BROKEN OPEN: A NEW BOOK FROM ACCLAIMED OREGON WRITER MARTHA GIES
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Broken Open is a memoir told in essays exploring a life robustly and thoughtfully lived by Martha Gies, an acclaimed writer, activist and teacher, now entering her eighth decade. 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 “right livelihood,” following both fate and choice to a wise and forgiving assessment of what it all means.
Author:
Martha Gies
Publisher:
Trail To Table Press: An Imprint of Wandering Aengus Press
Publication Date:
August 2024
ISBN:
979-8-218-38270-4
Trim Size:
6x9”
Page Count:
198
From the Publisher: “May you live every day of your life,” counseled Jonathan Swift. This collection—15 personal essays, two profiles and one interview—covers decades of a life robustly lived. Its three sections explore, respectively, the illusions and disillusions of childhood, the search for right livelihood, and the reflections and discoveries of age, all told with a gift for humor and all lived with the courage to face heartbreak.
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, profiled Portland’s graveyard-shift workers and 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
“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. Whether she is writing about something as intimate as the spiritual path of a beloved sister who died too young or as exotic as her stint in the stage acts of a third-rate traveling magician, 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 that makes E. B. White seem opaque. 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. Whether writing about her family’s backyard camping practice or the untimely deaths of her father and kid sister, 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 Good Reads
“Reading Broken Open: Essays by Martha Gies, I was reminded of these words by another Pacific Northwest writer and activist, Susan Banyas: ‘I am called to bear witness; this is not a passive act.’ Gies's engagement in the worlds she writes about is palpable. Whether writing about men living on Portland's streets and struggling to get clean, or about growing up in Oregon's Willamette Valley with her ever-besotted parents and 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. I, too, was bearing witness as I read - a witness to this full and committed life, all detailed in gorgeous, clear prose with a fair amount of humor.
“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.)”
“Reading Broken Open by Martha Gies, I was reminded of these words by another Pacific Northwest writer and activist, Susan Banyas: ‘I am called to bear witness; this is not a passive act.’ Gies's engagement in the worlds she writes about is palpable. Whether writing about men living on Portland's streets and struggling to get clean, or about growing up in Oregon's Willamette Valley with her ever-besotted parents and 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.”
REVIEWER QUOTES
“It is an exquisite book.” – Elinor Langer, author of A Hundred Little Hitlers
“This book is a beautiful thing.” – M. Allen Cunningham, author of We Are Guests of Ancient Time
“These essays shine with unassuming openness.” – Doug Marx, poet, musician, artist
“Gies combines an obvious affinity for a good story with a close study of humans in all their brokenness and illumination.” – Laura Moulton, founder of Street Books & co-author of Loaners: The Making of a Street Library
“...a fascinating mixture of memoir, social observation, and literary journalism…written in a clear clean rhythm that moves swiftly forward even as it plunges into surprising depths.” - Bob Hicks, arts and culture editor
Read the full review here >>
“Artful and deeply personal essays comprise this splendid new memoir…[Gies] demonstrates her ease at bringing elegance, humor, and pathos to the printed page.” - Activist Joe Martin in Seattle’s Post Alley
Read the full review here >>
UPCOMING EVENTS
Martha has read in Portland, Seattle and California; more events will be happening in the Spring. Sign up for Martha’s mailing list or check the events page to stay in the loop.