A NEW MEMOIR FROM ACCLAIMED OREGON WRITER MARTHA GIES
“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.
Broken Open will be released in August, 2024.
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
Trail To Table Press, August 26, 2024
“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 >>
ADVANCE 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
REVIEWS
In Broken Open, [Gies] 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…This book is a beautiful thing.”
– M. Allen Cunningham, author of We Are Guests of Ancient Time
“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
