The winter of 2016 found me walking down a cobblestone street in León, Nicaragua, on my way to visit a prosthetics clinic. While the outing was off the beaten tourist path, I had not had a vacation in mind anyway. I was one of eight writers led by the author and teacher Martha Gies, on a 10-day immersion in observation and daily writing practice that she called Traveler’s Mind. We studied politics and history, visited fading murals of martyred Sandinistas and scenes of fallen university students, gunned down by soldiers during a 1959 protest against the first Somoza dictatorship.
We read about long-dead poets, and got to meet some living ones. That day at the prosthetics clinic, a former Sandinista named Mario, himself an amputee, demonstrated the work he'd done since the ‘90s, crafting limbs for people who’d lost them to landmines left over from the war.
It was no surprise to us to be granted this intimate view of a country and its history. By then, Gies was well known for her meticulous research and insight into each place, her ability to peel back the skin of a country to reveal the people who formed its beating heart. She led her Traveler’s Mind workshops from 2000-2019, in and out of cities in Mexico, India, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Spain, Cuba, and Denmark. For the final trip before she retired, she chose to stay local, taking writers to the Umatilla Reservation in Oregon.
Gies’ ability in her Traveler’s Mind workshops to direct writers to the story beneath the story is the same talent she brought to her work in the States. She taught creative writing, either as adjunct or privately, for 34 years, in graduate programs (Antioch, Marylhurst, Lewis & Clark College), as well as at many workshops from Haystack and Sitka to The Attic. In 1999, I lucked into a writing class with her, and from then on signed up for a workshop whenever I could.
In 2004, she published Up All Night, a nocturnal tour through the lives of graveyard workers, featuring real-life Portland characters from a zookeeper and a nude dancer to a baker. All told, she accompanied 23 different people on their night shifts, and captured their candid personal histories.
Her skill at writing brilliant portraits of others is what makes her latest work so noteworthy. In Broken Open, Gies has at last turned the lens upon herself. The book is a masterful memoir in linked essays, divided into three parts. The first section, “The Fugitive Years,” gives us a young Gies, who as a fourth-generation Oregonian grows up on a large parcel of land west of Salem. “As a young child,” she writes, “I came to associate solitude with revelation.”
Everything from the walk to her rural two-room schoolhouse to an empty schoolyard where she waits for her mother, is edged with an awareness of time, how it can be “compressed into isolated moments of great clarity and registration.” Days are wide open ventures into wildness and contain encounters with the divine and epiphanies about a mysterious universe. Sunday afternoons were punctuated with the ritual of cocktail hour — Old Fashioneds mixed and served by a nine-year-old Martha. After the children are dispatched to bed, Gies and her siblings sometimes sit unseen on the landing to eavesdrop on their parents, then hold “formal councils to analyze tidbits overheard downstairs.”
The reader meets Gies as a teenager, perched on the kitchen counter, smoking and gazing out into the night toward a family outing she’s been unceremoniously excluded from, and later as a renegade prankster, sneaking into the library of her old elementary school and stealing a favorite book. There is humor, and an unsentimental steadiness, which holds its form even through essays that contain calamitous loss of loved ones and, eventually, of the beloved farm where she’s grown up.
Part two, “The Power of Hunger,” opens with Gies finding work as a taxi driver, inspired by the book Conversations with Nelson Algren, and believing that, as she writes, “in order to see the world as a writer, I’d best get out there, away from the cocoons of academia and the white-collar class.” The descriptions of the characters who climb in and out of her cab, and the drivers she counts as colleagues are vivid and memorable. In “Substitution Trunk,” Gies joins a traveling magic show, carrying only a small suitcase with jeans, t-shirts and a 35-cent copy of a Houdini biography. Part of her duties require her to climb into and then escape from a trunk, and here we see examples of Gies’ deadpan humor at its best:
“What made the trunk unique was the requirement that I labor to get out of it. The other illusions required little or nothing on my part; usually it was enough to lie still (as when I was cut in half) or make myself as small as possible… Getting out of the trunk was a struggle because I had so little time to work.”
When in 1980, Gies reads a Raymond Carver short story for the first time, (“So Much Water, So Close to Home”), she is inspired to try her hand at fiction, and in fact the first short story she ever composes is the one she submits for consideration at a workshop Carver teaches at Centrum in Port Townsend. What follows is a poignant and vivid portrait of Carver as a generous teacher, and the connection Gies has with him until his death. It’s here that she hones her writing chops, and this essay is especially compelling for any student of writing.
One of the most powerful essays in this section is “A Father’s Story,” an account of Kent Ford, founder of the Portland Black Panther Party. Centered around the arrest of his son, one of many people swept up in the post-9/11 war against terrorism, the essay explores Ford’s early roots in Jim Crow Louisiana and the life he builds out west.
Ford reads Malcolm X, studies colonial periods in Africa and Latin America, and comes to sympathize with independence movements. Eventually, in 1969 he starts a chapter of the Black Panther Party, which offers medical and dental clinics and a free breakfast program for the community, but also attracts the attention of police and the FBI. The essay is an invaluable counter narrative to the often whitewashed history of the racism and intolerable harassment experienced by Black Portlanders, and their work to push back at injustice and thrive despite it.
In the final section of the book, entitled “Invincible Summer,” Gies details a lifelong spiritual journey marked by curiosity, deep reading and a growing commitment to social justice. “In the days of my itinerant youth,” she writes, “I had only a dim awareness of a spiritual foundation—unarticulated and unexplored.” But after she encounters the story of a local Archbishop in Seattle who advocates for the poor, fights nuclear proliferation, and withholds taxes to protest U.S. defense spending, she reevaluates Catholicism.
She also takes “inspiration and consolation” from the Latin American Church and those who have fought for the rights of Indigenous people. In the years to come, her brand of religious practice takes her inside a jail ministry, and to a parish in downtown Portland, where she is occasionally invited to preach. Among the lovely essays in this section is one on the nature of memory, the Proustian ways it comes unbidden, like the “soft surprise of sponge cake on the tongue.” This is the quietest piece, contemplative, and the details are sharp and precise because of it. There is rueful humor in the style of James Thurber, and also grace for what is lost from memory with each passing year.
The essays in this collection offer life as a sacrament, and people who make sacrifices for one another. They explore what it means to live a contemplative life, one open and receptive to the natural world: oak trees, creek, forest, farm, the verdant Willamette Valley. Gies combines an obvious affinity for a good story with a close study of humans in all their brokenness and illumination.
For all the years she has worked as a writer and beloved teacher in Portland, she has also made her mark on the city, in the writing she did for Street Roots newspaper for many years, and the work she did for 17 years with elderly and disabled people downtown, displaced from buildings being renovated or condemned. She has lived intentionally small, attempting to organize her life in a way that she says “permitted the most writing time and just enough money to feed me.” Broken Open offers a rich portrait of a life well lived, well loved, and captures the stories that Gies couldn’t let go of until she’d written them down. All the better for us.
“Broken Open” (Trail to Table) is out now. Find public events for the book launch at marthagies.com/events-classes
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This article appears in August 28, 2024.