Martha Gies
Martha Gies began publishing nonfiction in the mid-seventies and later studied fiction with Raymond Carver at two Port Townsend workshops. Her short stories and literary essays appear widely in literary quarterlies, including Orion, The Sun, and Zyzzyva, and in various anthologies. In 2004, Oregon State University Press published Up All Night, her portrait of Portland told through the stories of twenty-three people who work graveyard shift, and in 2024, her memoir Broken Open, including essays on Carver and Kent Ford, came out from Wandering Aengus Press. Gies taught creative writing in the Portland area for 34 years, as well as 20 years of Traveler’s Mind, an annual writing workshop abroad.
Author's Entries
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Black Panthers in Portland
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) was founded in October 1966 in Oakland, California, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, two young Black men who met at Merritt Junior College. The party was their response to centuries of disenfranchisement of Black people in America and routine police violence in …
Oregon Encyclopedia
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Raymond Carver (1938-1988)
Raymond Carver was America’s preeminent short story-writer during the 1970s and 1980s, a time that witnessed a great renaissance of the art of the story. In his stories, and also his poems and essays, Carver recorded with poignancy and humor the financial and emotional bankruptcies that beset the working poor. …
Oregon Encyclopedia
