Up All Night by Martha Gies

by Jessica Poundstone

Reading about the work lives of folks who have jobs entirely unlike my own is a wonderfully voyeuristic pleasure. In the last few years I've enjoyed several new books focusing on people's lives at work: Gig, What Should I Do With My Life?, and Studs Terkel's Working--the original of the genre--to name a few.

This year, another book on life at work was released--this one unlike any of the others I'd read. Titled Up All Night, the book shares the perspectives of 23 workers on the graveyard shift. Among the professions of those profiled are zookeeper, policeman, cab driver, astronomer, janitor, tech support operator and newspaper distributor.

In each chapter, Martha Gies' laser-poetic descriptions are interspersed with each subject's own first-person account of their life at work.

In the chapter "The Legendary Judie Brown," Gies "shows" us her subject: "[Judie is] a huge woman in her early fifties--she wears a Mickey Mouse wristwatch, has her hair whacked off in a bob, and drives a Cadillac Eldorado when she's not driving a cab." Then we hear directly from Judie: "It happened that I'd been mugged, shot stabbed. So what was going to happen again? The law of limitations had already took effect... " Judie then goes on to tell her story, and give an account of a typical night on the job.

In most chapters, workers share how they came to be on the night shift. Some, such as pediatric oncology nurse Kerry Cawrse, are only working graveyard until they can get a "better" shift. "Everything about night shift is fine except for the way you feel," she says in her chapter, titled "Lullaby."

Others, such as breadmaker Dan Kelner, love the night shift. "I've always been a night person, even when I was young," he relates in his chapter, "Nightly Bread." "I do like the night a lot."

Up All Night opened my eyes to a world of workers I, as a day worker, never see, but who make my community safer (police officers and ambulance drivers); make my life easier (tech support operators and bus drivers) and help bring beauty to us all (flower market operators and astronomers). It gave me a profound sense of gratitude, while burning the stories--some funny, some touching--of these workers into my mind. Gies has crafted a moving portrait of a city at night that I'll carry with me for a long time to come.

Up All Night author Martha Gies lives in Portland, Oregon; her stories and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Orion, Zyzzyva and The Sun. She is a recipient of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, and teaches creative writing at Lewis & Clark College.