“I was, at my core, incapable of escaping the taint of my ancestry.”
About Martin
When asked in school what I wanted to be when I grew up, on some days I said a scientist. On others, I said a writer. I have spent the last thirty plus years as a scientist and R&D executive in pharma and biotech companies. Since 2022, I have revisited that question from my school days and become a novelist. I was born and raised in south-central Kentucky near the Cumberland River. I left there when I went to college and have lived in Massachusetts for the last thirty years. I never felt an interest in my birthplace and certainly never felt driven to write novels about it. Now, an amateur’s love of history has led me back there. I am compelled somehow to write these stories about a fictional place near the Cumberland. My stories are meant not so much to capture history as to reveal imaginary characters that might have lived in and been shaped by that place and time—that very small slice of a world long gone that could have led these characters to take a particular path.
About Isabelle’s Point
My debut novel, ISABELLE’S POINT, begins in 1951 in southern Kentucky along the Cumberland River, where William, a middle-aged farmer, is losing his land to the building of a dam and his sense of reality to isolation and depression. When William discovers the century-old, secret diaries of his great-grandmother, Isabelle, he finds her struggles against intolerant and violent Appalachian mores match his own. Isabelle’s story unveils to William a fateful intertwining of his life with hers and a promising future he could never have predicted.
Projects in Progress
All of my writing has a Faulknerian devotion to a single place along the Cumberland River in Kentucky where generations of a fictitious single family evolve over the course of a century. Isabelle’s Point represents the first such novel.
In my second manuscript, Millie’s Calling, six-year-old Millie is left to live with her grandparents and aunt on the same farm along the Cumberland River where her mother, Isabelle, grew up. She chooses to leave as soon as she is able and to live a singular existence far from her birthplace. Ultimately, the obstacles she faces expose to her a different person than the one she at first believed herself to be.
© Charlene Sargeant
Water Astir
Art as Inspiration for Isabelle’s Point
My works of historical fiction are set in and around a place called Point Isabel, a fictional variant of a village that once existed on the banks of the Cumberland River in antebellum Kentucky. As my writing has evolved, I have found myself adopting visual representations of the novels I am creating. Water Astir, an original painting created by my wife, Charlene Sargeant, became that visual for Isabelle’s Point. The river is central in the 19th century lives of the characters in these stories—for transportation, commerce, recreation, and irrigation. Charlene’s piece evokes the surface of the Cumberland’s waters near Point Isabel in Pulaski County: miles from its source in the Appalachian Mountains, below the pounding water of Cumberland Falls and the shallow shoals that follow, near the branchpoint of the South Fork before the Cumberland turns to the south toward Nashville. The elements of the painting suggest storm-driven white caps breaking over the blue surface as ominous dark swells of blood red and black emerge from beneath. The subtle underlying layer of striations suggest uplifting rays of light. These elements parallel the dimensions of Isabelle’s character: solitary and damaged but expectant that hope will emerge from her troubled days.
Literary Inspiration for Isabelle’s Point
“Move. Walk. Run. Hide. Steal and move on. Only once had it been possible for him to stay in one spot--with a woman, or a family--for longer than a few months. That once was almost two years with a weaver lady in Delaware, the meanest place for Negroes he had ever seen outside Pulaski County, Kentucky…”
Toni Morrison
Beloved
“The empty point of land between the rivers became Point Isabel. One story goes that a lovelorn girl named Isabel leaped into the river to her death, but as no one knows the last name of this Isabel or the name of her faithless lover, the tale remains only a tale.”
Harriette Simpson Arnow
Old Burnside: A Memoir of a Southern Girlhood