Author Gregory Martin: reflections on 'Mountain City' and the future
By Lindsay Redifer Argonaut Senior Staff
Photo by Emily Weaver
Author Gregory Martin reads an excerpt from his first novel, "Mountain City."
At an intimate reading and book signing, author Gregory Martin enthralled an audience of six. Reading excerpts from his first novel, "Mountain City," he shared his fondest memories of a tiny town in Northern Nevada.
ARGONAUT: So this is your first book published?
Martin: Yes, is was published in early June.
A: After your reading, you mentioned that you knew you needed
to write something. When did you first realize this is what
you needed to write about?
M: After I finished college, I knew I wanted to write and I knew
I wanted to write about Mountain City. But I didn't know what
form it would be, and at the time I thought it would be poetry.
I knew that because it was so essential to me. Place really
motivates me, especially places in the West. I lived there (Mountain
City) for a year and wrote notes on the back of produce slips
while I was stocking shelves and if someone said something interesting,
I wrote it down.
A: Did any of those notes make it into the book?
M: Yeah, almost all of them. So many of the sources came from
my notes while working in the (grocery) store and just hearing
people talk.
A: What did you study in college?
M: I have an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and then I went
to graduate school to study creative writing and to study poetry
and non-fiction.
A: You've started a new novel. Do you know what the name of
that novel is going to be?
M: I don't have a title for it, but it's set in Southern Idaho
and it deals with a remote stage station in Owyhee County in
the '20s.
A: Do you have a rough idea when it will be done?
M: It took me almost three years to write ["Mountain City"].
I have a feeling this next book will take me even longer, because
I'll be creating it. It won't be true, I won't have all these
people to draw from, they'll have to come from my imagination
and from research.
A: Is that intimidating right now?
M: It is. I think that it's daunting, it's challenging. More
challenging to me than trying to write short stories or essays
or poems because I know that I'm not going to be done for three
or four years and that when I am done I'm not sure if it will
be any good, but I have to try.
A: What made you decide to come to Moscow?
M: Well I'm on a book tour and it's on the way home from Missoula.
I was reading this last weekend at the Festival of the Book
there. Also, I haven't ever driven over Route 12 on the Lewis
and Clark trail and I really wanted to drive that. My publisher
thought it was important, because my book is set in Northern
Nevada, to try to hit the independent book stores all over the
Northwest. So I'm going to read in Bellingham and I'm going
to Pullman and I'm going to read in Spokane and Boise.
A: Does it surprise you that there's an audience for this book?
M: It has surprised me some. I think that everyone has some
connection in some way to remote small towns. One hundred years
ago 97 percent of the population lived in small towns all over
the country. So, even though most of us might live in larger
cities now we may have grandparents that have lived in a small
town and feel like they've moved a lot in their lives so there's
one place in their past that's really important to them. I've
gotten letters from people in Maine and Wisconsin and Charleston,
S.C. about this book because it really reminded them of their
place. So I think the book is about people trying to record
their sense of place.
A: What piece of advice do you find yourself giving to your workshop
students the most?
M: I think the most important thing is to try to write the thing
that's most essential to you. Don't try to write merely to meet
an assignment or try to please the workshop. The community of
people in a class or workshop with you is not your audience.
Your audience is anyone that has an interest in the subject or
work that you're doing. Sometimes workshops can have kind of
an avant-garde slant or not at all so you might be writing something
that pushes the boundaries of form and everyone in there isn't
interested in that.
Well, they're not your audience; your audience is much larger
than that. Don't write to please that small group. Write to
please yourself and to please specific people you know. I wrote
my book because I wanted my Uncle Mel in Mountain City to read
it and like it.
I also wrote it so that Ivan Doy would read it and like it.
And he did, he wrote a blurb on the back cover for me. Another
thing I tell writers is to find an author you love and to read
every single thing they've written.
Read their journals, read their diaries, read their letters,
read everything because their sensibilities will eventually work
their way inside your system. You won't write like that, you
can't; you write like yourself. The reason you love that author's
work will hopefully come out in other ways.
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