GIGMENTIA is a reflection on the raw, challenging, and gritty vocation of a blue-collar musician living in the Pacific Northwest; and the varied adventures of a hard-working, day-in-day-out rock band.
Introspective, insightful, and eloquently observed, Koep chronicles a summer season of fifty rock shows performed in small clubs, huge bars, and outdoor festival stages, to barns, backyards, and in the middle of the woods.
Between gigs, Koep writes of sword fights on the lawn with his young son, the challenges of building a household, of world travel, pop music, poetry, and the fascinating pursuit of the writer’s craft as he works toward completing his third novel.
As the summer wanes and he balances the rigors and joys of live performance, promoting his books, and being a father and partner, his mother descends into dementia and forgets the world around her, including her son.
Early Reviews:
“As an accomplished musician, poet, and novelist, Michael B. Koep is a modern day renaissance man, whose writing echoes his musical vocation: he writes with lyrical intensity in the pulsing rhythm of a drumbeat. In his new memoir, GIGMENTIA, this literary gift flourishes. GIGMENTIA takes the reader on a riveting journey through band and musician life, fathering and marriage, caring for a mother who has acute dementia, and ultimately saying goodbye. I highly recommend this book.”— Michael Gurian, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Wonder of Children and The Wonder of Aging
“This is a thoroughly original and deeply engaging exploration of the sometimes bizarre, often touching, but always fascinating public and private experience of working musicians — and a moving depiction of friendship, parenthood, biological and created families, and the losses and gains that constitute life lived intentionally and well.”— Michael B. Herzog, Author of This Passing World and Pilgrimage
“Koep captivates with spellbinding, lyrical prose. GIGMENTIA is a moving exploration of artistic process, of friendship and family, of memory, of grief and loss―joyful, nuanced, and heartbreaking.”— Nspire Magazine
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