If the lines were any indication, the 10th edition of Literary Arts’ Portland Book Festival in downtown Portland on Saturday was a best-seller.
People lined up to buy books. To get books signed. To get into author panels (not always successfully). To refuel in between panels at the food trucks stationed for the day in the South Park Blocks. To chat with exhibitors at the two-floor book fair. To hear authors read from their work amid the Portland Art Museum galleries.
Here’s a sampling of what the day offered.
10 a.m.: Literary Arts’ senior artistic director, Amanda Bullock, welcomes the audience at The Old Church, one of 10 festival stages. It’s hosting “First Generation Food,” which features an all-Asian American panel. Kristina Cho, a two-time James Beard Award winner, is here to talk about her new cookbook, Chinese Enough. Louis Lin and Jolyn Chen chime in with their perspectives as the married Taiwanese American owners of Xiao Ye, a year-old Northeast Portland restaurant. Moderating the conversation is Rachel Khong, onetime executive editor of the food magazine Lucky Peach, editor of the cookbook All About Eggs and author of the new novel Real Americans, about three generations of a Chinese American family.
They talk about straddling cultures and categories and communities, about life experiences that can’t be neatly compartmentalized. Take the title of Cho’s cookbook, which is a response to feeling questioned by relatives about whether she is Chinese enough while growing up in a Chinese American restaurant family in Ohio. Or take Lin’s remark that Xiao Ye is intentionally vague about what kind of restaurant it is – its menu, billed as first-generation food, represents his and Chen’s experiences growing up in Southern California and then working in Washington, D.C., and Portland.
Cho says that in writing her cookbooks, she wants to share facets of Asian American life that aren’t often seen in pop culture. Chen talks about feeling so Taiwanese in some ways and so American in others and says making Xiao Ye a strictly Chinese or Taiwanese restaurant would “dilute” it. Lin remembers discussing whether to use the English-language translation of Xiao Ye, “midnight snack,” as the restaurant’s name – “but it didn’t explain the whole story.”
11:45 a.m.: The panel in the Winningstad Theatre is titled “On the Run” and both novels under discussion are about journeys metaphorical and literal, but the three women onstage stand firm in their statements and convictions. Moderator Marisa Siegel, a poet and an editor at the online literary magazine The Rumpus, describes the novels as giving other authors permission to tell stories that we don’t hear enough of, in particular stories about how male violence interrupts female relationships.
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Portland author Chelsea Bieker’s new novel, Madwoman, centers on Clove, a mother of two young children who fled a childhood filled with domestic violence and crafted an adulthood as far from that tumult as possible. The novel opens on the day Clove gets a letter from her imprisoned mother, from whom Clove has hidden her whereabouts and whose existence Clove has lied about to her husband. What follows, Bieker says, is Clove’s journey of finally having to face the defining day of her life. Bieker tells the story in direct address, with Clove speaking to her mother throughout the book. It’s a technique intended to convey urgency and intimacy, Bieker says: “I’m going to tell this story and you’re going to have to listen.”
Author Gina María Balibrera’s debut novel, The Volcano Daughters, is inspired by La Matanza, the 1932 massacre of an estimated 30,000 El Salvadoran workers, many of them Indigenous, after they rose up against the country’s land-owning elite and undemocratic government. The novel centers on four women-turned-ghosts who narrate their lives and those of two other women who survived La Matanza. The narrators form a Greek chorus, but an uneven one, often breaking apart to tell their individual stories or getting closer to other characters, Balibrera says.
Both authors address survival: What does it look like when your life has been framed in terms of surviving – when, as Bieker put it, you’re safe in your home but your body is still terrified? How do you survive amid state-sponsored violence and what Balibrera calls “pernicious national mythologies”?
1:40 p.m.: Walking through the book fair is like touring Portland’s multifaceted book community. At the table for the Portland nonprofit Willamette Writers in the Portland Art Museum’s Fields Ballroom, volunteer Frances Ippolito talks animatedly about a picture book, A Tree of My Own, that she just published through the nonprofit press she founded, Qilin Press. Written by Portlander Nui Wilson and illustrated by Thai Karen artist Kayor, the book follows the journey of a Karen girl from her family’s home in Burma to a camp in Thailand to a new home in Portland.
At another table, Jerry Sutherland of Portland tells a couple about his book Bayocean: Atlantis of Oregon, a history of a coastal resort community that once flourished on Tillamook Spit, now a popular hiking destination. Sutherland says he spent 10 years researching the 290-page book, which includes photos and maps.
Still another table groans under the weight of books brought by Katherine Morgan, owner of the newly opened Grand Gesture Books romance bookstore in downtown Portland. Next to Morgan, best-selling author Casey McQuiston is following up an 11:45 a.m. talk at the First Congregational United Church of Christ by signing copies of their new bisexual romance, an unexpectedly-reunited-exes story titled The Pairing, with practiced speed.
2:20 p.m.: In the Portland Art Museum’s “Throughlines” exhibit, pop-up readings are overlapping as authors read next to the artworks they’ve been assigned. As Portland author Renée Watson wraps up her reading of poems from her young adult collection Black Girl You Are Atlas, people are coming in for Portland writer Lola Milholland’s reading from her memoir-cookbook, Group Living and Other Recipes or for Oregon State University anthropologist and historian David G. Lewis’ reading from Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley.
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The final pop-up author of the day is Vancouver author Curtis C. Chen, reading from True Blue Kangaroo, the third book in his science fiction series about a spy with a superpower in a time when humans are on the moon, Mars, and Venus. Chen has been paired with American artist Corita Kent’s 1967 print somebody had to break the rules. Chen says he appreciates the pairing – Kangaroo also breaks rules, and the print’s presentation of text floating in white space nods to the spy’s ability to open portals in an empty universe.
3:15 p.m.: The scent of popcorn still wafts through what was once a Regal cinema and is now The Judy Kafoury Center for Youth Arts. In The Stage at The Judy, Portland cartoonist, illustrator, and author Jonathan Hill is hosting the day’s second “Illustrator Draw Off,” a game that draws enthusiastic participation from the kids in the audience.
Hill puts illustrators Nat Iwata, Chanel Miller, Faith Schaffer, and Olivia Sua through prompts, mostly provided by the audience, to which they respond with 2- and 3-minute drawings. They draw SpongeBob SquarePants. They draw an animal that’s a mix of a fox, Garfield, and an octopus. They play “Drawing Telephone,” which starts with a child whispering the phrase “Donald Duck got eaten by a shark in the Pacific Ocean,” works its way through three more children and all four illustrators, and ends with a drawing of a narwhal eating a squirrel having a birthday party. They draw another animal that’s a mix, this time of a chicken, a hedgehog, and a panda, and with their nondominant hands. They draw a horse riding a bicycle over a car.
Hill, having announced that he’s fiercely competitive, awards the illustrators points for their drawings, ranging from 1 to 1 million. He sings. He tells riddles. He makes sure all the drawings are signed and distributed to children eagerly waving their hands.
5 p.m.: People started lining up at 4:15 outside the Portland Art Museum’s 200-seat Miller Gallery for the “Reconciliation” panel, featuring three Oregon literary stars. Renée Watson is a Newbery Honor author whose children’s and young adult books are consistent best-sellers. Joe Wilkins is an Oregon Book Award-winning poet, a critically lauded novelist and director of creative writing at Linfield University. Moderator Mitchell S. Jackson’s numerous writing awards include the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.
Watson’s new novel, skin & bones, is set in Portland and tells the story of Lena, a 40-year-old Black librarian, as she navigates love, in multiple forms, and history, at the personal and community level. Wilkins’ new novel, The Entire Sky, is set in rural Montana and braids the stories of three characters: Justin, a teen on the run; Rene, a cowboy, sheep rancher, father and grandfather; and Lianne, Rene’s daughter.
“I loved both novels,” Jackson says, but adds that he wondered, “But what’s the conversation here?” He bridges the urban-rural divide by asking Watson and Wilkins to each give their definition of the other’s setting. The bridge built, they discuss the novels’ common ground: what home means, what love means, being found, being seen, how the authors’ poetry informs their prose.
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Jackson asks the authors what political statements their books make, and the authors agree readily that their books do make political statements.
“A fat Black woman in Portland saying, ‘See me,’ is political,” Watson says, adding that being a Black author in a country that once criminalized Black literacy is the ultimate political statement.
Wilkins brings up the 1998 hate killing of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man in Wyoming, just south of where Wilkins grew up, as an example of the “real stakes of what it can mean for us to break out of rigid gender norms, especially in rural spaces.”
6 p.m.: A couple of people sit at the Literary Arts table in the Portland Art Museum, looking tired but cheerful. Ride-share drivers stop along Broadway to pick up festival-goers. The Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, having hosted its two festival events, is now admitting music lovers for an Oregon Symphony concert.
