BROKEN OPEN: A NEW BOOK FROM ACCLAIMED OREGON WRITER MARTHA GIES
Get your copy of the book:
Portland: Annie Bloom's Books | Broadway Books | Powells | Up Up Books / Seattle: Secret Garden / Online: Bookshop.org
“In this memoir in essays, Gies seeks right livelihood and spiritual balance in her beloved Portland while also leading creative and cultural retreats in Central and South America.”
- CLMP Regional Spotlight on Pacific Northwest books
UPCOMING EVENTS
Martha has read in Portland, Seattle and the California Bay area. Sign up for Martha’s mailing list or check the events page to stay in the loop.
Broken Open is a memoir told in essays exploring a life robustly and thoughtfully lived by Martha Gies, an acclaimed writer, activist and teacher. With dry wit, sharp insights, and deep empathy for the underdog, Gies writes about the principal illusions and disillusions of childhood and the experiments made in exploring how one makes a living without sacrificing the dictates of one’s heart.
About the Author: Martha Gies was raised in the solitude of rural Oregon with a love of literature and a yearning for friends unmet. Her family’s relative affluence discomforted her and provoked a lifelong preoccupation with justice. Unlikely jobs—asparagus packing manager, deputy sheriff, cocktail waitress, stage manager—provided material for writing. She founded Traveler’s Mind, an annual ten-day workshop in non-touristic communities in Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, India, Mexico and Nicaragua, and taught it for twenty years.
Martha’s previous book, Up All Night, was selected by Oregon’s two largest newspapers for their Ten Best of the Year lists. Learn more about Martha here >>
PRAISE FOR BROKEN OPEN
“Martha Gies opens her world to the reader completely with a grace and honesty that requires each essay be completed before you step away."
– Independent Book Publishers Association
“Profiling a haunted, former physicist she met at a skid row chapel who had once overcome his silence to talk with her over a never-repeated dinner, Martha Gies writes he was “private isolated, and essentially unknowable… That evening was a humbling reminder of the deep mystery at the center of each of us.” It is exactly that mystery that is illuminated in every one of the essays in this intense and heartfelt collection. . . She brings to life not only what is happening at the moment but what had happened to those people, to that place, and to herself in the past. “I was sifting through memory and idea to find a story of my own…that might rise above personal chronicle and speak meaning to another person,” she writes of her first short story decades ago, and these essays are a testament that she has found it. In Broken Open, she breaks open not only herself but everything and everyone she writes about. It is an exquisite book.”
– Elinor Langer, author of A Hundred Little Hitlers
“I admire so much in these interlinked essays – their unabashed elegance, their contemplative and emotional landscapes, their origin here at home in Oregon, their light-handed learnedness and abundant allusions. There’s an added pleasure in noting how Gies’ work, so finely turned in itself, falls on a distinguished spectrum amidst Brodsky and Ozick and Ruefle. This book is a beautiful thing.”
– M. Allen Cunningham, author of We Are Guests of Ancient Time
“Readers familiar with Martha Gies’s fiction, nonfiction, and journalism know two of her several virtues. One goes to her Catholic life of service at home and abroad, which informs her ability to evoke the global through a clarifying focus on the local. Two is a transparency of style. I could easily point to “Teacher: A Memoir of Raymond Carver” and “A Father’s Story,” about the life of Kent Ford, who co-founded Portland’s Black Panther Party, but it’s the smaller personal essays that provide a setting for the larger jewels. These essays shine with unassuming openness.”
– Doug Marx, poet, musician, artist
READER REVIEWS OF BROKEN OPEN
“…thoughtful, heartbreaking, honest, revealing, highly personal and so observant. . . All the essays were unique and absorbing; [the book] made me realize I've just been running on the surface.
- Melissa Mitchell via goodreads
“Gies's engagement in the worlds she writes about is palpable. Whether writing about men living on Portland streets and struggling to get clean, or about growing up in Oregon's Willamette Valley with her three younger siblings, Gies is ever a caring participant in these concerns. She moves as gracefully between essay forms as she does between the subjects that captivate her: the twists and turns of family life, the different shapes of grief and remorse, the lives of immigrants, the winter she worked as a magician's assistant, and how to lead a life of devotion. We are equally captivated wherever she turns her attention.In one of her last essays, ‘Paradise Refused,’ Gies describes accompanying an older Mixtec couple as they return to Mexico. Other travelers at the Mexico City airport parted around them "as though aware of one of life's significant moments." If I can borrow from Gies, that's how I feel about this collection, that I am reading something significant. . . a witness to this full and committed life, all detailed in gorgeous, clear prose.
“Each of the beautifully crafted pieces in this collection by Martha Gies stands alone, and each also falls into place as a crucial part of a greater whole. Not only is it a sharply honest, engaging, and moving memoir – it is an inspiring master class for those of us laboring to write our own life stories. The memoirs I most love incorporate distinct and surprising threads that run through the writer’s life, from childhood on. In this author’s case, those threads combine to show a tireless curiosity about/respect for other people and cultures, a lifelong capacity for hard work, and a delightful ability to capture the absurdities and miracles she encounters. This is a book to own and treasure, folks. (A bonus: If you loved the Pacific Northwest of the 1960s-2000s -- prepare to be transported back to what you miss about it.)”
“Martha Gies writes a spellbinding tale of experiences in her itinerant life plus stories of the equally fascinating souls she met along the way. Whether assisting Great Kramien the Magician onstage, studying with Raymond Carver, interviewing graveyard shift workers when driving cab (see her first book Up All Night), talking to an ex-Black Panther father or a nuclear physicist, she speaks wisely and compassionately. It is very much a Northwest book describing growing up on an asparagus farm worked by hundreds of braceros when the U. S. welcomed foreign workers and the author's myriad jobs in different parts of Oregon and Washington and farther afield. The writing is polished, as one might expect from a writing teacher, but also hones exquisite recollections: ‘the thousands of stars above the Andes suggesting a white blaze just behind the perforated sky; the afternoon I bent among dense ferns to ladle clear, bubbling spring water into my pail and discovered the pink pearlescent shock of a large abalone shell left by a recent guest.’ She includes a passionate telling of her own spiritual journey preaching to county jail inmates, and her eventual conversion to Catholicism, work with the homeless and visits to pastoral ministries in Latin America. No humdrum moments in Gies's life tales--I highly recommend this collection..”