Introducing the Fierce and Funny Marti MacGibbon

For memoir month, I am thrilled to introduce you to one of my personal heroes, the amazing Marti MacGibbon. We met one day when she and her husband knocked on our door with a petition to keep a self-storage facility from being built next to the elementary school. We happily signed. They had moved in a few houses down and my husband and I were thrilled to find kindred spirits. 

When I mentioned I wrote books, Marti told me about her self-published memoir Never Give In To Fear: Laughing All the Way Up from Rock Bottom. Memoir is not my usual jam, but I purchased it and loved it. With her gallows humor, Marti wrote about her move to California to work in comedy which soon turned into a nightmare of homelessness, addiction, and being sex trafficked to the Japanese Yakuza.

Marti not only survived but thrived, using her experiences to help others. She gained professional certifications in ACRPS, (Advanced Certified Relapse Prevention Specialist, and the CAPMS (Certified Addiction-Free Pain Management Specialist) and became a public speaker on the issues of addiction and sex trafficking. She has traveled the globe and been invited to speak at the State Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Office for Victims of Crime on mental health and policy advocacy. Returning to her love of standup, Marti is founder, producer, and emcee of Laff-Aholics Standup Comedy Benefit for Recovery, an annual charity fundraiser in Indianapolis that features nationally headlining comedians.

Never Give Into Fear became a nationally award-winning and critically acclaimed memoir. She followed it up with Fierce, Funny, and Female in which Marti takes us to the oil fields in Texas where she was one of the first women to work as a laborer, setting off explosives and staking oil wells. The memoir is dotted with memorable characters: sleazy authority figures, wannabe Sixties musicians, crazed Corn Belt cult leaders, wild-eyed redneck coworkers who robbed banks on their lunch hour in the company truck, Texas oil billionaires and wildcatters.

We both left Indianapolis, moving to opposite coasts, but I have enjoyed watching her spread her wings and soar, giving back to a world that took so much from her. She is a bad-ass warrior woman and I can't wait to see what she does next.

You can learn more about Marti and connect with her on social media and view her inspirational talks and comedy on her YouTube channel.

https://martimacgibbon.com/

https://www.facebook.com/MartiMac

https://twitter.com/MartiMacG

https://www.linkedin.com/in/martimacgibbon

https://www.amazon.com/Never-Give-Fear-Laughing-Bottom/dp/098600670X/

https://www.amazon.com/Fierce-Funny-Female-Journey-Through/dp/0986006734/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt2x9-WrvFAuHrUc00GvjEQ

Posted by Diana Hurwitz, author of Story Building Blocks: The Four Layers of Conflict, Story Building Blocks II: Crafting Believable Conflict, Story Building Blocks III: The Revision Layers, and the YA adventure series Mythikas Island. Her weekly blog, Game On: Crafting Believable Conflict explores how characters behave and misbehave. Visit DianaHurwitz.com for more information and free writing tools. You can follow her on Facebook and Twitter.