The Portland Book Festival Turns 10
Image: Courtesy Literary Arts
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When the local nonprofit Literary Arts took over what was at the time called Wordstock, in 2014, its executive director, Andrew Proctor, had big plans. The first order of business was moving the festival out of the windowless Oregon Convention Center. “You have to give me two days at the art museum,” he remembers telling Brian Ferriso, the director of the Portland Art Museum, on a call. “And I need them, actually, for free.” Ferriso made it work, and eventually some surrounding venues—the Schnitz, the Winningstad, the space now called the Judy, and others—followed suit. This Saturday, November 2, is the Portland Book Festival’s 10th anniversary under Literary Arts’ watch. In the past decade, it’s spread to 10 stages and has grown to host more than 80 authors and 5,000 attendees for a marathon of readings, panels, classes, kids events—like a music festival but, you know, with books.
This year, Proctor himself will interview Richard Powers, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory, about his new novel, Playground. Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco is bringing her latest children’s book about the importance of voting. Best-selling romance author Casey McQuiston will be there. So will Rachel Kushner, whose novel Creation Lake is currently a finalist for the Booker Prize. A huge cast of Portland authors will be coming too, including Chelsea Bieker, Renée Watson, Ferris Jabr, Emily Chenoweth, and tons more.
And I’ll be there, chatting with the local artist and picture book author Carson Ellis and Canadian artist and comics writer Walter Scott for a panel about the hardscrabble life of the artist. Ellis’s latest book, One Week in January, collects recent paintings she made of scenes from a diary she kept her first week in Portland, when she was 25, subsisting on free pizza and cheap wine, and trying to make a life of making pictures. Scott’s latest book, The Wendy Award, the fourth in his Wendy comics series (Zadie Smith is a fan; Naomi Fry, too), is also about a 20-something artist cutting her teeth. It flickers between tender-hearted moments and key bump–fueled nights, and nails every art-world pretension and cliché with hilarious wit.
More Things to Do This Week
Football Christine Sinclair’s Final Match
7pm Fri, Nov 1 | Providence Park, $31+
Soccer’s world record holder for international goals plays her final game at Providence Park in a consequential match against Angel City FC. The last remaining Thorn from 2013, when Portland won the championship in the National Women’s Soccer League’s inaugural year, Sinclair has won two more league championships, in 2017 and 2022, and a gold medal with Canada at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Born in suburban Vancouver, British Columbia, and now a dual citizen, she came to the Rose City in 2001 to attend the University of Portland. One of the most recognizable athletes in Canada, the 41-year-old has said that in Portland she gets to live a quieter life—aside from this week, that is, when the city is plastered with “Thank You, Sinc” billboards with her picture. —Margaret Seiler
art Emily Counts
5–8pm Sat, Nov 2; thru Feb 9 | Oregon Contemporary, FREE
When Counts first mounted this installation, Sea of Vapors, at Seattle’s Museum of Museums (MoM), in 2023, a boat holding an extended matrilineage of humanoid figures stood at the center. Like the ceramic sculptures of cats, crabs, turtles, and winged creatures spread throughout the space, the peoples’ features were scrambled. Some had one big eye, some four; some had vampiric mouths where you’d expect to find their eyes. Counts doesn’t make specific spiritual references, though the imagery evokes everything from Noah’s ark to Egyptian barques. For her, this realm, which she’s installing in a new, expanded version at Oregon Contemporary, belongs to an unspecified “Wizard Queen,” and the figures are tributes to the women, across timelines, who have influenced her work.
music Porches
8pm Thu, Oct 31 | Wonder Ballroom, $40.94
From his early, dream-pop days in the 2010s into this latest chapter—faster, louder, more yelling—the songs Aaron Maine writes as Porches have held a charmed intimacy. “Knock, knock, who’s there? / Boo, Boo who?” he sings, a cappella except for the glitchy auto-tune, on the opening track of Shirt, the band’s sixth album, which came out in September. Is he flirting? Cheering you up? Is it working?
