Thrilled to welcome the writer, teacher and activist, Martha Gies. She will be reading from her newly released collection of essays, Broken Open.
About Broken Open
“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
Broken Open is a memoir told in essays exploring a life robustly and thoughtfully lived by Martha Gies, an acclaimed teacher, writer, and activist 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.
About Martha Gies
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 began publishing journalism in the seventies and later studied fiction with Raymond Carver. Her short stories and essays have appeared widely in literary magazines, including Gettysburg Review, The MacGuffin, Notre Dame Review, Orion, The Sun, Zyzzyva, and various anthologies. 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.