Broken Open

Broken Open

"Broken Open" is a 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. Broken Open is a collection of beautifully crafted stories told with a gift for humor and lived with the courage to face heartbreak. "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—The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist "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 "The essays in this collection offer life as a sacrament, and people who make sacrifices for one another. They explore what it means to live a contemplative life, one open and receptive to the natural world: oak trees, creek, forest, farm, the verdant Willamette Valley. Gies combines an obvious affinity for a good story with a close study of humans in all their brokenness and illumination. For all the years she has worked as a writer and beloved teacher in Portland, she has also made her mark on the city, in the writing she did for Street Roots newspaper for many years, and the work she did for 17 years with elderly and disabled people downtown, displaced from buildings being renovated or condemned. She has lived intentionally small, attempting to organize her life in a way that she says 'permitted the most writing time and just enough money to feed me.' Broken Open offers a rich portrait of a life well lived, well loved, and captures the stories that Gies couldn't let go of until she'd written them down. All the better for us." - Laura Moulton, Author of Loaners: The Making of a Street Library " Broken Open — a collection of 18 essays — is a fascinating mixture of memoir, social observation, and literary journalism, with some spiritual searching and progressi