PITTSBURG, Kan. — Lori Martin, an English Professor and director of English Graduate Studies at Pittsburg State University, is grading her last paper on the 4th Floor of Grubbs Hall as she is set to retire this semester and focus on the completion of a novel.

“I had a wonderful career here and I enjoyed my time,” she said. “It always felt like home.”

Martin has worked for the university for 14 years with 11 of them tenured. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at PSU.

When Martin first set foot on the Pittsburg State University campus, she was considered a “non-traditional” student. Her children were teenagers, and for many years she had been a stay-at-home mother but also spent some time working as a bookkeeper then later a reporter and editor for the Coffeyville Journal.

Chasing a bachelor’s degree from PSU stemmed from a decision to pursue a job as a Gifted Facilitator, a position that worked with gifted students in the area. After completing her associates degree from Labette Community College, she realized how much she missed academic settings.

Relearning how to study and take notes was a challenge at first, she said, but many of her professors were helpful and supportive. While some students were unnerved that she was an older student, she made fast friends with many of the younger students.

Martin always had a love for writing, so she took a creative writing class “just for fun.” After she turned in her first story, her professor, Dr. Kathy DeGrave pulled her aside and told her she had talent and needed to pursue writing. She said she continued to receive that same encouragement from all her professors.

“I felt like that was what I needed to hear,” she said. “The encouragement I received and the fact that it's a small school, they see you in ways that in a bigger school, you probably would be more invisible.”

This encouragement and love for writing led her to change her career path.

“I just felt like I needed to go where my heart was,” Martin said. “I would go home, and I wasn't thinking about the things that we needed to do for the Education Department. I was thinking about what I could write, and I was thinking the way my story could be developed and how I could improve it. And it just felt like that was the way my heart needed to go.”

Martin went on to complete her bachelor’s degree in English with a creative writing emphasis and then a master’s.

After earning her degrees at PSU, Martin was accepted into the MFA program at the University of Iowa. She was named a Truman Capote Fellow and won the Clark Fisher Ainsley Prize for Fiction. After she completed her MFA, she worked at Independence Community College for three years. When a position became available at PSU, she applied and was hired.

Martin said there was a slight adjustment period in seeing her former mentors as peers, but it didn’t take long for her to become close friends with fellow professors.

“The people I work with were so supportive, so professional, and I admire them so much,” she said. “I've got lifelong friends through here. Susan Carlson, Kathy DeGrave, Laura Lee Washburn, Chris Anderson, Chase Derringer, Mary Larson, Paul McCallum, Casie Hermansson, they've been very, very good friends and as well as colleagues, and it's meant a lot to me.”

Martin plans to spend her retirement finishing a novel that she has been writing and revising for the past 10 years. She also wants to travel and learn to sew.

“I owe a great debt to PSU. I feel like, again, this has felt like home to me,” she said. “My students have meant the world to me. If all I had to do here was teach students, I probably would do that until I was like, 100 years old, because that never gets old.”

Martin’s work has appeared in “The Maine Review,” “Tampa Review,” “Whimsical Poet,, “Room Magazine,” and “The MacGuffin,” and others. She is the poetry editor for “The Midwest Quarterly” and the editor for “River Styx.”

This reporting is made possible, in part, by the Support Local Journalism Project Fund. Learn more at: southeastkansas.org/Localnews.