Martha's Bio

Martha Miller was born Martha Jane Thompson on December 21, 1947. She is the first daughter of Carl Edward and Geraldine Thompson. She would eventually have two younger sisters, both very close in age. She grew up in one of those post-WWII housing developments: 900 square feet, which looked like the neighbor’s 900 square feet, and the 900 square feet across the street. Her father was a motorcycle enthusiast though he worked from the time he came home from the South Pacific until his retirement at Allis Chalmers—a tractor factory. While other families’ recreation consisted of camping and car trips to the ocean, in the Thompson family everything centered on the motorcycle: hill climbs, beer parties, races and etc. Martha learned to ride and had her own Harley 125 when she was eleven. Martha graduated from Feitshans High School, in 1965, with unremarkable (in fact, poor) grades. More than a few times she was busted working on her novel rather than doing school work in the class room—especially math. Her interest in books and reading and writing was influenced by her mother who read to the three girls before bedtime (Anne of Green Gables), a fifth grade teacher who read the entire Laura Ingles Wilder series one chapter at a time all through the school year, and her grandmother, her father’s mother, who kept Classic Comic Books and a complete set of Zane Grey westerns at her house. Martha was twelve when she read grandma’s copy of Gone With the Wind the first time.

Upon graduating High School, at the age of seventeen, she left home. She worked as a waitress first at the train station and then at the Greyhound Bus station. She eventually met Lloyd Pratt (a much older man) and was married to him for two and a half years. About a year after her divorce she married Phillip Dale Miller and in the next fifteen years had two sons: Phillip and Andrew. While her sons were still young, Martha started college and earned an Associates degree in 1984.

May 5, 1984 Martha was introduced to Bill Wilson, and she has been a steady friend of his since then. Only in sobriety did her writing take form. "I used to get drunk on tequila and write poems about murder," claims Miller. "But in sobriety writing became less haphazard. I worked on longer projects." Miller started taking writing classes at Sangamon State University. Her first class was with the poet John Knoepfle. The second was with Jacqueline Jackson who became a good friend and mentor. While at Sangamon State and later the University of Illinois, Springfield, she took as many writing classes as she could, mastering first the short story and then the novel.

She worked at Springfield Marine Bank, which was later bought by Bank One, which was later bought by Chase Bank. She worked at the bank for 27 years from 1972 through 2000 when her department was downsized. She used her severance money to finish graduate school and in the fall of 2001 started teaching part time at Richland Community College and the following summer at Lincoln Land Community College.

In 1989, Miller divorced her husband and got involved in a lesbian relationship (not necessarily in that order). After that time she primarily wrote about gay and lesbian stories themes. Early in the 1990 Miller joined the Sangamon Writers group. This group met in the home of Tim Osburn and Becky Bradway. At the Sangamon Writers group meetings on Friday nights everyone took writing seriously. Some of the best writers in the area sat in Osburn’s living room, shared their work, critiqued others, and learned from each other. Osburn and Bradway were at that time publishing an arts magazine called The Writer’s Bar-B Q. So Miller got some experience both publishing and editing. She also started working on her first book. It was there she met the poet and playwright Shannon Keith Kelley. He encouraged her to write plays. "For a while everyone was writing plays," Miller says. Kelley had started his own theater company "Mid America Playwrights’ Theatre" or "MAPS Theatre." Miller had four plays produced at MAPS Theatre. "Billy’s Voice," a one act play about a woman who’s lost her son to AIDS grew out of that friendship. "Billy’s Voice" had four encore performances and it was published in the arts journal modern words.

During the AIDS epidemic in the early 1990's the writer Paul Monette published a book of autobiographic essays titled, Last Watch of the Night. Monette had died of Aids before the book came out. Then the first of Miller's friend's succumbed to the disease. Watching this sad piece of history unfold, Miller was struck by the isolation and and hopelessness of the victims and those who loved them. Paul Monet’s book inspired Miller to teach people living with AIDS to write memoirs. She developed a five week workshop in which a group of men wrote stories about themselves. She received a Lila Wallace Grant and arranged for a space at the local SARA (Springfield AIDS Resource Association) Center. The guys in that group met for a couple of years after the workshop was finished until one by one they died.

Tales from the Levee actually started out as a few short stories. Miller had already published short stories in Common Lives/Lesbian Lives and On Our Backs when she wrote "Lady Verushka’s Lover." This story about a drag queen (based on a guy who performed in the local gay bars) and his straight boyfriend was published in a periodical called Amethyst. Next she wrote a purely fictional story about the Orpheum Lounge titled "The Cajun Dancer." By then she had the idea for a book. She started talking to people in the gay and lesbian community in Springfield and these conversations gradually became taped interviews. "We just sat around and talked about the old days," says Miller. "And now and then someone would relate a story." Some of the stories in the book came from those interviews and many were her own the creations. In 1995 Miller submitted the manuscript, Tales from the Levee, to the Friends of Lincoln Library Writer of the Year contest. It took the honors for best fiction. That year Miller was recognized by the Illinois Times Reader’s Poll as the best writer in Springfield, and she also won an Illinois Art’s Council award for her writing.

To her disappointment Tales from the Levee did not find a publisher. Miller received several nice rejections. The one from New Victoria Press asked her to keep them in mind if she had another manuscript for them to look at. From her first publication in On Our Backs, Miller made money writing lesbian erotica. "Lesbian sex scenes are hard to write," claims Miller. "Our language is patriarchal and the words don’t really exist to describe what two women do in bed together." Susie Bright and other publishers often contacted Miller for contributions to their latest projects. The erotic stories she’d published added up to a complete manuscript. She sent a collection of these stories to New Victoria Press and they were accepted. Skin to Skin: Erotic Lesbian Love Stories earned some good reviews and sold well. In 2000, New Victoria published Miller’s second book, Nine Nights on the Windy Tree and in 2003 they published Dispatch to Death. Both of these books have leading characters that were first introduced in Skin to Skin. Both got positive reviews.

After letting the manuscript sit for a few years, in 2003 Miller started sending Tales from the Levee around to publishers again. By now she knew why she had problems finding a publisher. After buying and reading gay and lesbian literature for a few years, she noticed that publishers published the girls or the boys but not both. Since New Victoria had already rejected the manuscript, Miller looked in the gay and lesbian magazines and sent her manuscript to the publishers who advertised. In 2004, almost a year after she’d submitted Tales from the Levee to Harrington Press, she got a contract in the mail.

Martha Miller still lives in Springfield. She still teaches writing. And she’s still plugging away writing stories like the ones she loves to read. Miller’s sons are now grown. She lives with her partner Ann, who she refers to as Girlfriend in her "Martha [lesbian] Living" column that she writes for Out & About Illinois. Miller and Girlfriend lead a quiet (sometimes reclusive) life with their two dogs and two cats in a bi-level house that has over 900 square feet on each floor.