Dumber Than
An Interview
with author Lee Martin

Lee Martin explains how he “stumbled” into the craft of creative nonfiction.  “I was teaching at the University of North Texas, and I had to teach a creative nonfiction workshop,” he says.  “I made myself a working member of the workshop, writing along with my students, putting my work up for discussion, and learning what it was to practice this craft and to try to get better at it.”

“What I learned was that creative nonfiction gave me the opportunity to directly face personal material that I'd been working with for years in my fiction, and I liked the way this ‘new’ genre (by this, I mean new to me) allowed me to claim, validate, interrogate, explore, and shape personal experience into a form that ended up teaching me something about myself and how I moved, and continue to move, through the world,” he adds.

Martin likes the “great intimacy at work here between writer and material, as well as writer and reader,” finds it “at the same time comforting and terrifying,” and likes “the challenge and charge that comes from living in that space.” 

His Brevity piece "Dumber Than"developed from Martin’s memory of a boy and how he was viewed and treated by the community, peers, and by Martin himself.  Martin says, “I remember, when I started writing, using the ‘dumber than. . .’ phrases for pacing, nailing down certain segments, and also as a way of emphasizing how quickly and cruelly, particularly in a small town, we can label someone, never considering the long-reaching consequences of our insensitivity.”

About the essay:  Martin says that he “likes the edge to the voice and the way it's simultaneously self-implicating  and defensive. I also like the way that voice locates the personal within the communal and raises questions of responsibility. I was working on my new novel, The Bright Forever, when I wrote this short essay, and the novel features the kidnapping of a young girl in a small Indiana town in 1972. ‘Dumber Than’ gave me the chance to find the narrative stance I needed to approach similar issues in the novel.”

Martin compares writing short to “entering the dream world and seeing if I can keep up while being swept along by detail, image, and observation—that and seeing whether I know enough to jump off at the right place and let the dream world rush on to wherever it is our dreams go when we're done with them.”  He says, “the challenge for me is knowing where to end, to listen closely enough to hear the resonance of something popping into sharp relief—to hear a turn or an irony or a deepening that tells me I've gotten somewhere I had no idea I was going when I set out.”

For beginning writers, Martin passes along the advice of Isak Dinesen: "I write a little every day, without hope and without despair."

—Sarah Klingler