A Portland Writer Traces Her Conversion to Being a Writer

Artful and deeply personal essays comprise this splendid new memoir, Broken Open: Essays (Wandering Aengus Press), by Northwest writer Martha Gies. A native of Oregon’s Willamette Valley, she traces the distinctive paths taken since her early life in that rural valley. Echoes of “sound and smell and memory” pervade stories of family, loves, books, and adventuresome forays into the greater world. 

Her family was not religious, so it came as a bombshell when her kid sister Toni announced she had become an evangelical Christian. Siblings were appalled. Writes Gies, “It would be many years before I had any insight into that period of Toni’s life.” Diagnosed with fourth-stage cancer, Toni’s ordeal lasted five-and-a-half years. Shortly before Toni’s death, Gies recalls her so frail that, “her head was like a heavy blossom on a broken stem.”

Toni’s greatest fear was that she would lose her mind. She didn’t. Grace-filled in the midst of pain, she found that the ailment only deepened Toni’s religious faith. Gies writes, “For me, it was a profound spiritual experience of sustained and unparalleled intensity.”

In the course of her life, Gies has held a lot of jobs, from managing an asparagus-packing plant to driving taxi. In one hilarious chapter Gies gets a taste of show biz. She is young, lithe, and blonde, perfect for the gig as a stage magician’s assistant. Better yet, she is just the right size for the previous showgirl’s attire, thus saving the miserly maestro from having to pay for alterations to the glitzy couture. She endures the unglamorous peregrinations from one podunk venue to the next, getting sawn in half and cramming herself into a mysterious trunk. Finally, she departs show business altogether, leaving unpaid wages behind. 

Gies lived in Seattle twice. During her 1981-87 stay she grew in admiration for revered anti-war archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, converting to Catholicism. An early and passionate reader of writers like John Steinbeck, Gies already harbored an awareness of societal inequities, and her childhood in a family of means bred a concern for economic justice. As a Catholic, she embraced the works of religious leaders like Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Martin Luther King, who remain “characters who live in my imagination as teachers and friends.”

Studying with the late Raymond Carver in two summer workshops at Centrum in Port Townsend was the other life-changing experience from the same period. A kind and generous teacher, Carver was encouraging while assuring his students that the vocation of writing “was a very serious enterprise.” Shortly after Carver received in 1983 the Strauss Living Award, a lavish two-year grant to dedicate himself to writing, Gies ran into him at a reading at the University of Washington. 

The Strauss grant had come with the proviso that recipients not take other work, and Carver admitted he did not miss teaching. “You may not still be my teacher,” Gies replied, “but I’m still your student.” She remained in touch with him until his death in 1988. Broken Open includes essays about both of these conversions: from having no religious affiliation to Catholicism, and from journalism to literary writing.

Moving home to Portland, in 1988, she began attending a small skid road chapel where out front a Mercedes might be parked next to a shopping cart, signaling the diverse congregation inside. Here Gies met a quiet and lonely man who, in time, revealed to her his astonishing secret. This poignant vignette is worthy of a movie.

Gies has been anthologized with notable authors, though she has published only one previous book, Up All Night (Oregon State University Press, 2004), an interview-based account of the myriad happenings and individuals employed in the nocturnal hours of her city. It was honored  as one of the region’s “Ten Best Books of the Year,” and demonstrates her ease at bringing elegance, humor, and pathos to the printed page. 

Martha Gies will offer a program on the art of memoir, and read from the new book at Folio, 93 Pike Street, 3^rd floor, on Friday, November 1, 4-6pm. The entry is free, though reservations are requested on the Folio website.