LAURA MOULTON: Many of you here are no doubt fans of Martha's journalism over the years. I think that we probably arrive from different angles to her work, but I guess one of the questions that I want to start with is those years of really vivid and potently-drawn portraits of other people. Martha has been a real master at it; I wrote about this a little bit in a review I did for Street Roots. It was very thrilling as a student to suddenly have a window into my teacher's life that she was not necessarily real vocal about. We didn't know her stories.

I think I would be curious if the lens you applied when drawing a portrait of someone else changed at all when directed at yourself, when you had to make decisions about how much of yourself to reveal? And in a story about your life, and your experience of that life, whether you pivoted or, you know, approached it differently than you would have [writing about] another person?

MARTHA GIES: You know, I used to teach short story writing or essays—[switching] back and forth—for several colleges and then, finally, privately. And one of the writers I used to teach was Eudora Welty; she can do any voice south of the Mason-Dixon line. I used to love assigning, let's say, “Why I Live at the P.O.” with one of her very serious stories. “Powerhouse” is amazing, about some New York musicians that come down and play in the South. She had traveled for the Works Progress Administration, photographing and interviewing people about the effects of the Depression. Traveling around, recording people's stories, and I really think that just that close attention to people's diction, the relationship to journalism [informed her creative work].

So let me go back and just speak about the book. The first section are essays about my childhood. And there's a pivotal essay, probably dead center in the book, about when I studied with Raymond Carver. Suddenly I just wanted to write short stories. I didn't want to even read novels anymore. And in fact, it became so bad that a boyfriend of mine sent me a novel of Robert Coover's, and on the cover, across “novel” he pasted “short stories” to lure me into it.

Before that class, I was doing all kinds of motley jobs. Two of them are in the book: taxi driver and stage magician's assistant. Cut in half twice a day—that would be matinee and evening shows. Those are the only samples; I was a deputy sheriff, a computer programmer. I can't even remember them all; I’d have to look at the list, but it was many.

But when I studied with Ray, I just realized, geez, I'm a writer. I'd already been publishing journalism. But you ask, Laura, about turning the lens on myself and how much it's revealed. Honestly, I think the best pieces in the book are about somebody else. Somebody in my family, the piece about Ray, the one I read at the launch, about Mr. Mullaney. The difference [from journalism] is, of course, that I'm in these pieces, too.

The rawest description of myself has a lot to do with the title. This has had three titles. After I had the essays chosen and sequenced to my satisfaction, I realized that the first story in the third section has me in a Catholic chapel meeting an amazing elderly man. And I thought, people know from [reading] the earlier essays that I wasn't a Catholic, that I wasn't even a church goer. I realized the book was missing an obligatory scene: my conversion.

So, I wrote a kind of flat record of my conversion. I was living around unpacked boxes brought from the house where I’d lived alone for 26 years, before I married Thomas. In one of those boxes, I found an essay that I'd forgotten I'd written. It was written in 1994, as I was sitting in Veracruz waiting for somebody to join me. I wrote a spiritual autobiography which, in truth, seemed a presumptuous and even egotistical thing to do.

As I sat writing on the zócolo in Veracruz for a few days—I think I had three days alone—there was a young boy, probably from Chiapas, an indigenous boy, who had his own little business there. Every day he carried an orange crate and his sign and his tools across the zócolo in front of me. And his sign said, Su nombre en un grano de arroz. “Your name on a grain of rice.” And his work was to inscribe your name on a grain of rice, in letters so tiny you couldn't see it. But then he would drop the rice into the cylinder of a ballpoint pen that was filled with oil and it would be magnified and readable!

And I thought, that's what I’m doing. And with that consolation, what I was writing seemed less self-important.

But it was never for anybody to read. It was never for publication.

Yet, I found it just as I was just finishing the book. And when I read it, I thought: This is way more authentic than the piece that's in the manuscript now. But do I dare put it in the book? Because it says things about me that I've never said.

And then I saw Martin Stabler’s photograph of an iris that is no longer in its prime. But I liked it because it's about to fall apart. And when I saw that iris, I knew in the same moment that I wanted to call the book Broken Open and I wanted that iris.

LAURA MOULTON: One of my favorite essays, Martha just alluded to, is “Teacher: A Memoir of Raymond Carver.” She sets up a scene where she encounters his story, “So Much Water So Close to Home.” It's the first time she's read Carver and it blows her mind. And I think that what's so interesting to me is then she basically talks about canceling the next eight weekends of her life, donning a bathrobe, pot of coffee, and just tucking in and really trying to understand what makes a short story. And then she reads very deeply and wildly, I should say. And you allude to that. But I think my question is: Is that the formula, bathrobe, eight weekends? Like for a young emerging writer, what is the counsel? Is this still the bathrobe?

MARTHA GIES: Yeah, no. I remember being asked, but I think we don't hear so much of this anymore, but people would say, "Well, do you write with a typewriter? Do you write at night or in the morning?" Those questions were in the air for a long time, not so much anymore. More than half of the people in this room are writers and we ask these questions and everyone would have a different answer.

There was a time when I thought that I could only write in the morning. Then I was invited to write a screenplay, and I was working in this filmmaker’s New York loft and she was paying me to be there and she wanted to keep going for about ten hours a day.

We were doing an adaptation of "12 Carver Stories" that she'd optioned. She wanted me because I knew Carver, and she felt I had an allegiance to a literal film, the way a real screenwriter might not.

So working in New York, when our work together was done, I would stay up late, putting everything in the computer and she'd go to bed or read. And so I was really working at night in some way. When I flew home, I thought I would just collapse, but instead, I thought: No, I'm going to see if I can write at night. And I did! I had a little ritual: I would finish dinner--I'd eat early—then take a warm bath, and sit in a rocker. I just wanted to see if I could. And I could. I could do it. I wrote a story about Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American woman to win the Nobel Prize.

LAURA MOULTON: Everyone longs for the formula; if we just knew it!

By a raise of hands, how many of you have had a chance to study with Martha in a class? Okay, that's great. So Martha broke our hearts in the last couple of years by announcing that she was done with teaching, that she had retired. But I'm curious about whether it's retired, like a lot of people are doing these days, which appears to be keeping on doing what they've been doing. Are you are really done teaching? And what reflections [do you have] on teaching? How did teaching interact with your writing? What did you love about teaching? Maybe sometimes it was a drag?

MARTHA GIES: I never was on the faculty anywhere. I taught for 20 years at Marylhurst where everyone was an adjunct. I probably was the only one among them who was happy about that, because I taught for 20 years without ever going to a faculty meeting.

You know, it's the time it takes us; that’s the only downside of teaching. I was actually invited to teach by the head of the humanities department, and I was shocked when he called me. He started by saying, "Martha, you have a PhD, don't you?" He was a writer as well, and he and I were in a critique group. I said, "No." He said, "Well, you have a master's, right?" I said, "Jon, where is this going?" He said, "Martha, tell me you do have a BA." I said, "Okay, I have a BA." He said, "Well, it's okay." And he said he'd like me to teach at Marylhurst, creative writing. I said, "I have never been trained to be a teacher. I have never thought about teaching. I don't think I could teach anybody." He said, "Fine, then propose three classes and meet me downtown."

In about two weeks' time. I had three classes [to propose]. Two of them were before their time. One was to teach minority writers, when everybody else was teaching the canon. This was in 1989. He didn't want that. What we finally agreed upon was a three-term sequence on the development of the short story in the 20th century. So, fall term was Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Their stories to be presented as models in my writing class. But, I said, "I can't start right away." I clocked 250 hours, prepping just for that first class.

What I learned in teaching was how I do it. That is, I had been publishing for 14 years, but had never formalized any thoughts about it. I had never thought about what I knew, about what worked and what didn't work.

After assigning a story with certain parameters [for instance, limited third person], I often said to students saying, "But there are no rules in art." But that idea worked way too well with undergraduates, so I told them there were no rules after you learn to write a conventional story. Picasso could paint a conventional landscape if he wanted to. He could also draw an elephant. But he had learned to draw realistically and then went beyond it. So, we had some rules about how to start.

But I loved it. I loved seeing my students love it, and I loved seeing, eventually over the decades, seeing them publish. When I was at Marylhurst, I wouldn't talk about publishing, but later on, teaching privately with a group of committed writers—again, some of them in this room--I began to push them to publish.

LAURA MOULTON: Let's open it up to the audience and do a little Q&A. Yeah. Robin.

AUDIENCE MEMBER QUESTION (ROBIN SCHAUFFLER): Yeah, so everything in this book is terrific, but Martha, here's my question. Is there one of the pieces that stands out as the one that was the most difficult to get right, that you had to wrestle with the most? Is there one, or is it like, it's all hard?

MARTHA GIES: Oh, God, writers love to say it was all hard. Yeah, there's one in there that I'm still not satisfied with.

ROBIN: Are you going to tell?

MARTHA GIES: Of course I am. It's “Where Pablo Neruda First Saw the Sea.” Everything in that piece happened. But something else also happened when I was down in Temuco (where Neruda was raised), that I would have loved to have been able to shoehorn in there because, to me, it was such a remarkable story. But I couldn't figure out how to get it in there, how to make it fit the arc of the story.

What happened was, I had figured out from reading his autobiography, which, by the way, translates as I Confess That I Have Lived. It was published the year after he was (probably) murdered. He talked about where he lived in Temuco, and for some reason I figured out where that house was. And there was no plaque there because he wasn't even a writer when he lived there; he was just a kid, still going by the last name Reyes, which was his dad's name. But I just wanted to know where his childhood house was. And I figured out what I thought was the intersection and I looked around. I knew it was two storied for some reason. On one corner was a house with one of those diagonal doors across the corner, and I looked in and saw it was a junk store with furniture piled up inside.

There was a butcher shop next door, and the butcher was behind the counter, but no one else was there at that moment. And I said, “Excuse me, but did Pablo Neruda grow up in the house next door?” And he looked at me and he wiped his hands. Carefully, he took off his apron, came out from behind the counter and said, "How did you know? Nobody has ever been here, asking about it." And I said, "Well, I kind of figured out from the blah, blah, blah." And he said, "There's an old lady that lives in there. Shall we go meet her?" And I said, "No, I don't want to bother her.” Her house showed me what kind of life she was living.

But I don't know. It just felt so great to be able to do that, but it doesn't fit the story. And I let it go.

AUDIENCE MEMBER QUESTION (BEN PARZYBOK): I have a question. I know that you're a longtime student of the world, both from your individual travels and Traveler’s Mind, and also a longtime student of Portland. I kind of consider your last book to be, in a lot of ways, an ode in observation of Portland. And so, I would love to hear you talk about how you would talk to someone else about the state of Portland. You know, a city that is sometimes troubled and sometimes resilient—exempting this national culture that we're part of, just Portland as itself, as a city. Just to hear where you see it in its various cycles. And then I was also curious what your favorite current cocktail was.

MARTHA GIES: Well, that's an easier question: the martini. You know that—you’ve made me a martini.

You know, I grew up on a farm outside of Salem, and my mother was the one who went to Portland. As a kid, I didn't go much; I only got to go when my mother took me in the car.

But she used to say, “Portland is not a city; it’s a big town.” She always called it a big town. She had grown up in PeDee. Oregon, a small town, went to Corvallis for college, went to San Francisco and immediately became executive secretary for the president of Standard Oil. For her, San Francisco was a city.

When I first lived here, it was on the Reed campus, and Reed is a challenging place to be a student. Nobody ever left the campus except Sunday night when Don drove us in a little beater car to Rose’s. Rose always gave him treats for bringing all these kids to her restaurant in Northwest Portland.

Then I was out of town for a long time, moving around a lot, when I did come back to Portland, it seemed an awfully nice place to be. Once I had bought a house, in 1994, I could never really be itinerant anymore. But I was happy to be here. And then things started going bad.

My evaluation is probably different from a lot of people's. For me, it was the City tearing down low-income housing without replacing it. And I used to write about that in the newspapers. Then I was hired to find replacement housing for elderly people when HUD contracts expired and people lost their housing. That got harder and harder. Developers were building, but they were building “affordable housing” for people who made, you know, a couple hundred thousand a year. And so it got really bad. I think Portland kind of lost its soul then.

Somebody was at dinner the other night and asked, Why doesn't this town have a good mayor? Well, we once had a great mayor, Neil Goldschmidt. [Never mind the rest of his story] Goldschmidt was a great mayor. There were fun mayors, like Bud [Clark]. There were efficient mayors like Vera [Katz]. She wasn’t much for replacement housing. I was in front of her many times, testifying.

So now this person asked why isn't there any good mayor? And I asked him, Would you run for mayor? He's an academic. He said, “No!” And I said, well, I think it was Thoreau who said about 150 years ago [sic—s/b 170 years], “The problem with politics today is that no good men want to run for office.” So there you are.

LAURA MOULTON: So it's time to wind up. I want to thank everyone for coming. I want to let you know that if you're on a Martha tour, she's going to read again Thursday night in another lovely independent bookstore, Annie Bloom's. So you have another chance to catch Martha. She's in town. It'll be a whole new story.