Laura Martin is an English teaching fellow here at Georgia College. As far as being a campus celebrity, her fame is a quiet renown. She is relatively new around here, but has not been timid when it comes to getting involved. She recently helped organize the literary conference hosted here, Flanner O’Conner and Other Southern Women Writers, where she read some of her works. Not to mention, she is well known and liked by many of her writing students, which is not at all a surprise considering what an interesting and outstanding individual she is.
Her Campus: Can you start by telling us where and what you’ve studied in school?
Laura Martin: So, I did my undergrad at NYU and I studied creative writing and literature. I’m working on my graduate degree here; actually, I’m on my last year. So, I’m getting an MFA in creative writing, and so that is that.
HC: What are a few things you think define or identify you as Laura Martin, Professor extraordinaire?
LM: Well, I’m not a full professor and I don’t know how “extraordinaire” I am. Things that define me? I mean, one thing that I’ll say that I think is kind of interesting about me is that, you know, this is not my first career. I was a hair dresser for thirteen years before coming back to school and pursuing this, and when I was in New York working on my undergrad degree I taught cosmetology school at this really high-end boutique in SoHo and then I also travelled and taught classes nationally, like advanced education courses. So, that’s all been really fun. And I have a lot of teaching experience it’s just that most of it is outside of academia. I also taught art and science classes for elementary school kids for a while. I love teaching. It’s always been a passion of mine. It’s exciting to do it in a university setting.
HC: What made you switch from cosmetology to literature?
LM: Well, that’s a very complicated question for me.
So, I always really wanted to be a writer, you know, and when I went off to college the first time when I was eighteen and my parents were helping me pay for it, it was like “no, you cannot go to school for that.” So, I was a psych major and then I just dropped out after a semester. I was like, this is not what I want to do. So I moved to Chicago and was like, what can I do that is fun and creative, and I thought… I’ll do hair!
I still really like cutting and coloring and styling hair. I loved working on fashion week and teaching and writing stuff for magazines, but the day-to-day grind of doing hair in a salon is not very creative. It’s more like being a therapist. It’s really like doing the same five haircuts over and over again while hearing everyone’s life struggles. That can be interesting, but I’m kind of an introvert and that was very exhausting. Plus, that career just left very little time for me to write.
So, a decade passed and I still really wanted to be a writer, so I went back to school.
HC: When did you first become interested in writing and what are your favorite things to write?
LM: I started when I was really, really young. I kept a diary since I was in elementary school. I used to write like little poems, and I would do water color illustrations over them, and my parents still have some of them around the house. Yeah, so I’ve always written.
I think a lot of people start out writing poetry, like that was kind of my first thing and then when I was in junior high I went through this phase where I would write a whole bunch of creation myths about how the world started. Just kind of weird and random.
I did one for school and then I wanted to write more, and I wrote like a whole series of them.
Then I started writing fiction that was sort of nonfiction. I would just take people that I know and change their stories a little bit and sort of write about them.
When I was in my undergrad I discovered creative nonfiction and that’s really where my passion is. I love researching things and incorporating things that have actually happened to me with the history of those things.
Like the book that I’m working on now is a memoir told through the lens of the fairytale Beauty and the Beast, which is my favorite fairytale. I’ve loved it my whole life so I just read all these different versions of that story and a lot about the history of fairytales and how we’ve modernized them with different retellings, and then I’m sort of examining my own story through that lens and also writing my own retelling of the story. So, that’s really fun.
HC: How can we find your writing and can you tell us how some of your pieces came to be published?
LM: The easiest way is online. I have a story that was published on Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, which is a New York based literary journal. It’s called “Dead Horse Bay,” and then, I blog. I blog weekly for a style blog, which is a hair fashion blog.
HC: I was going to ask you about that. You’re a staff writer for a fashion blog called Style Noted. How did you get started with that and do you write a certain piece?
LM: Yeah, well I write eight pieces a week, so, I write A LOT.
I was just approached by somebody I knew through the industry that I knew when I was in New York who knew that I was a writer and also a hair-dresser who said “Hey I’m starting this project” and “Would you like to be involved” and I said yes.
That gig is really fun because my boss will let me write about anything I want as long as it’s related to hair and fashion. So, one post will be on like the history of braids since the dawn of time and the next post will be on how hair relates to economic disparity and the next one will be like step by step how to do a four piece braid. It really lets me go kind of crazy with it, so that fun.
My favorite are my two formulations a week where I come up with like two new colors every week, a name for them, a description, and then like how to create it. Coloring [hair] was always my favorite.
HC: How did you end up at Georgia College?
LM: When I applied for MFA programs I only applied for five because I had a really specific idea of what I wanted. I wanted somewhere small, I wanted somewhere in a city I could afford to live in as a graduate student. Since I did my undergrad at NYU I just needed something that would be well-funded and this is what gave me the best financial backing, so here I am.
HC: I assume you do other things besides write. What are some of your other interests?
LM: I still do some hair on the side. Also, I was a trapeze artist for about four years, so, yeah. I don’t really do trapeze anymore because there’s nowhere to do it in town, but it’s something I’m very interested in. I’ve started slack-lining here, just to kind of keep up balance and that kind of thing.
Slack-lining is like a tight rope, but a loose one so you walk on it and do tricks and things. You just tie it to two trees. I just started doing it, so I’m not good at it yet at all. I’m trying.
I lift, too. I feel like being a writer and a teacher I spend most of my day just sitting quietly and reading and writing. I balance that way. I run five miles three times a week and do lifting in the gym.
HC: What’s been inspiring you lately?
LM: You guys! [Students] My creative writing class really inspires me, just having conversations. Every time I leave that class I just want to go write things. I want to read things. You guys are a huge, huge inspiration to me.
HC: Do you have any advice for us college ladies who are aspiring writers, artists, professors, future Presidents, or otherwise?
LM: Do what you love! Don’t worry about the money side of it. I know people say that and it sounds really impractical. But I think doing something that you don’t care about, you’ll just never reach beyond a certain level of success because you’re not willing to put the time into it to succeed. Succeeding at anything is really hard and requires a lot of work and I really think it has very little to do with talent and everything to do with passion and dedication. So, pick something you love and just make it work.
HC: Do you have any favorite heroines from literature/ books/ comics/ television? I’m hoping you do! Who and why?
LM: I mean, my heroines are actually, because I’m a writer, they’re other writers. So, like Miranda July is one of my favorite ones. She’s a writer. She’s super cool. But she’s also a filmmaker, and a performance artists and I’m just kind of smitten with her. Janisse Ray who was here just over the weekend, you know, she’s a Georgia writer and she also has a farm in South Georgia. She’s trying to kind of remake her whole southern town. I find her really, really inspiring. Patricia Hampl I really like. Deborah Eisenberg. Tons of female writers.
HC: Who would win in a fight: Wonder Woman or Cat Woman?
LM: I’m going to have to say Cat Woman because I really like Halle Berry and Michele Pfeiffer and I would put the two of them up against anyone.
HC: We thank you so much for taking the time to hang out and wax some narrative with us here at Her Campus!
You can read Laura Martin’s “Dead Horse Bay” here and check out Style Noted here.