While many students have typical summers life-guarding by the pool or twiddling their thumbs in an office, there are those few people who truly have summers to write home about.
Ten years ago, one Duke student had a summer to write a novel about.
Eric Martin, Trinity '90, joined a house course started by one of his friends. The course led to an internship in the middle of tobacco country, where Martin and his friends spent the summer of 1990 working with farmworkers and social service workers in rural North Carolina.
"One hot night during that summer I went really late to the office-I sat down and wrote what would become the first page of the novel," said Martin, who graduated with a degree in comparative literature. "I didn't really know I was starting a novel; I just saw a scene and tried to capture it."
Last month, Martin published his first book "Luck: A Novel" which chronicles a Duke student's return to his rural hometown. He and his friends encounter the decline of tobacco farming and the use and abuse of Mexican migrant workers-many of the scenes Martin himself encountered that summer.
While the first page of "Luck" was written during Martin's internship experience, he put the story away for five years while he worked on another novel and attended graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin.
"The novel is about a North Carolina I had known during an intense part of my life," Martin said. "It is a North Carolina drawn on facts and reality that ended up existing in my book."
The novel deals with both rural North Carolina and the Duke experience.
"Duke is a really weird place," he said. "A lot of the book was about my experiences at Duke, and the idea of Duke being in North Carolina, but not of North Carolina."
While he enjoyed his time at Duke, he recognized its limitations.
"I felt like I had a Jekyll/Hyde experience at Duke," he said. "On one hand, I loved it, on the other hand I hated it-not the everyday reality, but the certain level of guilt and privilege, the conservatism and political blindness. I had a great time, but I was wondering, 'Is this what I'm supposed to be doing?'"
Martin describes his main character, Mike, as a Duke student who is trying to transfer his feeling of conflict: wanting everything yet wondering what he deserves and what his duties are. Although Mike experiences many of the same things Martin did, Martin says that Mike is not an autobiographical character.
Becoming a writer has always been a career goal for Martin. He took James B. Duke Professor of English Reynolds Price's Advanced Narrative Writing class as a senior.
Price said that Martin "was plainly a serious worker from the start-no nonsense, real ambition, patent ability."
On the book's jacket cover, Price described the novel as "clean, clear, swift prose; and it tells a riveting story."
In addition to telling an entertaining tale, "Luck" has its roots in social commentary about the migrant farmworker situation.
Martin returned to these roots last month, when he did a bilingual reading of the novel for the farmworkers and another at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies.
"It was full circle to come back after writing and publishing the novel-after thinking of it only as a book for so long, to remember how it was tightly linked to people," he said.
Martin's inspirational internship was through Student Action with Farmworkers, which has been active at Duke since the 1970s and is now incorporated as a non-profit organization.
Both Martin and SAF representatives said they hope this book will help bring about social improvements for the farmworkers.
Martin thinks that his new novel "will have a dedicated limited audience. I hope people in tobacco country read it-they can make a difference."
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