When Gail Zuro arrives in the South Park Blocks in downtown Portland on the morning of the Portland Book Festival, the sky will still be dark.
But fellow volunteers whom Zuro calls “dedicated souls” will likely already be waiting for her, ready to tackle last-minute tasks before an anticipated 8,000 festival-goers show up for a daylong celebration of all things bookish.
There will be plenty to do for Zuro and about 250 others who’ve signed up to volunteer at the largest festival of its kind in the Pacific Northwest. As curated by Literary Arts, a Portland nonprofit that works to engage readers and support writers, this year’s festival on Nov. 2 is slated to present more than 80 authors on 10 stages in six buildings and one large tent.
One of those buildings is the First Congregational United Church of Christ, where Grant Engrav also will show up before sunrise for his volunteer shift as a stage manager. With five scheduled events in a space that can hold about 700 people, festival day at the church requires the combined efforts of two stage managers, a venue monitor, a line monitor, and an author signing manager, for starters.
Engrav, a Portland lawyer, has volunteered with the festival for 10 years. He said his first year was chaotic, what with the crowds and heavy rain. “But the volunteers and the people were awesome. And despite the chaos, it was so much fun that I’ve been back every year since,” he said.
Zuro started volunteering with the festival during its original incarnation, the Wordstock Festival, founded by Portland author Larry Colton in 2005. “I was looking for work and I thought, oh, maybe I’ll be able to network, and they look like they need help,” she said.
Wordstock organizers gave Zuro the role of exhibitor coordinator. “Nobody had done it before, so I made it up as I went along,” she said. She found she was a natural at coordination, organization, and logistics. “I was hooked,” she said.
When Literary Arts acquired Wordstock in 2014, they got Zuro, too. She spent several years managing events in the Portland Art Museum’s Mark Building, next to the museum’s main building. Now she supports Literary Arts’ volunteer manager, Denver Olmstead, during setup the day before the festival and during the festival itself.
“I get to be in the real mix of it,” Zuro said. It’s a fitting role for someone who works as an emergency manager for Multnomah County’s Office of Emergency Management, and she thrives on it.
“The energy is just something that Portland doesn’t see anymore on a regular basis, right? So that’s kind of exciting,” Zuro said. “We take over the Park Blocks. It’s tents and food trucks and 8,000 people everywhere, and there’s just that excitement.”
Amanda Bullock, Literary Arts’ senior artistic director, also is a festival longtimer. In fact, the festival is the reason she is in Portland. A decade ago, she was director of public programming at New York’s Housing Works Bookstore, which supports an organization that serves homeless New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS. “It’s a pretty special place,” she said. But the workload was tremendous – she was running more than 200 events a year. When Literary Arts advertised for someone to relaunch the book festival it had just taken over, she saw her dream role.
Today, Bullock is the festival’s lead curator, charged with creating an event that offers something for everyone. “I always joke that the theme is just ‘Good Books That Came Out This Year,’” she said.
The books come to the festival from a range of sources: Bullock’s Literary Arts colleagues. A 20-member Portland Book Festival Advisory Council. Publicists at presses of all sizes. An open submissions period, which strengthens the lineup by bringing in titles that might be overlooked otherwise, Bullock said.
As Bullock goes through the submissions, she’s thinking not only about literary merit and variety but also about pairings. “A lot of the festival programming is about work in relationship to other work,” she said. Most of the onstage events feature a pair of books that have something in common, whether it’s genre (horror and romance make strong showings this year), audience (kids have their own mini-festival at The Judy Kafoury Center for Youth Arts at Southwest Broadway and Main) or topic (panels will address justice, family history, Indigenous identities, poetry and pop culture, heroes, and much more). Even the solo pop-up readings inside the art museum are pairings – of books and artworks.
“I think some of my favorite pairings are the ones that are a little unexpected,” Bullock said. “I try to read as many of the books as I can, and so some of the [pairings] that I think have so much potential for great conversation are where that isn’t a super-, super-obvious connection.”
The connections and convergences, the “density and diversity” of so many authors in one place, are what make a book festival special, Bullock said. “This might be a unique opportunity to know what Danzy Senna and Rachel Kushner think of each other’s work,” she said, referring to the 3:15 p.m. panel titled “Deceit & Dark Humor.”
Bullock typically invites the headliners – this year’s are singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco, who’ll discuss her new picture book, Show Up and Vote, with OPB journalist Prakruti Bhatt, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers, who’ll discuss his new novel, Playground, with Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor. “Whenever I’m pitching a long-shot author, I’m always like, well, Tom Hanks said yes,” Bullock said. (Hanks appeared at the 2018 festival to discuss his story collection Uncommon Type.)
Just as carefully selected as the author lineup are the venues, meant to give the festival a sense of place. Bullock is especially fond of the festival’s use of the Portland Art Museum galleries for the 15-minute pop-up readings.
“We started them in 2015, and it was really responding to the art museum as the primary venue for the festival and wanting to highlight that and feature that and celebrate that,” Bullock said. “The authors also love the pop-ups, because it’s really fun to read in an art museum.” As far as she knows, Portland has the only book festival with such readings.
If Bullock could curate the weather, she would. “I always joke that I want it to drizzle just a little bit, to get like a vibey rain but not enough that it will prevent people having a good time,” she said. Cue this year’s new book-check truck, where festival-goers can stow their freshly acquired literary treasures in lockers in case of wet weather.
Also new this year is Readers Night, which offers a festival eve preview of the book fair in the museum’s Mark Building. While Readers Night attendees are encouraged to donate to Literary Arts, admission is free.
The festival’s usual lineup of local bookstores will have a new entrant for 2024: Literary Arts itself. The nonprofit will have a bookstore at its new Central Eastside headquarters, and it’s already been selling its stock at events this fall.
Being lead curator of the Portland Book Festival isn’t all fun. The biggest challenge is financial. “It’s not an event that’s designed to be profitable,” Bullock said. If ticket prices were aligned with cost per person, they’d be more than $100 each, she said. This year, tickets are $18 in advance and $25 on the day of the festival.
“It’s really important to us that it’s accessible,” Bullock said. For instance, anyone 17 or younger gets in free. Sponsors have typically made up the difference. “As long as the programming’s good and people show up, we’ll be OK,” Bullock said.
It likely helps that Portland’s festival is a relatively small one. The Texas Book Festival is two days and features 250 authors, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books lasts two days and showcases 550 authors, and the Brooklyn Book Festival runs eight days with 300 authors. “It’s like the difference between a short story and a novel,” Bullock said. “Maybe you can hold the whole short story in your head at once, but a novel is a much more sprawling thing.”
She paused, then said of Portland’s festival, “It’s a story collection.”
There are the stories told onstage and sold at the book fair. There are the stories attendees tell one another.
There are Zuro’s stories. One year the author lineup included Malcolm Gladwell, and Zuro was eager to see him. She announced she’d be off her radio for an hour and asked that requests for help go to someone else during Gladwell’s talk. “I think I watched 10 minutes of it before people were starting to call,” she said. She went back to work. “I have a real sense of service,” she said.
Another time, Zuro got to meet Portland author Phillip Margolin, whose legal thrillers she enjoys. “I called him Mr. Margolin and he said, ‘No, no, just call me Phillip.’ I’m like, Oh my god. That was very cool,” she said.
Zuro has also met author and publisher Dave Eggers. “He is pretty cool and laid-back, of course, just like you would imagine.” She answered questions about herself and Portland from actor and playwright Jesse Eisenberg while escorting him to the authors’ green room. “He didn’t have to talk to me – there were people with him – but he did, and I thought that that was just really kind of him.” She chatted with Carrie Brownstein while the musician and actor worked her way through a pile of books awaiting her signature.
Engrav has a story about how, at morning orientation, all the volunteers introduce themselves by their name and what they’re reading. “That just sets off almost too good of a conversation, because then people get into it, and then you’re like, OK, well, we got a job to do,” he said.
One year Engrav discovered that his wife was related to the lead singer of Fleet Foxes, Robin Pecknold, who was at the festival to discuss a book about the band’s lyrics. Another year he hosted an after-party for volunteers at his house, “and it was, like, the nerdiest, coolest thing. People were just talking about their favorite books or just awesome presentations of that day.” Every year he wears his Mark Twain tie, and it always sparks some fun conversations.
Bullock tells a story about the time the actress and writer Abbi Jacobson found herself at the festival in need of pens. “I remember sprinting across the festival grounds being like, I must bring these pens to Abbi Jacobson!” She reminisces about the time author Ta-Nehisi Coates and several of his relatives closed down an after-party. And she’s already anticipating the stories that will be told after this year’s “Wild Life” panel, which will feature a special guest from the Cascades Raptor Center.
The one story they all tell: Working behind the scenes at the festival doesn’t mean missing out on it.
Zuro: “I feel like, in fact, kind of the opposite, right? Because I get to help all these people, seven, 8,000 people – I’m one of several hundred people that are helping these 8,000 people have an amazing day.”
Engrav: “You just feel like a bird flying around, getting different tastes of the festival. You’re inside, it’s all quiet, very philosophical, and all of a sudden you’re on the street and it’s raining, and you hear two people in an argument over whether one book by an author was better than the other.”
Bullock: “Every year there is a moment where I’m on the Park Blocks and have a chance to look around, and I’m seeing everybody having a good time, seeing people out with their friends, getting food, seeing people with books, seeing people talking about the events they’ve attended. And that’s really what it’s for, just bringing community together and providing space for people to make those kinds of connections.”