It was the perfect day for a festival when Literary Arts’ 2025 Portland Book Festival took over the downtown Park Blocks on Saturday. The sun shone brightly through the orange November leaves, and not a drop of rain fell while excited book-lovers lined up early all the way around the Portland Art Museum to pick up their wristbands. Despite the crowds at the festival’s first-ever sold-out year, many weren’t worried about the busy chaos and instead leaned into the joyful mood.

With more than 100 authors and seven stages, I was among the attendees facing some difficult choices. Here’s a sampling of what I saw and heard.

Jess Walter & Kristen Arnett

The session titled “Funny Story” featured New York Times bestselling authors Jess Walter and Kristen Arnett. At precisely 11:30 a.m., the two walked onto the brightly lit stage of The Old Church, dappled with light from the stained-glass window. After introductions by moderator Jess Hazel, OPB host of Morning Edition, Walter read from his newest novel, So Far Gone.

Walter jumped into a passage from the top of his narrative in which aging protagonist Rhys Kinnick tosses his smartphone out his car window after a Thanksgiving dinner family altercation. The passage was met with laughs and nods, followed by loud applause from the overflowing pews.

Next came Arnett’s turn to read from Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One, changing the subject and tone by saying she would now tell the audience “about lesbian clowns.”

“I think you should always have a moment of wish fulfillment in a novel,” Walter said, expanding on his desire to disconnect from technology. Walter went on to talk about the “reality gap” in America and how each small place contains its own beauty or “center of culture and openness,” despite not necessarily being a major metropolitan city, citing his home state of Washington and Spokane.

Arnett, who lives in Florida, spoke about “being a queer person living in a red state … a space where people spend a lot of money to come stay [in Orlando] and leave thinking it’s tacky.”

She talked about the many queer artists living there and how that demographic inspired the clown character in her new book. “I love when people think they know [what it’s like],” she explained, “and I love being like, no, you have no idea.”

The two wound through topics including gender, home, catalysts, safe spaces, gay IHOP, the Spokane World’s Fair, family dynamics, technology, information as commodity, clowns, the importance of humor, and the hope that comes from looking back at history.

The Paris Express — Emma Donoghue

Later, in a nearly full Newmark Theatre, OPB’s All Things Considered host Crystal Ligori welcomed attendees with a description of historical fiction and introduced Emma Donoghue, playwright, screenwriter, and award-winning novelist. Donoghue’s newest book, The Paris Express, is based on a French railway disaster of 1895 and inspired by a photograph of the crash. 

“I’m a playwright first, really … I love my limits,” Donoghue said, referring to the short timeframe in which the book takes place. “I think the intensity of any situation where people are stuck together … makes it all linger in your head. I wanted to draw attention to time and urgency, because the disaster happened due to time and urgency.”

“It’s a timeless image of high tech going terribly wrong,” Donoghue said of photographs of the crash, adding that we remember the event because of the photos.

After some back and forth with Ligori, Donoghue read a passage from the book about an Irishman taking the third-class train carriage. Full of wit and spark, Donoghue said she has drawn on actual characters from that time — painters, inventors, and radicals — and even made the train itself a character at times.

“I knew it had to be a novel surveying society, so there had to be many people in it,” she explained, telling the audience that she arranged her characters in clusters so they would have to interact.

When it comes to the “wellspring of her works,” Donoghue considers giving voice to the voiceless a catalyst for her creativity. Revisionism, in the sense of adding the voiceless back into history, became a focus for Donoghue during her PhD years.

“In historical fiction, we are typically looking for the troublemakers … reaching out and grabbing the muddy hands of the past,” she elaborated. “It’s a big inspiration to me to look at those who have been left out by the past, and it gives me a real feeling of mission to give these people the platform they deserve.”

As the event came to a close, Donoghue and Ligori discussed her time living in Montparnasse, France, the ethics of suggesting queerness on historical figures, the process of creating and writing childhood characters, the discrepancy of travel class systems, writing for stage and screen, and learning the mechanics of the train through the eyes of the working-class mechanics of the time.

“A train is such a beautiful image for the forward thrust of progress,” Donoghue said.

Poetry pop-up — Jennifer Perrine

Jennifer Perrine, poet and teacher, read from her collection Beautiful Outlaw in the Impressionist room of the Portland Art Museum before a full room of listeners. Standing before Carl Vilhelm Holsøe’s painting Interior with Young Woman Reading by the Window, Perrine explained her process.

Perrine wrote her book in an experimental form that “outlaws” the first letter of the poem, requiring the other letters in the poem to be included while the absent letters spell the poem’s title. 

“If my voice comes out too brittle or loud, it could be the growls I’ve stifled…” Perrine began. “I’ve learned not to leave the house when I feel a certain set to my jaw.”

Flanked by Gustave Courbet’s The Violoncellist on her left and Edgar Degas’ Madame de Nittis on her right, Perrine continued with more poems, the last called I Can Look At You From Inside As Well.

“I wrote the book when there was a lot going on in my mind and not a lot in my life,” she later said.

Written in the Waters — Tara Roberts

Tara Roberts spoke at First Congregational United Church Of Christ later in the day, joined by Shayna Schlosberg from OPB. Roberts, the first Black woman explorer to be featured on the cover of National Geographic, was named Nat Geo Explorer of the Year in 2022 and is now a National Geographic Explorer in Residence, working on a secret new project. Her book Written in the Waters is a memoir of history, home, and belonging, and the inspiration behind this project.

Roberts greeted the crowd with a warm hello and shared how she finds Portland, the last stop on her book tour, welcoming and beautiful. She then dove into discussing the book, which follows her journey over the past seven years, as she dives with and follows a group of Black scuba divers searching for the wrecks of slave-trading ships around the world.

“It’s really changed my relationship to the past… I wasn’t really interested in history before I started this book,” said Roberts. “Before, I was a bonafide sci-fi fantasy girl … from land-locked Atlanta, Georgia.”

In 2016, Roberts saw a picture at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. The photograph was of a group of Black women in wetsuits on a boat — something Roberts had never seen before. The image sparked something in her and reminded her of her childhood dreams. Inspired to embark on a new journey, that photo helped form her interests and career. 

“Because I saw that picture, it changed everything,” said Roberts. “I felt like the floor went stage dark and the clouds parted, the angels started to sing, and there was a spotlight on that picture on the second floor of the museum…“

The women were part of a group called Diving With a Purpose that helps search for and document shipwrecks around the world, spending time underwater with clipboards, pencils, and measuring tapes, while fighting the current to draw and document what they see. So far, they have found six shipwrecks.

Taken with a calling to join them, Roberts left her nonprofit job in Washington, D.C., completed her 30 mandatory ocean dives, and joined the women who help “bring this history back into memory,” simultaneously transitioning from a life of fear to a life of confidence.

Roberts, whose excitement for the topic was palpable, described getting scuba certified, the rift in the national consciousness on race, her transition from unhappiness in a nonprofit to living her passion, learning about the transatlantic slave trade, and getting the National Geographic grant that allowed her to do this work.