Reading and Conversation with Writers Martha Gies & Vibha Akkaraju at Mountainview Books, Inc.

On October 25, 2024, Martha Gies read at Books, Inc. in Mountainview, California. She was joined in conversation by writer Vibha Akkaraju. Gies read the essay “Camping Practice” from the book, spoke with Vibha, and then took audience questions. Watch the video of the conversation with Vibha and see pictures from the event, all courtesy of Nin Filip, below. Thank you to Books, Inc. for hosting such a fantastic event!

Watch the video below, or scroll to the bottom of the page to read the transcript.

Transcript: Martha Gies and Vibha Akkaraju in conversation at Books, Inc. in Mountainview, California.

Rene Quebec for BOOKS, INC.: Our guests tonight are Martha Gies, joining us from Portland, Oregon. She has received grants and awards from PEN, Regional Arts and Culture Council, Oregon Literary Arts, Seattle Weekly, and the Sundance Institute. Her short fiction and essays appear widely in literary quarterlies, and many have been reprinted in anthologies. In 2004, OSU Press published Up All Night, her portrait of Portland told through the stories of 23 people working graveyard shift. She founded and taught Traveler's Mind, an annual workshop abroad for 20 years. 

She is in conversation with Vibha Akkajaru, who writes personal narratives, which have aired on KQED, and published in Fourth Genre, and in the anthology Daring to Breathe, published by Cal State Fresno. And then, Write Yourself Out of a Corner, published by W.W. Norton. She is president of the SF Peninsula Chapter of the California Writers' Club. She's working on her own memoir about her family's search for a cultural home. Vibha says doing this interview is her sly way of getting tips from a real pro. 

[Gies reads the story “Camping Practice” from Broken Open]

AKKAJARU: Incredible. I'm really glad you chose that, Martha. As you can see, I marked a lot of places I wanted you to read. That was not that one, but I'm so happy that you did that. Because I realized through the process of preparing for this, that my questions are more to probably do with my own fixations than with yours. 

GIES: Good. (laughing)

AKKAJARU: Martha's bored of her own fixations. 

GIES: We all are. 

AKKAJARU: So, thank you. So if anybody needs a quick summary, the book is divided into three parts. There are the early years, Martha's pushes away. These are essays. Martha, do you want to describe the first? 

GIES: No. (laughing) 

AKKAJARU: My purpose is to make her talk. The first third is her early years where she's kind of pushing away, trying to make space for herself. I learned this word “individuation” from Martha's book, about how children need to kind of define themselves in their own space. So those are the early stories. 

The middle years is literally the messy middle of her life. Lots of jobs, lots of lovers, lots of experience. 

GIES: There are no lovers in this book. (laughing) 

AKKAJARU: There are some that are hinted at. This is a perfectly PG book. It's true. (laughing) Martha, I have a part that's highlighted. I can prove this. (laughing) 

And the third is a more of a reflection back—she did say her fixations.

GIES: I did say that. 

AKKAJARU: So it's 18 essays, linked essays. And the themes that I found most pulled into were two, but they're linked. One is faith. So as a religion-curious person (I haven't committed to any religions; I flirt with all of them), I'm fascinated with everything that you've grappled with. In the first third of the book, I don't know, can I give away some bits of the book? I have to, I guess, to talk about it. Your youngest sister, Toni, passes away. And can you talk about her faith and how it affected yours, how it challenged it, and what it did to your family's faith?

GIES: Well, my father had died first. And my mother didn't think life was worth going on. She was only 41. He left her some money and she just would as soon throw it away because without him, what's money worth? And she said to herself something that we must never, never, never say to ourselves, and that is: this is the worst thing that could have happened! Because it wasn't:  then she lost her youngest child. 

Toni had converted to an evangelical Christianity that actually sort of insulted the sensibilities of the remaining family, the mother and the other sibs. Immediately, she and her young husband became missionaries. Her husband was a really good guy. He had a slot to help people do some kinds of farming in Peru. It was at a time when there were a lot of kidnappings—of Americans. Mother was worried about them.

But she did convert. When people said to my mother, Wwhat in the world is this child doing? Mother said, Well, I don't know. You know, Martha dropped out of school and heaven knows where she is. I always ask, when she makes a phone call, where she's calling from. (audience laughing) My son dropped out of Antioch, came home and then had to pretend to be of an undecided sexuality to get out of a draft. It was during the Vietnam War. And then next sister was experimenting with intravenous drugs. My mother would say, I guess Christianity was the only thing left. (audience laughing) 

But what happened was that when Toni got her cancer, she had a six-month prognosis. She was stage four when she was diagnosed in her early 30s. She pulled that out to five-and-a-half years to stay alive for her kids. And her faith became like molten gold running through her. Everybody just was like, wow. We saw what faith can really do. And that touched all of us. 

AKKAJARU: Do you feel like it opened the family up to the evangelical? 

GIES: No, I think that the things that disturbed us about evangelism, just disappeared, and it became a profound personal faith which meant everything to her and probably kept her alive. 

I think a lot of people when they get cancer, they either succumb--my aunt did that, like I’ve got cancer, it's fatal, I'll be dead by January. And she was. But then some people say I'm going to fight this. So to walk that line of “letting God be God,” as my sister would have put it, is very hard, but it kept her alive for five-and-a-half years on the terminal diagnosis. I would be with her in the car, and the service station attendants would all come out [to be near her]. There was something, she was emanating something that people needed. 

AKKAJARU: Martha, I've underlined this one passage. Do you want to read it? I just thought it was so incredibly thought provoking. 

GIES: (reading) I now think when people refuse illness, dependency, and pain, they may be depriving themselves and others of a powerful transformation. “Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing," Flannery O'Connor once wrote to a friend. “And I think those who don't have it miss one of God's miracles.” 

AKKAJARU: Something, I guess, time tells, right? Whether you can hold on to that as the end of life comes.

Another thing that I thought was really endearing about the book was the empathy that runs through it. Even people who have done either terrible wrongs or just led lives that you didn't necessarily look up to, everyone has something. There's redemption in everything, right? One of my favorite essays was about the physicist. You want to tell the story about the physicist? 

GIES: No. (audience laughing) 

AKKAJARU: Should I tell the little? Well, I don't want to tell that story, if it's really a spoiler. I think you can't tell that story. 

GIES: She's talking about an old man that came in a fly-spotted tie, as we would say, to the little Catholic chapel in Skid Road. We all thought he was homeless. It goes on, but there is a big surprise. 

AKKAJARU: You know, there's a level of deep empathy and forgiveness that I just found incredibly profound through all of them. Even your father's work—he was a lawyer, but he does something. What does he do that kind of redeems him? 

GIES: Oh, yeah. Well, what didn't redeem him? 

AKKAJARU: I mean, there was something-- 

GIES: He was practicing law, defense law back in the days before all the insurance companies had in-house lawyers. So he was defending the big insurance companies when somebody's bus ran over a guy in the crosswalk. 

You know, I now understand, because he loved to tell these stories at the Sunday dinner table, which was about the only meal we ate with our parents. But now I realize he was sending me up. He saw me as a little bleeding heart. You don't really see what your parents are getting at until they're gone. But he was sending me up. And when he died, you know, I rethought one story. And then somebody told me another story that just blew my mind about him. And I think the reason he knew I was a little bleeding heart was he probably had been, too. That's my suspicion. I'll never know. I was 20 when he died. 

AKKAJARU: Okay, we do have some writers in the bunch here, and I'm really grateful that you guys joined. So I'm going to ask some writerly questions. 

Let's first start with the concept of writing a memoir. A lot of people want to write memoirs. Yours truly, I’m in the middle of one. So the thing that I've always sort of relied on, sort of leaned on was this: I went to a Jhumpa Lahiri talk once, and she said, "If you've lived to five years of age, you have enough material for a lifetime of writing." (audience laughing) I was like, "Okay, even my boring life then is enough material." I mean, just go at it. But you've led this incredibly adventurous life with millions of different jobs and experiences, language and travel. I mean, how do you reconcile? Is there a way to reconcile those two things? Do you have to have led a really interesting, varied life in order to write a memoir? 

GIES: That's interesting. There's a middle section about finding right livelihood. I used to think, and there's a line in there that I realized, probably as a teenager, or late teenager, that in order to find life, I had to not get stuck in the middle-class vision or the academic vision. I needed to get out there like Nelson Algren did, who picked peas, who had all these bizarre jobs. I loved Nelson Algren. I still love his work, and his work shows up in that taxi driving piece. And then after a while, after I did all sorts of nutty jobs, two were in this book. One is I was cut in half twice a day by a magician, (audience laughing). And then another is a cab driving story. But that's just two of a dozen things that I did that seem improbable. 

But I want to move back to memoir because I don't think I could write a memoir of my whole life. Some people do that. But more and more, I think what we're seeing is people writing memoirs of a certain problem. Like Jean-Baptiste’s wife. She wrote about getting leukemia and getting in remission, and then deciding to take her dog around the United States. But, she's not talking about her whole life. She's too young to talk about her whole life. 

That, by the way, was followed up by that wonderful film that the Obamas produced, American Symphony, which if you haven't seen it, do. It's touching. It’s on Netflix.

So what I'm saying is that I use interchangeably the term personal essay  –  I think you said personal narrative  – that term, personal essay, with short form memoir. And somebody asked me the other night, how do you make unrelated events hooked together? I always recommend that people who read this book read it in the order that it appears, as opposed to jumping around. They are essays, which kind of invites one to jump around, but it was sequenced to make a narrative, and I think [that way] you get the most out of it. 

I think because film jumps around, I mean, we now have films that run backwards that our brains seem to understand. We have films where three different stories are intercut with each other, and we get it. So, if we're talking one time about camping practice, and we go to mixing old fashioneds, and having a psychic moment about what was happening to my father, people get it. It's the same family, you know. 

I don't think I could write a continuous memoir, because my life has been episodic. I see life as episodic. And this, I think also, is a corollary to how I see the spiritual life. I don't think we say one day we're saved. And then we can ride it on out. 

I think that every day has potential for conversion. I'll stop there. 

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Potential for what

GIES: Conversion. 

AKKAJARU: Conversion. 

GIES: Yeah. 

AKKAJARU: Yeah, actually there's another absolutely lovely passage, which it's about you seeing God in so many different places, not kind of a question, it's kind of finding. Give me one second. Maybe I'll look for it - yeah, we'll find it later. So was it tough finding that arc? 

GIES: Yes, because I was looking at putting a book together. After I published Up All Night, which was fairly highly rated: it made a couple of 10 best of the year lists. Then I didn't publish a book for 20 years. 

Some of my students—I taught for 34 years, creative writing in a lot of different situations. And I think they began to wonder what I was doing. While I was writing all along, I was just publishing in literary journals; I wasn't pulling a book together. 

And then I realized at a certain point, I had enough short stories to make a book of fiction. And I had way more than enough personal essays. And so it was a matter of figuring out which ones to use and which ones to eliminate, in order to make a narrative that would make sense to someone who's never met me. 

I eliminated one that people love and it's been reprinted many times. It's on my website, it's called “My New Father” if you want to sample my writing and see if it's your cup of tea. But it just didn't fit, it didn't fit in there. 

AKKAJARU: When you read your stuff from 20 years ago, do you feel like you've changed a lot as a writer? 

GIES: I think I change every day. 

AKKAJARU: So can you still relate to the stuff you wrote 20 years ago? 

GIES: Absolutely. 

AKKAJARU: Can you or do you tweak it a lot? 

GIES: Absolutely, because if we're honest when we write, you know, in terms of our memory, and the people that we've loved, the people that we've lost, it brings back some feelings.

AKKAJARU: So we're opening it up for questions. While we wait: Somebody mentioned that you dropped out of college? 

GIES: 10 times. No, no. (audience laughing) 9 times. 

AKKAJARU: Can you talk about that, did you complete it, or did it just not matter after a certain period? 

GIES: No, I just love college. And I went a couple of years to Reed right out of high school. I think my dad's instincts were probably right, that it wasn't the right college for me, but not for the reasons he would have said. I mean, people were in trouble with HUAC, when I was going there, some of the faculty, but I didn't care about that. It didn't [fit], because so many of the people were really headed for Woodrow Wilson Fellowships, academics, and I just knew it wasn't my thing. 

I left Reed after two years, and then wherever I moved, I just signed up for courses. Like, I was in Montreal, and I took Russian history, and Chaucer, and Spanish, you know. Then wherever I was, I took courses. 

So at some point, I cycled back home to help my mother with a project at her request, and once again, I enrolled at a school there. I’d been there about 10 years before, and the lady in the register's office remembered me, and she said, "Are you still going to college?" (audience laughing) And I said, "All the time." And she says, "Well, you must be ready to graduate." I said, "I don't know if I'm ready to graduate." 

But at her request, I drew all my transcripts together. I had way more than I needed. She just said, "You’ve got a degree." And then, guess what? They wanted graduate fees. I don't like to say that. (audience laughing) So I didn't go to school there anymore. 

AUDIENCE QUESTION: How did you get started writing?

GIES: My aunt, for the Christmas when I was in fifth grade, gave me a one of those leatherette journals with a little lock and key, and I wrote in it, January one, filled the page, you know, they were all dated. And I kept that up until I was through eighth grade. And then I decided I was far too sophisticated for the little journal of the lock and key, and after that, I had logs. I kept logs. You could do a whole page-and-a- half, five, or not write at all. And I took this whole library with me when I went to Reed and burned them in the old dorm block. I got a beautiful old dorm room that had French windows and a fireplace, and I burned them all in the fireplace. I did that because if I'd left them at home, my mother would have been into them before the car got out of the driveway. You can do it with a bobby pin. By the way, parents, you can read your kid's journals if you use a bobby pin. And I didn't want that. 

And then at Reed, I didn't know those two roommates. I guess I was paranoid, so I burned them up. But it took me about another year to start a journal again, and now I keep a journal. I've got 66 of them, and I tend to cannibalize them for memoir because I can, with absolute certainty, know a date, and sometimes even a whole conversation, the weather, you know. They're very useful to writers.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Do you regret burning your early. . .

GIES: You know me, don't you? (audience laughing) Among my regrets, yes, I do, because I want to know why the spelling bee meant so much to me. And many other things, yeah. 

AUDIENCE QUESTION: On a spectrum from work to fun, where does your writing practice fall? 

GIES: Oh, well, I think I enjoy it more than anything else, but I'm not sure fun is quite the right word. I do have fun teaching, but it's just that. . . Let's put it this way: if I don't write for four or five days, you would not really want to have a beer with me. (audience laughing) I'm not the same nice person, there's something in me that just is annoyed. (audience laughing)

AUDIENCE QUESTION: As you wrote these essays, did the arc emerge, or was it sort of after the fact? 

GIES: After the fact. I just decided to make a book, and see, I knew there was a book there, it was like finding. 

AUDIENCE QUESTION:  So was it—I haven't read the book, which is why I'm asking. Is it an arc of coming to a point, like a maturation? Or is it an insight? What did you go for, what emerged for you? 

GIES: Well, I think actually readers are better able to ascertain that. I had some beta readers, I was testing a sequence on a couple of writers I admire in Portland, and they liked it a lot. They talked a lot about the spirituality, which I hadn't totally picked up on. But also when they started talking about that, I noticed that this essay, [the one] that Vibha and Smita were talking about, “The Man in the Pew,” started the third section. And I went, wait a minute, nobody knows I'm a Catholic. They'll remember that conversion of my sister, and think, wait a minute, you guys were skeptics, nobody had any religion in your family. So I thought, darn, I need to put it, I had to write some new material to make it cohere. 

But I didn't really want it to be about that. I just, I wanted it to be. . . So the last half was sort of a tribute to some people and some places. Place, you know. . . 

AUDIENCE QUESTION: So you had to fill in some part. . .

GIES: I had to, yeah. I wrote some new essays to “patch” it up.  

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Do you write long hand, or on a computer?

GIES: Well, I prefer writing a first draft in longhand, and then putting it on the computer.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Do you think that's because you grew up without a computer? 

GIES: No, I think it's because I recognize that when we're on a computer, we don't follow our thoughts, we follow –“whoops, there's a problem there.” You know. “Did WORD just change that? Is there a grammatical problem there? Does that sound right?” Maybe you get hung up in the trees and you can't see the forest. You know, this is process stuff. 

When I first started talking in front of writers, they were like, do you write in the morning or the evening? Are you in your bathrobe? And I’m like, You know, it doesn't matter what I do. You may be writing in a tree. You may be bundled up in your dad's old army sleeping bag, but that's what works for you. 

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I had a question. I just popped in; I didn’t know this was going on. 

GIES: Welcome!

CONTINUING: Thank you.  I flipped to “A Father's Story” and it made me want to ask you, you seem to have a lot of wisdom. What advice you would have for young writers in their 20s who have just graduated college and want to change minds? And I guess when I attack an ideology rather than, I mean, it is fun, I love writing, but I also, as I'm sure you felt in your 20s, feel an incessant need to change certain things. So what would you advise me? 

GIES: In the world, do you mean?

CONTINUING: In particular, I guess to “A Father's Story.” When I skimmed it and could see a little of the things you were writing about, which are so prevalent today and never changed. 

GIES: She's talking about a piece that's from the middle section, when I've been looking for what I'm going to be when I grow up—although I've already grown up. (laughing) I had studied with Ray Carver, which is really the turning point, and I knew I wanted to be a writer. And when I studied with him, I wanted to write short stories. I wouldn't even read novels. I read tons of Chekhov. 

However, because I'd been a journalist, which to me, journalism was always a license to snoop. And I never did “gotcha journalism.” I always did what I call the journalism of appreciation. I wouldn't waste my time on people I did not admire or want to present to the public. 

And the person she's talking about, the father's story, is the man who was the captain and founder of the Black Panther Party, the Portland Chapter. And the FBI kept trying to lay traps for him. And they didn't succeed. This man is shrewd. He'd grown up until he was twelve in the Jim Crow Louisiana, and had developed some survival habits before he ever got out to the West Coast. And he grew up and just never got entrapped. He had a great lawyer who, on one case not only did he get him off, but then turned around and sued the government. You know what I mean? He was shrewd. 

However, he had two brilliant sons. One who spoke Chinese and attended the John Hopkins International School in China. The other one who went to Stanford and is a medical doctor, sports medicine doctor, actually. Well, the FBI entrapped the oldest son. And he got an 18-year sentence. The way that the feds do this, especially when they get a bunch of defendants, they get somebody who is not really that culpable or that provable, and they tell them you'll get a very light sentence if you'll just rat on these [other] people. It's done all the time. It's how drug cases are processed on the federal level. 

And so this son, who would never say anything untrue about a brother Muslim, wouldn't. And he went to do his time. And people in the gym—I happened to work out at a black gym in my neighborhood, and these older guys said, "You know, they never got him, but they got his son." You know, I mean, so that's what she's talking about. 

I don't know how to answer your question, and I'll tell you, it's more urgent to change things now than it was when I was your age. I don't know how – whatever you can do. Whatever you can do, I'll give you my card. I think of anything, just call me. 

AKKAJARU: Any more questions? I have a couple more minutes. You have, yeah, we have time for one or two questions. 

SAME YOUNG WOMAN: I might have an easier one to answer. 

GIES: Oh, yeah? 

CONTINUING: It's a little less daunting. What's your advice to recently graduated writers? 

GIES: Where'd you go to school? 

CONTINUING: I graduated from UCI, but I was blessed to get a lot of writing time in Italy for a year, so. 

GIES: I think you must already be doing something right. 

CONTINUING: Yeah, maybe. 

GIES: What kind of writing do you want to do? 

CONTINUING: At the moment, I am geared towards what I like to call very blunt philosophical writing about the current times. So having a philosophical take on the patriarchy, for example, and saying it in a blunt and crass way that I think also gets you into a reader's mind because it's funny, but it's also very true. 

GIES: Yeah. I think you're going to like this book. 

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  In your teaching, what are one or two things that you really want to drive home to students? 

GIES: Well, one is learn to write before you try to publish. And I guess the other is, unless you want to write advertising copy or some crap, don't expect to make money. [laughter]  

AKKAJARU: I have a couple of things. One of my favorite passages; can I get you to read again? 

GIES: Sure. 

AKKAJARU: Because I really want you guys to get a feel for her beautiful writing. And this paragraph, it goes back to spirituality, but I really feel like it starts right here. 

GIES: “During these peripatetic years, I believed myself to be an agnostic, an idea I picked up from one of my intellectual Jewish friends. Yet I continued to find God in nature's variety, beauty, and uncountable detail; in the feelings of profundity or clarity evoked by great music, literature, and art; in the small resurrections and sacrifices of love and friendship; and especially in the mysterious sensation of always being companioned, even in my most troubled solitude. Today, I would call this the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, promised by Christ. But in the days of my itinerant youth, I had only a dim awareness of a spiritual foundation—unarticulated and unexplored.” 

Copyright Martha Gies, 2024. No portion of this site may be used without written permission.