Description

Brainstorming

by Carolyn Martin

On a quiet afternoon in August 2025, Carolyn Martin was painting by-numbers in her dining room when a massive stroke hit. A clot-buster saved her voice and her thinking; her left arm and leg would have to relearn everything else. Within weeks, she was writing again.

Brainstorming is the result: a collection of stroke narratives documenting the physical, emotional, and spiritual terrain of her first year of recovery, complemented by lyric poems that revel in the inner and outer worlds she has explored for decades. These poems move through pain, grief, and the recalculation of every movement once taken for granted, and arrive somewhere unexpected: gratitude, acceptance, and joy. Carolyn shared them with friends each Sunday throughout her recovery, and that sense of connection runs through every page.

The cover art is by Robert Sanders, created from the very paint-by-numbers canvas Carolyn was working on when the stroke arrived.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING…

“Dazzling in its execution… This book has enlarged and deepened me, and I cannot praise it enough.”
—Ingrid Wendt, Oregon Book Award recipient and author of Keeping It All Afloat

“Carolyn Martin stands among the finest of Oregon poets.”
—Emmett Wheatfall, author of Contradictions from an Uncertain Silence

“With Martin at the helm, this ship is unsinkable… Even before we reach the last page, we are gratefully answering, ‘Yes! Oh, buoyantly Yes!'”
—Annie Lighthart, author of Pax