer day spent with hard work. Maybe "walking the beans," going up and down the rows of a soybean field, hoe in hand, cutting out pokeberry and jimson weed, back and forth the length of the field, sweat stinging my eyes. Or putting up hay, choking for breath in the barn's loft, stacking bales in the dusty air, the alfalfa or clover or timothy leaving scratches on my forearms. Or working the wheat harvest, driving the truck up close to my father's combine so he can empty the hoppers into the bed, where I stand knee deep in grain, using a scoop shovel to level the load, while the sun beats down on me and the dust and chaff clogs my head.

Then the skies turn dark, and there's a streak of lightning off in the distance, and my father concedes to the storm that's coming and tells me to head to the house. It's there, grain truck backed into the machine shed to keep the load of wheat dry. It's there, the last load of hay bales stacked in the loft. It's there, the pokeberry and jimson weed left to grow a little longer. It's there that my father and I drink cold Pepsi-Colas on the front porch, watching the wall of rain move in from the west, and we know there's nothing asked from us now but to rest and watch and let our lives be suspended within the storm we see moving across our field, down our lane, until it's finally there with a vengeance, and we move inside the house, letting the windows down to just a crack, sitting in front of the oscillating fan, and for a good while it's jut the rain and no thought of work. Just the rest and the body's calm.

I've learned that it's the same way with writing. I've learned to embrace those periods of rest between projects and how they're necessary for my rejuvenation. I'm in one of those periods now. I just sent a revision of my next novel to my agent, and while I wait for her response, I'm barely writing at all. I'm doing a good deal of reading instead and also taking a few notes on a story that interests me. I don't know if it will become a novel, a short story, or nothing at all. I'm trying to stay still, letting the characters come to me, not in a hurry to start thinking in terms of a plot. I'm like the boy I was those summer days when the storms came, and my father and I sat in our farmhouse, barely saying a word to each other. I'm just soaking in what there is to soak in. At some point, I'll soak in enough that I'll have no choice but to start writing. Then the real work will begin, the way it did for my father and me once the storm passed and we got up from our chairs and went outside where the air was usually a little cooler, a little less humid, and my father always had something for us to do.

A Writing Exercise

Folks, I'm sorry I haven't done a new post in a while. I've been busy with a few events for the release of my new novel, Break the Skin, which, much to my great fortune, got a very good review in The New York Times. Here's a link in case you'd like to check it out:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/books/break-the-skin-by-lee-martin-review.html?scp=1&sq=lee%20martin%20skin&st=cse

The launch event for Break the Skin took place last Tuesday at the McConnell Arts Center in Worthington, Ohio, a northern suburb of Columbus. The room (and what a nice room it was with lovely quilts on the walls and beautiful hardwood floors) was nicely filled for my reading and signing. In the photo above, I'm signing books for my cousin, but trust me there were plenty of folks there who weren't related to me!

After the reading, I taught a workshop that focused on how a writer's curiosity in the pre-draft stage can help create that first draft. Whether we're talking about a novel, a story, and essay, or a poem, we can get a good deal of mileage from writing about what we don't know. Arousing our curiosity and then writing toward other curiosities and/or answers can deepen our work.

I started by asking the folks in the workshop to recall a memorable character from their hometowns, current towns, neighborhoods, etc. Then I led everyone through a sequence of writing prompts. Since many of us are without school and/or workshops this summer, I thought I'd offer those prompts to you in hopes that you might find them useful in creating a new work or in deepening the work that you're in the midst of now.

1.   Once you have your unforgettable character in mind, establish a baseline for him or her by completing the following: He/she was the person who. . . . Your goal is to articulate the character's basic nature.

2.   Now arouse your curiosity: I thought I knew exactly who he/she was, but now I wonder whether. . . .

3.   Make a list of props that you associate with this character. The things they carried, we might say. Or even the things they wore. Choose one prop and investigate it with your curiosity. You might begin a freewrite with,  He/she loved the _________________. I wonder whether it was because _________________. Or you might consider the prop and the character's relationship to it by completing this line: There must have been times when. . . .

4.   You might also consider the character's relationship to the place/landscape/culture of his/her home area: I wonder whether sometimes he/she. . . .

5.   Invite your curiosity to go further the next time you're in your writing room: I still don't know. . . .

6.   At some point, take everything you think you know and everything you're still curious about and use it to craft the opening of a piece of writing. Here's mine: Late at night, he wandered the streets and peeked into more than one window, scaring to death the folks who caught him at it. What could make an elderly man do that in a small town, a man who was jovial and kind and a goodwill ambassador who passed out candy to shoppers uptown on Saturdays? I don't know. It's my job to write my way to some possible understanding or at least some other interesting questions.

Till next time, good luck and good writing.

 

On Father's Day

Anyone who's read my memoirs, From Our House and Turning Bones, knows that my father was a farmer who lost both of his hands in an accident in November, 1956. He wore prostheses the rest of his life, and he continued to farm. My relationship was uneasy with him until my later teen years when we reconciled. Whatever fire I have comes from him. He taught me how to endure, persevere, fight. He also taught me how to be generous, how to work, and how to enjoy the small moments of life. On Father's Day, I'd like to share a brief section from From Our House. In this passage, I'm describing how I cared for my father one summer when my mother, a grade school teacher, was at Eastern Illinois University, finishing her bachelor's degree, and my father and I were alone on our farm. This scene takes place on a Friday when we were getting ready to travel to Charleston to pick up my mother so she could spend the weekend with us. Both my father and my mother taught me how to love through actions, and I hope I've captured exactly that in the passage that appears below this next picture of my father and me on a distant Father's Day.

That summer, I did for him what she would do for twenty-six years without regret or complaint; I shaved him, I bathed him, I cleaned him after he had used the toilet. I was eleven years old, and I knew my father's body as intimately as I knew my own: the gray whiskers that grew on his face; the wrinkled craw of his throat, red from the sun; the white flesh, loose on his chest; the swell of his belly; the tuft of pubic hair; the uncircumcised penis; the loins and scrotal sac often inflamed with heat rash. "I'm gallded," he would say, adding a "d" to the past tense of "gall." I rubbed him tenderly with a wash cloth, patted him dry with a towel, and then powdered him with cornstarch.

Never was he as timid as he was then–as bashful as I. He would look away from me whileI washed him, sorry that circumstances were such that I had to perform this task. If anyone were to have seen us there, the aging man and his son, they would have never suspected the ugly rancor that simmered between us. They would have seen the boy soaking the washcloth in a basin of water and wringing it out with his small hands, and the father, standing naked in the sunlight streaming in through the window, his legs apart so his son could touch the washcloth gently to his tender groin. How could I not love him, then, so great was his need. "Burns like fire," he often muttered under his breath. At those times, I concentrated on maintaining a gentle touch, one that wouldn't hurt him. As my mother had done, I rolled fresh white cotton arm socks over his stumps and safety-pinned them to his T-shirt sleeves. I helped him slip his arms into the holsters of his hooks and then settle the canvas straps of the harness across his back.

We stood before the wardrobe, and he chose a shirt and a pair of trousers. He made his choices carefully, matching colors and styles. "Blue," he might say. "Your mother likes blue." When he was finally satisfied, I dressed him. I buttoned his shirt, held his trousers so he could step into them. I fastened his belt. The finishing touch was a dab of Butch Hair Creme brushed though his flat top. He would turn this way and that, looking at himself in the dresser mirror.

"Ready?" he would finally say, and I would race to the door, my heart light and full of joy because my mother was coming home.

Pub Day: It Can Happen

I thought I should make a post on this day, the pub day for my new novel, Break the Skin. Such a thing doesn't happen without the help of  a number of people. A book doesn't make its way into the world only because of the efforts of the author. There are the people who support and encourage that author through the years that it takes to write the novel, loved ones who listen and console, who even offer suggestions and advice and who understand when things aren't going well. There are those who read the manuscript in its various drafts and offer editorial advice. There's the agent who does this as well (at least, thank goodness, mine does) and then takes the polished manuscript and offers it to editors, negotiates the deal once an offer is on the table, advocates for the author and his or her book through all the stages of publication. This may include fighting for other book jacket designs, urging the publisher to pull out all the stops with marketing and promotion, listening to the author (okay, to just say it, listening to me) whine and complain about any number of things because writers are, after all, apprehensive about how a book will do once it's in the bookstores.

There's the editor who helps the writer make the novel the best book it can be. In the case of Break the Skin, I worked with three editors. I won't go into all the details about the "restructuring" at the publishing house that led to the editorial changes. Suffice it to say, editors move around quite a bit, either by their own choice or by the choice of others, and sometimes authors are orphaned and then adopted by another editor at the house. Above all, there's the publicist at the publishing house who pitches the book to the media, the reviewers, the bloggers, and who arranges readings and signings for the author. The publicist, in short, does everything he or she can to get attention paid to a book. To all of these people, I say thank you with all my heart. Thank you for taking care of my novel. Thank you for taking care of me.

In my writing room, I've done what I can with this new novel. Now it's out there on bookstore shelves, or on readers' kindles and nooks, etc. My attention now is on doing what I can to publicize the book. I've done posts for various blogs, interviews with various forms of media. I've agreed to readings, the first of which will be at the McConnell Arts Center in Worthington, Ohio, on June 21 at 7pm. If you're interested in other events, you'll find them under that link on my web page (http://www.leemartinauthor.com).

Most of all, I want to thank all of you who have read my blog posts these past months and tolerated the things I've done to promote this new book. I hope I've offered enough of substance when talking about the craft and the teaching of writing, to excuse the occasional shameless plug.

I'll make one more (oh, who am I kidding; of course, there'll probably be many more). Break the Skin is a book about working class people and their conflicted hearts and everything they do to try to make them feel that their lives matter.

"Tell me how you see magic and spells working in your novel," an interviewer asked me yesterday.

I'll let my narrator, Laney, answer:

We were scared. You have to understand what happens to people who start to believe they have no choice–people like us. We had so little–or in my case, I'd thrown too much away–and we were fierce to protect what was ours.

People like Laney come to hope for anything that might turn their lives around. A little practical magic? Sure. Spells cast? Why not? A revenge plot? What harm can it do? Plenty, of course. As Laney eventually says, "You could be that person you saw sometimes on the news, that person who'd done something unforgiveable and could barely face it. Trust me, I wanted to say. It can happen."

Dear Everyone,

To My Dear Undergraduate Students,

Don't be afraid of your talents, but also be sure to humble yourself to them and to what will be a lifelong apprenticeship if you decide to keep writing. Never think yourself greater than the craft itself. We are all amateurs from time to time, no matter how long we've been writing. The process always finds a way of showing us that. If you've decided to sign on to this apprenticeship, particularly at the expense of some other route in life that you or others have mapped out for you, ask yourself why you're choosing writing. Make sure it's because, as hard as it may be, nothing else that you do gives you quite the same degree of satisfaction. Is writing necessary to you? Is it part of who you are? Will you feel a stranger to yourself if you stop? Make sure you understand that people will say no to you. Editors will say no. Other writers will say no. Family members will say no. Readers will say no. They will find many ways of saying that word to you. You'll know it each time you hear some manifestation of rejection. Rejection will become a part of your life. Make sure you can toughen up and accept that fact, no matter how deeply each no may cut you. A single yes will make you forget all the rejections. . .at least until the next time someone tells  you no. You'll live for those yeses, but most of all you'll live for the act of writing itself, for the joys of shaping something out of words. Maybe you'll even throw in some teaching here and there. Some teaching and some writing. Some yeses and some not-yeses. There are worse ways to make a life. It was a pleasure to know you and your work. I hope I was clear and considerate whether I was telling you where you fell short or where you triumphed. I hope for our ten weeks together, you experienced at least once the joy that comes from touching a reader, for making that reader say, yes, yes, and again, yes. Blessings to all of you.

Your Teacher,

Lee

 

Dear Gods of the Book,

In two days, my novel, Break the Skin, will be on bookstore shelves. . .at least I hope it will. Please grant it a pleasant passage through the world. Please forgive me for being nervous about its reception. I'll stop short of asking the great dragons to protect it, as this blessing on the left does, but, I'll go along with, "So Mote It Be."

Your Nervous Author,

Lee

 

Dear Readers,

Whether be Nook or Kindle or between the hard covers, I hope you'll find something in my new book to delight you, and if you do, I hope you'll let me know. If you don't, please remember what our mothers taught us: If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. I did the best I could, and now I can't do anything more except to do what writers do, move on to the next project. In my case, this means attending to my agent's edits of the next novel to come. I'll open the manuscript tomorrow. In the meantime, blessings to all of you.

Happy Summer,

Lee

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can We Teach Someone How to Write?: A Report from One MFA Program

Last night was a glorious evening for The Ohio State University MFA Program, where I teach. We held our end-of-the-year gala celebration for our graduating students. It was an evening of fancy clothes and stunning readings. A public performance of the excellent poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction that those receiving their degrees have written. Our yearly tradition of sending our grads off in style, each of them introduced by their thesis director with lavish praise in abundance. It was grand to see so many of our former students in the audience, our extended family returning to welcome the current grads to their fold. Just a truly wonderful evening all the way around.

I love to watch young writers find their voice(s) and their material. I love to see them writing with confidence about the things they were meant to take on, the material that is theirs and theirs alone. That's what I saw from each and every graduate who read last  night, a series of open and honest explorations done in distinct voices. I saw writers who, after three years of study and practice, knew themselves a little better, owned their material a bit more forcefully, and spoke of it in voices that were more genuine than they'd ever been.

Can we teach someone how to write? That question comes up quite often within the community of folks who do exactly that for their livelihood, and I'm always a little puzzled when the answer is sometimes no.

Of course, we can teach someone how to write. We do it each year in our workshops, our literature seminars, our thesis directing, our informal conversations in this place or that, and in writing of our own. We teach technique, we teach the habits of the process and the work ethic that they require. I happen to believe that we can also teach students how to adjust their vision so that they more readily note the contradictions and complexities of the world around them. I believe we can encourage them to think in terms of opposites so they see the plurality of any one character or situation. We do it by talking about published work that does exactly that and by pointing out what a writer has done to make the vision of that story, poem, essay, novel more deeply felt and more multi-layered with different levels of emotion and intellect, often contradictory in nature.

Not only that, we can show students how such layers are present in their own drafts, the opposites just waiting for a tweak of technique here or there, so they can emerge in all their  glory. Of course, it's up to the student to learn the moves of craft that allow the richest artistic expression of the way they see the world in all its complexity, and we can't discount the limits of any single writer's imagination. That spark of invention has to set the writer's toolbox ablaze so the writing will be white-hot. A work will only be as richly textured as the range of a writer's imagination will allow. All in all, though, after nearly thirty years of teaching writing workshops, I'm still convinced that writing programs can help folks get to where they need to be with their art. I saw abundant evidence that such is the case last night when our marvelous graduates stepped up to the microphone and read work that came from the way they, and only they, can see the world. Work that will abide because it is at once theirs and ours at the same time. The individual vision making a happy union with technical proficiency to make something on the page that endures because it is both particular and universal, because it has that ring of truth.

We Called It Decoration Day

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 the grass gave way to the start of my parents' vegetable garden. Each year on what we called Decoration Day, my mother cut the "pineys" (we had crimson and pink and white) and arranged them in coffee cans wrapped in foil paper. She filled in around the flowers with loose gravel I gathered from our lane, making arrangements we could leave on the family graves in the country cemeteries where my ancestors, all of them farm folks from Lawrence and Richland Counties, were buried.

It took me a long time to know that the proper pronunciation of peony was different from the way I'd always heard it said. The first time I heard someone say "pe (long "e")- uh (schwa)-ne" (long "e") with that accent on the first syllable, I didn't know what to think. I remember feeling a combination of anger and embarrassment. I was angry I suppose because I felt like a judgment had been passed on me and may family, who were too unworldly to know the proper way to say the word. I was embarrassed because it was clear that there were people who were more sophisticated, people who said words in ways I'd never imagined.

They took the "pine" out of that flower, but they couldn't rob me of the longing. Wherever I've lived, no matter how distant from my native southeastern Illinois, I've pined for it. I've had to write it again and again in my stories and essays and novels to keep it near to me. Each year when I see the peonies in bloom, I think of those Decoration Days spent driving from one country cemetery to another. I think of those coffee cans full of peonies and irises. I remember the sweet smells and the rush of air through the open car windows, the spray of gravel from the road under our tires, the freshly mowed cemeteries, some of them on hillsides overlooking fields of timothy grass, others alongside country churches. I recall the way my mother stooped to place the coffee cans along the base of the headstones, the way my father read the names and the dates of birth and death the way he did each year when we came, telling again the stories of grandparents and great-grandparents as far back as John A. Martin, my great-great-grandfather, whose monument was in remarkable condition in the Ridgley Cemetery in Lukin Township. I remember paying respect to our dead with these lovely flowers of spring.

Throwing My Voice(s) in Fiction and Memoir

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 to do some things with voice that I don't necessarily do in a novel. A kind reader has asked me to say more about that issue of voice in the memoir and the novel, and I'm glad to try to say more that will be useful.

First, I should admit that this is a question I chase around quite often, this matter of how voice differs in fiction and nonfiction, and to be more specific how it differs in a first-person piece of fiction and a piece of memoir. I'm always tempted to go for the easy answer, which is, well, of course, the memoir calls for a more reflective voice, the voice of the writer at his or her desk interpreting, interrogating, and trying to make sense of experience, trying, that is, to figure out what it all means. I can think of pieces of memoir, however, where the reflective voice  is minimal or nonexistent. Barry Lopez's "Murder" provides one such example, this tersely narrated tale of the day a woman who was a stranger to Lopez asked him to murder her husband. Lopez conveys the meaning of the episode through description, action, and his thoughts at the time in the midst of the experience. "I sensed a border I did not know," he says.

At the same time, I can think of plenty of examples of first-person fiction in which the narrator puts the reflective voice to work in much the same way that the writer of memoir often does. Nick Carraway, for example, looking back on and trying to make sense of the time he spent with Jay Gatsby, interrogating not only his own life but that of Gatsby and of Daisy and Tom and Jordan Baker. "In my younger and more vulnerable years," Nick says in the opening line of the book, "my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since." We understand right away that the story is coming to us through a narrator who occupies a position somewhere in the future from the events of the novel's dramatic present. A narrator, in other words, looking back upon a portion of his life in an attempt to interpret it and make it mean something. "He had come a long way to this blue lawn," Nick says of Gatsby after his death, "and his dream [to reclaim Daisy's love] must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night." This is clearly an example of the narrator's reflective voice, the voice of experience. It's the voice that we expect in a memoir.

So, to return to the original question, what can I do with voice in memoir that I don't necessarily do in a first-person novel? Let's see if I can throw out some thoughts to see what thoughts of your own they might provoke. I'll be thinking out loud here and inviting you to think along with me. I'll confess right away that I reserve the right to ultimately decide that nothing I'm about to say is actually true.

1.  My voice can be extremely earnest in a memoir, its directness and intensity and "me-ness" (for lack of a better term), more readily accepted than such a voice sometimes is in a novel where irony is often the thing that tempers the overly urgent and reflective response to experience.

2.  I can live within that reflective voice longer and more intensely in a memoir. I can let action, and character, and image, and dialogue wait for me as long as I prove to be interesting in those "voice of experience" passages.

3.  I can be more people (more parts of my persona) in that reflective voice in the memoir as opposed to the first-person narrator who is usually more distinctly divided between "before" and "after" in a novel. Perhaps the memoir form more clearly announces the layers of the narrator's persona, and, as a result, the voice becomes more textured, made up of more sounds coming from a number of different aspects of the narrator's character.

As I said, I'm not sure that my observations have any validity to them. I'd certainly be interested in other people's thoughts about voice in memoir and how it differs from that of a first-person piece of fiction. I'm pretty sure, though, about how writing in the two forms seems different to me when I think about this issue of voice. Things slow down for me in memoir. The form gives me permission to linger over small details and large actions as well. My voice becomes more textured with nuances of tones and personae. It embraces and gives full throat to the person who lives simultaneously within the experience being narrated and the various, countless positions I occupy beyond that experience. To me, my voice in memoir more readily gives expression to the multiple pieces of myself that create it, whereas in a piece of fiction there seems to be a more demarcated distinction between the voice of the character within the narrative sequence and the voice-over of the storyteller relating that tale.

 

 

 

A Question and Answer with Lee Martin

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 a comment or ask a question.

A Q&A with Author Lee Martin

Break the Skin is set in two small towns, but they are very different kinds of small towns. Your evocation of small town life is so vivid and beautiful. Where does your knowledge come from? How does small town life inspire your writing? And how did these particular small towns in Illinois and Texas come into being in your imagination? Was this a novel that began, for you, more with character, or with place?

I was born in Lawrence County, Illinois, where the largest town had a population of just over five thousand people. I lived on a farm with my mother and father, and I attended a two-room country school until I was in the third grade. Although it's been a number of years since I lived there, that place is always with me. I'm connected to the rhythm of its seasons, the stark beauty of its landscape, the come-and-go of its people.

I lived in Denton, Texas, for five years when I taught at the University of North Texas, and it was my memory of the area around the university–its bars and tattoo parlors, its head shops and drum circles–that produced Miss Baby and first brought me to the story that would become Break the Skin. Place and character are always inextricable for me. The details of Denton and those of New Hope produced Miss Baby and Laney for me, and I let them tell their stories.

 

Break the Skin is very much a novel about the deep-rooted hunger to be truly accepted and understood by another person. Laney shows the fierce loyalty and submissive qualities of youth, whereas Miss Baby, who has been through so much hurt, is willing to put it all on the line all over again. How do you dig so deeply into the emotional, internal lives of your characters? I noticed that the novel is dedicated to Miss Baby, and found that really interesting. Can you say a bit about that?

The novel, as you say, is very much about the desire for human connection and validation, which is a universal desire, of course. We all want to be loved. We all want to feel that we matter to others, that our lives have significance. With Laney, I had to investigate and dramatize the sources of her need–a loving father who died too young, a mother whom she disappoints by refusing to put her extraordinary singing voice to good use, the nearly invisible life she's lived up to the point where she becomes friends with the older Delilah Dade. Creating Delilah, who is so different from Laney–bold, experienced, hard-edged–allowed me to put pressure on Laney until the more hidden aspects of her character emerged.

When creating characters, I like to think in terms of establishing who they think they are and then providing the right pairing with other people and the right sequence of narrative events to bring out who they really are beneath whatever facades they've constructed or whatever lies they've told themselves. I do this same thing with Miss Baby, who tells herself she's fine with not having a man in her life and then takes a drastic action to claim one.

I dedicated the novel to Miss Baby, the only time I've dedicated a book to a character, because she spoke to me first when I began writing. I dedicated the book to her because without her voice, I'm not sure I would have found the shape of the novel. I also think she deserves the dedication because she's the character who closes the novel, still believing, even after all she's gone through, in the power and truth of a love story. She endures with grace and faith, and for all these reasons, she gets the dedication.

 

Miss Baby works as a tattoo artist, a profession which I imagine you didn't know much about at the outset. Did you know you were going to write about a tattoo artist when you were first beginning the book? How did you go about your research? (Any tattoos?) Why did it seem important that Miss Baby be in this line of work?

Well now, what makes you think that I didn't at some point work as a tattoo artist? In between the years when I cooked crystal meth, robbed banks, and worked as a hit man, maybe I was pounding ink. (Nah, that sentence was just a feeble attempt to establish my street cred.) After all, as one review of the novel says, I'm "crackling with dark deeds and bad intentions. . . ." I love that line! I want it to be part of my introduction at future readings and events: "Here he is, crackling with dark deeds and bad intentions, Lee Martin." Ha! I told my students that and they laughed so hard you could see how far from the truth of me such a description actually is . . . or is it? Hmmm . . . I'll never tell, nor will I reveal my tattoos, not even the ones that glow in the dark.

My research involved a conversation here, a visit there, some things read, some things watched—just the usual methods of immersing oneself in an unfamiliar world. I'm always fascinated with the details and the lingo of someone else's job, and as soon as Miss Baby stepped onto the corner of Fry and Oak Street in Denton, Texas, I knew she had to be coming from a tattoo parlor. Don't ask me how I knew that. I just did. I like to think that my subconscious mind had already started to sense the rich possibilities with metaphor in this practice of drilling into the skin and leaving something to live in scar tissue.

 

You've written novels, memoirs, a story collection. Can you tell me a bit about how each form differs for you? Did working on Break the Skin feel different to you than your other books–and if so, in what ways?

A short story is a burst, a compressed narrative under so much pressure it explodes at the end, often quietly so with a moment that subtly but irrevocably changes people's lives forever. It's a form I still practice when I have the material that calls for it. More often, as I get older, I'm drawn to the reach of a novel and the texture of lives that stretch back into time and forward into the future. A story made up of so many layers of characters, places, and time periods. A novel is a daily march for me. I make myself curious about characters and their situations, and I set out each day to complicate my curiosity. That's what keeps me writing. I'm trying to deepen my understanding of characters and the events of their lives. I'm trying to discover how they came to be who they are and who they'll be after the last page of the novel. It's not so different when I write memoir, only then the subject is me and there are perhaps some things that I do with voice that I don't necessarily need to do in a novel.

Working on Break the Skin challenged me to hold two different narratives in balance and to bring them to a point where each was necessary to the other. So Miss Baby and the man she's claimed go on with their lives in Texas while Laney's narration lets us see the place this man had in her life in Illinois and the plot for revenge gone terribly wrong. Those two storylines are on a collision course, and once they meet lives change in ways that can't be reversed. Along the way, I hope readers feel the hearts of these two women beating with all their complications and all their layers of fear and desire and courage. That's what I felt every day when I sat down to write more of their stories–Laney and Miss Baby, noble and loving and confused and misguided and brave and full of want and fear and uncertainty, just like all of us, even the people in those small towns of the Midwest that I dearly love.

Shock and Horror: Ohio School Kills "To Kill a Mockingbird"

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 Internet, found his web site, and sent him an email to explain the situation. I sent the book along with the SASE that would deliver the signed copy back to the soldier so he could present it to his girlfriend, and the other Lee Martin was kind enough to take care of things from there.

End of story, right? Um. . .not exactly.

My correspondence got my email into the other Lee Martin's address book, and now it appears that someone has hacked into that book and has sent a message to everyone in it,

So for the record, let me make it clear that I wasn't in London on a short vacation, and I didn't get mugged in the park near the hotel where I wasn't staying. My cash, credit cards, and cell phone are all still in my possession. Yes, I still have my passport with me, but it too is safe here at my home and isn't in London, where I'm not talking with the embassy or the police. I don't have a flight that leaves three hours from now. I don't have an issue with the hotel that's demanding payment. I don't need you to wire me money. Above all, I am not "freaked out at the moment."

Well, at least not about any of that.

But there was an item in yesterday's newspaper that got under my skin a little. Seems that a high school in southeastern Ohio was to host a performance by a traveling theatre troupe, a performance of To Kill a Mockingbird. The performance was canceled because it was deemed inappropriate for the students to see. Why? The N-word. Seems parents were complaining, so the school officials decided it was better that their students not be exposed to this tale of racial injustice in the South in 1935, this story of the attorney Atticus Finch and his efforts to defend Tom Robinson's innocence ("In the name of God," Atticus exhorts the jury in his closing argument, "do your duty.")

Without a doubt, the word in question is ugly and hurtful, and, as a white man, I certainly can't claim to know the pain a person of color suffers because of it. I wonder, though, if, like the jury in the novel,  it's our duty to attend to that word and all it so unfairly represents, particularly when it comes to us as part of a piece of literature that intends to expose and then condemn the racism that victimized Tom Robinson and continues to victimize far too many of our citizens. I wonder how many students at that Ohio high school will now somehow be less because they didn't see that performance and didn't experience the consciousness-raising that it attempts. Art at its best can take the ugly and use it to create something beautiful. Something that lasts. It can make people who open their hearts and minds to it better. It can make our society better. Every time I see the film of To Kill a Mockingbird, I wait for the scene in which Gregory Peck as Atticus leaves the courtroom after the jury has turned a blind eye to the overwhelming evidence and declared Tom Robinson guilty. The black members of the community are in the balcony of the courtroom, put there by the custom of the time and place, and none of them have left. They wait as Atticus gathers his papers into his briefcase, and as he starts up the center aisle to the courtroom doors, one by one the people in the balcony begin to stand, to pay their respect for this man who has fought the good fight for the sake of Tom Robinson and by extension for all of them. Atticus's children, Jean Louise (aka Scout) and Jem, and their friend Dill are in the balcony, invited there by the Reverend Sykes.

At this moment in the novel, Scout says,

Someone was punching me, but I was reluctant to take my eyes from the people below us, and from the image of Atticus's lonely walk down the aisle.

"Miss Jean Louise?"

I looked around. They were standing. All around us and in the balcony on the opposite wall, the Negroes were getting to their feet. Reverend Sykes's voice was as distant as Judge Taylor's:

"Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passin'."

Even now, typing that passage, I feel the chill up the back of my neck. Every time I see this scene in the movie, the same thing happens. I want to be Atticus Finch. I want to be as good and as noble as he is. I want to live better, be a better person. It is, for me, a spiritual moment, one that I need to revisit from time to time.

I'm sad that the racial situation in our country is still such that the use of that word, even within the historical and artful context that Harper Lee provides, is so volatile. More than that, I'm devastated that those students at that school didn't have the chance to see the scene that I describe above, didn't have the chance to experience this work of art that asks us to consider how to treat one another with fairness and dignity and love. I can only hope that they'll encounter the book, the movie, or the play at some other time in their lives, some time when it's not too late to still make a difference.

A friend tells me that this school that denied their students the chance to see this production is in the same county where recently eight horses died in a barn fire, a fire that was deliberately set as part of an anti-gay hate crime. I don't believe I need to point out the irony here. I'll say it again: Art can change us; it can make us better.