The Best American Essays 2024 - Wesley Morris

The Best American Essays 2024: An Engaging Essay Collection with Award-Winning Voices by Wesley Morris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Impressive collection edited by Pulitzer-winner Wesley Morris. I have read over half of them and was particularly impressed and touched by the work of Jenisha Watts relating her journey as a young writer from Kentucky; Jennifer Senior "The Ones We Sent Away" about her institutionalized aunt; Richard Prins' heartbreaking tale of mental illness in the mother of his child; and Christienne L. Hinz lovely piece on being a weed and natural gardening. I also was drawn to Brock Clarke's piece "Woodstove" about deaths in his family, dogs and people. There are also essays "grappling with the issues of our time" from Teju Cole, Sallie Tisdale, Yiyun LiRémy Ngamije, and Jerald Walker.

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Broken Open

Broken Open by Martha Gies
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Martha Gies writes a spellbinding tale of experiences in her itinerant life plus stories of the equally fascinating souls she met along the way. Whether assisting Great Kramien the Magician in his act, studying with Raymond Carver, interviewing graveyard shift workers when driving cab (see her first book Up All Night), or talking to an ex-Black Panther father or a nuclear physicist, she speaks wisely and compassionately interviews her subjects with a bit of humor for herself. It is very much a Northwest book describing growing up on an asparagus farm worked by hundreds of braceros when the U. S. welcomed and documented foreign workers and the author's myriad jobs in different parts of Oregon and Washington and farther afield. The writing is polished, as one might expect from a writing teacher, but also hones exquisite recollections: "the thousands of stars above the Andes suggesting a white blaze just behind the perforated sky; the afternoon I bent among dense ferns to ladle clear, bubbling spring water into my pail and discovered the pink pearlescent shock of a large abalone shell left by a recent guest." She includes a passionate telling of her own spiritual journey preaching to county jail inmates, and her eventual conversion to Catholicism, work with the homeless and visits to pastoral ministries in Latin America. No humdrum moments in Gies' life tales--I highly recommend this collection.

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