Graphic from Nina Martineck via Instagram
On a wall of scarlet-painted wood planks at a bustling cafe in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, nestled among names of patrons, parents and partners, are three cryptic lines: “The Knowers” (2017), “The Eminence” (2019) and “The Duplicity” (2021). They’re written with love — and in crayon — same as any other name. But these are not the names of people; they’re the names of novels.
Twenty-year-old Nina Martineck, a third-year architecture student at Pratt University in Brooklyn, decided to inscribe her first novel’s name among those of passersby in 2017. Now, every time she treks from upstate New York to spend the holidays at Myrtle Beach, she updates the list with each new book she publishes in her speculative fiction series “The Knowers,” which follows protagonist Skylar Rawlings and the rest of the Knowers as they thwart evil forces and manipulate time.
“It started because I saw other people writing their names, and I was like, ‘I’m gonna write ‘The Knowers’ because I had just published it two months earlier. And now it’s just a personal thing,” Nina explained. “And the crayon is great because it rains a lot there, and it doesn’t come off the wall,” she added with a laugh.
The crayon on the wall of the cafe in Myrtle Beach is just one example of the public legacy Nina has been building since the age of 10, when her short story “The Bug Whisperer,” following the journey of a girl who becomes an entomologist after talking to an insect named Carl, was published (print only) in the Western New York Young Writers’ Anthology. Now, her books circulate in her local and high school libraries, lining shelves alongside the likes of Sarah J. Maas, and can be found in stores from Barnes & Noble to the Strand.
Though “The Knowers” series and her other writings aren’t the first things you notice about her — most think of her architecture projects, manatee activism and her predilection for wearing skirts, to name a few — they are an incredibly important part of Nina’s life and the mark she wants to leave on the world. She and her father, a science fiction author, even created their own publishing company, Our Little Secret Press, to nurture Nina’s growing collection of published works; all of “The Knowers” have been published using this company with the exception of the first novel, published first under CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform and later republished at Our Little Secret Press.
Encountering her work in the world “feels so validating. It’s like, someone else was touching my book. When I hold my book, that makes sense,” Nina explained. But when she sees her books in the hands of other readers, like her college roommates and close friends, “It’s out of body. It’s like seeing your own painting in a museum. It’s a lot of pride — good pride, not bad pride — and it’s like, ‘Wow, other people can experience this. It’s not like I only ever see my books.’”
Nina’s enthusiasm for sharing is evident from the interview itself; for just over three hours on a school night in the week leading up to midterms, she sat cross-legged in a chair across from me, fending off surprise attacks from a very devious black cat while answering my queries about her series, specifically the role of time in “The Knowers.” Each person’s experience of time is subjective, Nina argues, because time, though often seen as objective, was a product of “human conception”: “Humans conceived the seconds, and humans conceived the minute, and humans decided that we’re going to call this a day, and we’re going to divide it into 24 chunks … It’s rooted in nothing except the Earth turning around the sun,” she explained.
The Knowers, or the group of teenagers imbued with special powers to control time, “understand that — that everyone’s right, and no one’s right,” Nina continued. “That everyone’s perception of time is valid, yet none of it actually is true. They have come to the realization, literally through ninth-grade genetics, … that if they can change people’s perception, they can therefore alter time itself.”
These musings on time have been swirling around Nina’s mind since an afternoon Scrabble club meeting in the seventh grade, though she did not return to the novel idea in earnest until the end of her freshman year of high school. Her third book was published in the middle of the second semester of her sophomore year, amid the chaos of online learning and the pandemic. Now, as a third-year in college, she is working on her fourth novel, squeezing in writing time alongside design projects and lectures. Despite the ever-present challenges of balancing school, extracurriculars — she’s also a writer and editor at The Prattler, Pratt’s literary magazine — and the normal day-to-day of adulting, writing and sharing the story she conceived nearly a decade ago remain priorities.
Even though “Part of me is like, ‘I want to be on the bestseller’s list; I want people to make memes about my book like they make about Harry Potter,’” Nina explained, “another part of me is like, my books really are personal. If four people read them, four people read them. That’s awesome.”
Nina hopes every reader will come away with something after reading, if not profound wisdom then at least a laugh: “Whatever readers feel they can take from my book, that makes me so happy … that I had an impact on someone like that.”
Along with the excitement of sharing her novels with the reading community comes a bit of nerves, and the experience is sometimes even a little scary. The protagonists of Nina’s books make plenty of mistakes, get into fights and accidentally hurt each other as they mature. But it can be hard as an author to watch characters undergo these growing pains and even harder to judge how the audience’s perception of the writer would change based on what she “made” these characters do.
Specifically, in her third book, “The Duplicity,” “Something I really struggled with … is that a bunch of characters including Skylar made really bad mistakes. And I didn’t condone them!” Nina exclaimed. “And I had this really long conversation with my dad about this because I’m like, ‘I have to write this; I have to allow them to mess up.’ And he’s like, ‘They have a mind of their own, and they’re gonna mess up, and all you can do is adequately tell it.’”
Apart from worries about how her characters’ actions would reflect on herself, the other personal, emotional aspects of the novel that are vital in creating connections between readers and characters — particularly her “dialogue that makes you smile” and realistic characters — also give Nina pause. “Knowing my chemistry teacher read my books, knowing my religion teacher read my books…” Nina sighed and gave a tiny shake of her head. “I write about personal stuff in there. I write about, I mean, as anyone does, my own feelings and putting that out there is intimidating. Even if they’re not mine, everyone knows they’re mine.”
She paused, pushing her glasses up, before countering, “But also, if you don’t put yourself out there, you’re not going to get people putting themselves out there for you, and then you lose out on connections.”
In a way, Nina — and many young authors like herself — counter notions that authors only write to seek fame and earn lucrative book deals. In a world where BookTok directs millions of readers’ choices and fame can be made in a minute(-long video), it’s nice to be reminded of the personal legacy these books often represent for their writers. But for Nina, it’s more of a necessary creative outlet than a money-making endeavor.
“I’ve never been in it to make a career, at least not a professional career,” she explained. “I do it mostly for me, and I publish it because that’s part of me, that’s part of what I want, is putting it out there so it’s not just mine. It’s mine that I let people borrow,” Nina concluded.
The series is also “my legacy to myself,” Nina said. And it’s a legacy Nina still has time to figure out, to refine. Still moved by the desire to share the stories sweeping across her imagination, she is already working on the fourth of five books for “The Knowers,” among other writing projects. But, as she grows alongside her characters, she sorts out what kind of impact she has on the world — and the world on her.
That process still sometimes takes her by surprise — “Still, I look over at my bookshelf and am stunned to see part of my soul solidified. How did I manage to encapsulate it?” Nina asked. “I still don’t really know. That’s my favorite writing enigma: the transfer of ourselves into words and ink and paper. We become permanent.”