Robert Martin Hansen’s essay “Ascension” appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of Swing. Breakers, his first book, is a memoir of the 1985 highway crash in the Northwest Territories that killed his father, and of the years of precarity after it — his mother’s bipolar mania, the basement suites and unpaid rent, a childhood spent one exit ahead of the landlord.
He tackles poverty from the other end as well, founding the National Roundtable on Ending Poverty at the Goodnation Foundation and writing for Stanford Social Innovation Review. What it costs, what it takes to leave it, and what it leaves behind.
He remains, against a certain amount of evidence, an optimist.
An essay about inherited responsibility and grace that travels from a boarding house in British Columbia to Tennessee.
An article, written with Dorian Warren, about what becomes possible when we expand how we think about giving.
In August 1985, a highway crash in the Northwest Territories kills Robert’s father and undoes his family. What follows is a boy’s account of survival: a move south to British Columbia, a mother, Carol, whose bipolar mania swings between glorious possibility and ruinous reality, and a childhood lived in basement suites, on unpaid rent, one exit ahead of the landlord. Carol dreams big and takes what isn’t hers — including her son’s savings bonds for a trip to Acapulco. Robert learns that quiet can be deep and loud is suspect, and to always, always be in motion.
Written while drafting his mother’s eulogy, the book moves between the child’s immediate present and the author’s attempt to reconstruct a life he only half understood. It ends where every escape does — in the recognition that getting out and getting free are not the same thing.
Robert Martin Hansen read with Philip Kenner, Sarah Harris Wallman, Ivy Raff, and Lily Greenberg in an event MC’d by Carrigan Miller of KGB Bar Lit. He read from “Ascension.”
Robert welcomes correspondence — about the craft, the work, or what it stirred up. For press, readings, or events, please include relevant details and he’ll be in touch.
