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Author Martha Burns Reveals How Actual Events Inspired the Novel, Blind Eye
By Andrea Marvin
Author Martha Burns has lived across the country giving her a depth of knowledge about different regions.
She has spent time in New Mexico, New Jersey, and Hawaii, and her experiences have inspired many of her books that are based on actual events.
While living in a ranching area in rural Southeastern New Mexico, Burns recalls a particular case that gripped the community.
A young boy murdered his parents after years of enduring abuse, and the community felt a sense of responsibility for ignoring the suffering the boy endured.
The true events inspired Burns to write Blind Eye, her debut novel that she’s in the process of relaunching.
Blind Eye has been referred to as slightly fictionalized and won the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award and was a Spur Award finalist.
A conversation with author Martha Burns reveals how she felt a deep sense of responsibility to tell the story of Blind Eye with sympathy.
Burns researched court documents and her time in Southeastern New Mexico gave her an enormous understanding of how the tragedy impacted a community.
She hopes her work provokes deeper thought as the book addresses moral conscience and cultural complicity, as the community looked the other way when the boy was being abused on a remote ranch.
Author Martha Burns shares how the book took many years to write. And how she found, based on feedback from reading groups, that the reader's experience differs based on the familiarity with the actual events and the story’s setting in rural New Mexico.
How would you describe your book, Blind Eye?
The story is a fictional novel inspired by actual events in New Mexico.
It is also the genre I aspire to find myself in, which is Western. But that’s a tough category to get your arms around as far as what a Western is. So, I like to think of Blind Eye as Western literature - that somehow, the story captures the spirit of the West.
I did a lot of research for Blind Eye. I wrote it over quite an extended period of time. I had started the book, set it aside to work on other things, and returned to it. It was a story that captured me, and I needed to figure out how to tell it.
Did you find giving the writing process space improved your storytelling?
You know, it did for Blind Eye and for a few other books that I've written. I started out writing short stories and didn't take breaks from them.
But for Blind Eye, I couldn't figure out the structure. I have a better book because I let it sit for a while and tried to hear the voices of that story.
You mentioned Blind Eye is based on actual events. How did this story capture your attention?
In 2007, my husband and I moved back to New Mexico after living in many different places. We moved to a rural ranching community in Southeastern New Mexico and there was this heartbreaking story in the air that people were talking about. A young teenage boy killed his parents after years of abuse.
When inspired by actual events, I think part of the struggle is trying to figure out your responsibility as a writer in telling the story. When living in the area, I found people talked about what built up to the murder, and not so much the murder itself.
So, ultimately, the novel I wrote focused on what this boy’s story did to a community that I think felt a sense of responsibility for what happened.
It took a long time to write. I enjoy doing research and did much of it for this book. By research, I mean virtually every location in the novel I have personal experience with and have visited.
Regarding the case, the boy went to trial, so I went through all the records.
What has been the overall feedback of the book?
There's no mention of the actual case in the novel. So, the response to the story has been very different depending on the place.
For example, a book club in South Carolina had no grasp of the sense of the place and didn’t know the story about this boy. So, they were reading from a different place, whereas many of my readers in New Mexico knew of the case.
I'm relaunching the book because of different things that happened in my life. As a result, I've received feedback. New Mexico Magazine picked it up in their December issue of 2023, and the editor referred to the book as slightly fictionalized. And I hope the sympathy for the boy comes through.
I use “we voice "in the first-person plural in the novel. That voice has a strong opinion as to what's happening in the story – how the community stood back and did nothing, turned a blind eye. There’s a communal feeling of responsibility as the story unfolded.
What type of experience do you hope readers have?
I like how you phrase that with experience because what I try to do with my short stories is give readers experience. I write stories from a sense of place, a sixth sense.
I hope readers will take away an experience that will make them think about it again and want to discuss it.
I've been in reading groups over the years and have found that the book you want to talk about is successful. If the book is just pleasurable, there's nothing to discuss.
But when there's almost a social issue or a heartbreak behind it, I feel like readers had an experience. That’s what I would want readers to take away. Something that sticks with them.
Tell us about the other books you have written.
Blind Eye was followed by another novel I worked back and forth on that came out in 2024. I worked on the two novels concurrently for many years. It's so different from Blind Eye. It's called Across the Narrows and takes place in Brooklyn.
The book has three parts. It begins in Brooklyn, and it is about a woman who tries to divorce her Colombian husband in the 1930s. But divorce wasn't an option for women then. She tried to file for legal separation, and he countersued her, got the six children, and abandoned her in New York.
It's her story of losing her whole family and not knowing what happened to her children.
The second half of the novel is about one of the children who finds her later in life. It tells the story of the reconciliation between the mother and child, who both felt this abandonment. Actual events also inspired the novel.
I had a lot of research and material to work with and again faced struggle with how to tell and enter the story. But I think it has a strong sense of place.
It's sometimes classified as historical fiction and has a feeling of history behind it of the 1930s. It speaks to the actual legal aspects of what she went through based on information I researched from the court filings.
Do you mostly write about true events? What’s your writing methodology?
The story has to make a difference. That's what I experienced with Blind Eye. This was a story that people were telling.
I'm well into a third novel, and again, it’s based on actual events. It takes place in Hawaii in the 1980s, somewhere I had lived for many years.
The story's core is about a young woman who's a dance instructor who suddenly goes missing and disappears. Similar to Blind Eye, the story is about the impact of the disappearance on the community.
I do like writing about actual events. I find that many readers pick up a book and recognize the location, the place, and the period. And that somehow involves them in the story.
Tell our readers about your path to becoming an author.
I didn't set out to be a writer at all. I became a CPA and tax accountant. But my husband and I had wanderlust, and we lived in a lot of different places, and I got interesting jobs.
New Jersey is one of the places we lived for a long time, and I loved living there. When I got to a point where I could afford it financially, I went back to school and got a Doctor of Letters.
I had this inkling that I wanted to have a foundation of literature and so forth. This led me to, oh, maybe, I can write.
When we left New Jersey and moved back to New Mexico, I thought I was giving up my writing life. But when we came to New Mexico, there was such richness here among writers.
I started working on my craft and attended a writer’s workshop. And I have always been a voracious reader. At one point, I thought, how did they do this? That's how I got to writing.
Anything else you want to share?
My publisher and I decided to go back and create an audiobook of Blind Eye. They are working on it right now, and I've listened to a few of the chapters. It’s exciting for me to hear another interpretation of my work.
What’s it like to hear your book instead of reading it? How’s the experience different?
It's completely different than reading a book. When listening to the story, I hear things that bring me to a scene differently compared to reading it. And it gives people a different experience.
It took a while to find the voice for Blind Eye. I didn’t know how the person behind the voice in the audiobook would incorporate aspects of the written novel.
For instance, I have this “we voice.” I also have a snippet from a rancher’s magazine that runs weekly features in the book at the beginning of each chapter.
I didn't know how he would make it known to the reader that this is something different than the narrator.
Hearing the audiobook is like seeing my book's cover for the first time and having someone else interpret it. It's thrilling.
The audiobook of Blind Eye is expected to be complete in spring. Author Martha Burns' books are available at Barnes and Noble and can be purchased on Amazon and Indie Bound.
Her work has been chosen to be read by numerous book clubs, including in Alamogordo, New Mexico, Denver, Colorado, and Greenville, South Carolina.
Burns earned a Doctor of Letters with distinction from Drew University and won the Faulkner-Wisdom Gold Medal for Short Story.
She now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her two Jack Russell terriers. Martha and her husband lived in New Mexico, New Jersey, Hawaii, California, and Switzerland. She is the mother of two daughters and has four grandchildren.
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