Author Martha Gies Is “Broken Open” In New Memoir About Writing And Seeking

March 27 2025, by Saundra Sorenson

See article on The Skanner website here

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Martha Gies has a problem familiar to many writers: What to do with a lifetime of journals?

“I think I’m up to 67 journals now and wondering what the hell I’m going to do with them,” Gies told The Skanner. “I’m certainly not going to leave them for my nieces. I’m thinking they should be shredded, actually.”

It is to our benefit that the Portland writer has yet to destroy the many handwritten volumes that chronicle her life as a writer, journalist, teacher, traveler and sister. As she compiled her own work and memories, she found it helpful to be able to fact-check through her personal journals.

“The only reason I don’t shred them right now is it was a good check on my memory just in terms of dates and places, weather,” Gies said.

Last year Gies published Broken Open, a collection of essays that serve as a compelling spiritual and creative memoir. Gies begins with her childhood on a farm in Salem, where her family’s expanding agricultural empire allowed her to work side by side with migrant workers, just as she was digesting The Grapes of Wrath and igniting a lifelong passion for social justice. She reflects on her sister’s early death to cancer through a prism of faith – both her devout sister’s, and her examination of her own.

Gies writes of a professionally eclectic, creatively itinerant adulthood that led her to study creative writing with Raymond Carver, and to teach it for more than 20 years at the college level and ultimately through Traveler’s Mind, a program that took English-speaking writers on retreats on three different continents. It is in keeping with the collection’s throughline of curiosity and humanity that Gies includes an excerpt from her 2004 book Up All Night, where she follows and interviews two-dozen night shift workers, alongside her longform reporting on the prosecution of Portland native Patrice Lumumba Ford on terrorist charges.

Gies spoke with The Skanner about her work and the memoir process. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Skanner: How did you decide when it was time to sit down and put together a memoir?

I don’t think I ever really imagined writing a memoir for the simple reason that my life has been very long and very complicated. It would have been a daunting thing, it would have been a real door stopper.

The way this book came together is, I thought it was high time I wrote another book. My previous book had been written 20 years before. But I’d been publishing in magazines and literary quarterlies and occasionally in newspapers all along.

One day I just took a look at all the nonfiction. There’s a lot more of it than is in the book, but I just started playing around with sequencing. It does build a narrative arc, and there are some intentional echoes built in.

Really where I started with this was to make just an essay collection. And then I saw that I had to tweak some of the essays because a line or an idea or incident had been alluded to twice once you aggregate, and I kept playing with what should be included and what should not be included.

You want to keep the same tone, although God knows talking about the Black panthers and talking about a former CIA person don’t exactly keep the same tone, of course. It does express some of my interests at the time. It’s a hybrid book.

There can be a feeling of gatekeeping in terms of whose life “merits” a memoir. Do you have thoughts on who “should” write memoirs? Is it everyone?

There are interesting reasons to write them. Some kinds of memoir have, I think, oversaturated the market, like the memoir of disease, the cancer memoir. I swear, Tolstoy or Renata Adler could write a cancer memoir and we’d still not want to read it.

There are always original ways to do something even if it feels it’s been done way too much.

How did your Traveler’s Mind program come to be?

I taught in a lot of college situations. I was first invited to teach at Marylhurst – everybody in those days was adjunct. The only people who had actual jobs who didn’t have to get a new contract every term were the heads of the departments and the admins. It was a strange situation. But I was there for 20 years teaching short fiction, and then eventually also essays, as I started writing them.

A gal who was in my class wrote a short story that was set in Greece. She was American. You can tell in fiction if someone’s making it up and has never been there. I could tell she was really on secure ground. I asked her how in the world she knew so much about rural Greece, and she said that she lived there for six months. I said, and you kept a journal, right? And she said absolutely, every day.

I said, where do you live now? She said Beaverton. I asked if she could do the same in Beaverton. She just literally kind of frowned and said, no, there’s nothing happening to write about in Beaverton. And I said let me tell you something, darling, if we bring a Greek woman writer over here and put her in Beaverton, she’ll find something to write about.

It’s the little edge of fear and the excitement and the curiosity, and just sort of the altered state of being out of our element, I think, that really makes us see well. And so I thought, I would love to meet my writers on ground that is not familiar to them.

So for the first decade I took them to Veracruz. Unfortunately what happened was a second cartel came into Veracruz… But then, because I was a sore loser, I never found another home for the workshop and I just became very peripatetic and I just went to Bolivia, Chile, Nicaragua and Cuba, Colombia, India.

I think the Latin American workshops were showing students, as we wrote, the effects of American foreign policy. And so it was not by any means a tour.

It really worked. People were just fascinated by everything that we saw. I never took them to churches, cathedrals or museums. We didn’t do that kind of tourism. For instance, in Calcutta we went to a Muslim slum where a woman I had managed to meet had a little school, a little free school, and fed children, and she raised money for this. Just really obscure things that a tourist would never imagine.

I only did it for 20 years. I never advertised. After a while I had a sort of a following and fortunately, it was never the same group twice. All up for my politics – somebody who was very conservative politically or in favor of some of the things we did in Latin America would have been miserable, I’m sure.

How do you navigate the kind of emotional excavation that happens when you write about your own past?

I didn’t set out to write it at one time. Some of those pieces I wrote were more costly … I had this thing pretty much laid out in an early sequence, and I realized that as you go into part three I was starting with “The Man in the Pew,” and I had not mentioned anywhere that I had been converted to Catholicism. It’s what Aristotle talks about, things that are required to tell – you can’t skip over them. So I had to write up a long piece about my own conversion…then a really strange thing happened. I was unpacking papers and I found a work, it wasn’t even on any of my computers, it was just typed script. And I remembered writing it – it’s “Su Nombre en un Grano de Arroz” in the book – and I had sat down waiting for somebody in Veracruz for about three days. I wrote everything, what I called at the time my spiritual autobiography.

I read it, and it was far more revealing and far more sort of emotionally expensive to share. And I called my best girlfriend, and I said ‘I need you to come over here, I’m going to read this to you. It feels to me that it’s far more authentic, but I just don’t know if I could live with it in the world, publicly.’ She said you’re right, it’s better, it’s more interesting. But that’s something you have to decide.

I had not written it to show it to anyone, and I never had. I had never done anything with it until it went into the book.

What advice would you have for someone who might be considering writing a memoir?

This is a little mind trick, and it’s hard to do, but I’m not sure if we’re talking about being revealing and talking about our vulnerabilities, that it’s a good idea to keep in mind all the readers out there, because you’ll feel censored. That’s just a process trick: Try to think of writing for yourself, and writing it as honestly and as thoroughly and with as much remote emotion and response that you can put into it.

But also, I think that everybody’s life has something very unique about it. We need to hear from people who have such sense and sensitivity and dignity that they love different things. And we shouldn’t accept the kind of groupthink that being a politician is of any value whatsoever.

Martha Gies will appear as keynote speaker at the 4th Annual Raymond Carver Writing Festival on Saturday, May 3, 025. The festival runs 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Free to attend. More info, visit https://www.clatskaniearts.org/raymond-carver-writing-festival.