Ellie J. Anderson

My friend Martha Geis has published a book of essays called Broken Open.  She recently sent out a newsletter about it. The book is available at Secret Garden Books in Pike Place Market.  It was easy to order online and they sent me an autographed copy!!  Here is the newsletter, edited slightly: 

 

"Broken Open continues to find its way out into the world, helped along by all of you: thank you! 

 

Three Wonderful Reviews

 

Commonweal, “Experiments in Sainthood ”Commonweal has published a beautiful review of Broken Open by Valerie Sayers (Kenan Professor of English Emerita at the University of Notre Dame, author of The Age of Infidelity and Other Stories and six novels) in which she writes: "Gies’s narratives are often structured in a way that deepens and complicates their subjects: an acerbic account of her time touring as a magician’s assistant, for example, includes the facts she reads about Houdini in a thirty-five-cent paperback... Other essays tell the story of a former Black Panther organizer whose son, once an intern in the mayor’s office, is arrested and imprisoned for terrorism when he refuses to testify against fellow Muslims; of a taciturn physicist and former CIA agent living in voluntary poverty and attending Skid Row Mass; of Gies’s retracing of Neruda’s journey to the sea; and of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen’s advocacy for the poor, his anti–nuclear weapons stance, and his decision to become a tax resister." Sayers also generously writes: "This is a collection that belongs on a shelf alongside Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness and Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain."

 

Oregon ArtsWatch, “Broken Open: Martha Gies Meets Life” In his review, Executive Editor of Oregon ArtsWatch Bob Hicks (who has been covering arts and culture in the Pacific Northwest since 1978, including 25 years at The Oregonian) called Broken Open “...a fascinating mixture of memoir, social observation, and literary journalism.”He also writes: “Gies seasons her essays with reflections on literary figures including John Steinbeck (whose The Grapes of Wrath “plunged me into a desperate concern for the poor” when she was 16); the novelist and essayist Nelson Algren; the Northwest short-story master Raymond Carver, with whom she studied (her essay ‘Teacher: A Memoir of Raymond Carver’ is an insightful mini-study of the writer and the writing craft); and the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (whose boyhood journey from mountain town to ocean she retraced in 2000 and describes in the essay ‘Where Pablo Neruda First Saw the Sea.’)" 

 

Seattle’s Post Alley News: “A Portland Writer Traces Her Conversion to Being a Writer” In his review for Post Alley News, Joe Martin, who served the downtown Seattle community for more than 40 years as a social worker and co-founder of the Pike Market Medical Clinic, writes: “Artful and deeply personal essays comprise this splendid new memoir….Echoes of ‘sound and smell and memory’ pervade stories of family, loves, books, and adventuresome forays into the greater world.”

 

Thanks once again for your support for me and for the book: I deeply appreciate it!

Copyright (C) 2024 All rights reserved.

Martha Gies.