Broken Open: A Memoir In Essays by Martha Gies
Broken Open is a spiritually-engaged memoir told in 18 essays exploring a life robustly and thoughtfully lived by acclaimed writer, activist and teacher Martha Gies, who is now entering her eighth decade. With dry wit, sharp insights, and deep empathy for the underdog, the memoir’s three sections explore:
Act One: The Illusions and Disillusions of Childhood: Waking up to the world, as experienced through the lenses of rural living, a deep love of Russian literature, grief following two untimely deaths in the family, and other complications.
Act Two: The Search for Right Livelihood: A chaotic journey towards finding a vocation — from driving a cab at night to assisting a third-rate traveling magician — before a short-story writing workshop with Raymond Carver changes everything.
Act Three: A Forgiving Assessment Of What It All Means: Exploring the tension between the memories we try to find and the memories that find us. Essays include an encounter with a former Los Alamos scientist; a priest fighting for human rights in Chiapas; and a drug addict turned drug counselor, among others.
Act One: The Illusions and Disillusions of Childhood: Waking up to the world, as experienced through the lenses of rural living, a deep love of Russian literature, grief following two untimely deaths in the family, and other complications.
Act Two: The Search for Right Livelihood: A chaotic journey towards finding a vocation — from driving a cab at night to assisting a third-rate traveling magician — before a short-story writing workshop with Raymond Carver changes everything.
Act Three: A Forgiving Assessment Of What It All Means: Exploring the tension between the memories we try to find and the memories that find us. Essays include an encounter with a former Los Alamos scientist; a priest fighting for human rights in Chiapas; and a drug addict turned drug counselor, among others.
“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.
Gies 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
Readers familiar with Martha Gies’s writing 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, and the second is her transparency of style. Whether writing about her family’s backyard camping practice, an elderly physicist met in a Skid Road chapel, or the untimely death of her kid sister, these essays shine with unassuming openness.
--Doug Marx, poet and family man
I admire so much in these interlinked essays – their unabashed elegance, their contemplative and emotional syntactical landscapes, their origin here at home in Oregon, their light-handed learnedness and abundant allusions.
--M. Allen Cunningham, author of We Are Guests of Ancient Time
Gies 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
Readers familiar with Martha Gies’s writing 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, and the second is her transparency of style. Whether writing about her family’s backyard camping practice, an elderly physicist met in a Skid Road chapel, or the untimely death of her kid sister, these essays shine with unassuming openness.
--Doug Marx, poet and family man
I admire so much in these interlinked essays – their unabashed elegance, their contemplative and emotional syntactical landscapes, their origin here at home in Oregon, their light-handed learnedness and abundant allusions.
--M. Allen Cunningham, author of We Are Guests of Ancient Time
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. Her 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.