Ursula K. Le Guin’s Worlds at Oregon Contemporary
You’re reading a past edition of our weekly Things to Do column, about the concerts, art shows, comedy sets, movies, readings, and plays we’re attending each week. Read the current installment. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.
Early this June, I visited Theo Downes-Le Guin at his childhood home. Rosebushes meet you in the front yard and crawl onto the back deck, where Theo and I sat and talked about his mom, the late author Ursula K. Le Guin—a true giant of American letters whom he and most everyone refers to, with a mix of reverence and familiar comfort, as simply Ursula. Though Le Guin died in 2018, you can feel her throughout the house. She’s most palpable in the tiny room at the top of the stairs, just past the giant Henk Pander portrait of her, her signature, razor-cut bangs glinting. It’s in this room that she conjured her famous Earthsea and Hainish universes and typed out the bulk of her more than 20 novels.
A recreation of Ursula’s writing studio is one aspect of A Larger Reality, the immersive exhibition of his mother’s life and work that Theo curated at Oregon Contemporary (October 31–February 8, 2026; opening reception Saturday, November 1). At the gallery, an automated typewriter reproduces short passages of Le Guin’s work like a player piano would music, which gallerygoers can take home as keepsakes. Elsewhere in the exhibit, archival texts, photographs, and ephemera, as well as audio and video recordings, supplement contemporary artworks responding to Le Guin’s work. Murals by Ursula Barton, of a huge dragon and a tableau of Le Guin’s greatest influences, extend the author’s worlds directly onto the gallery walls. The artist Jeremy Rotsztain’s video game–like, augmented reality installation puts viewers in the mind of Le Guin’s 1971 novel, The Lathe of Heaven, about a man whose dreams become reality and the psychiatrist who tries to profit off of him. There’s also a video installation from Arwen Curry, who directed the 2018 documentary Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin; Curry will be at the Tomorrow Theater Sunday for a screening of the full doc and a Q&A.
And what would a biographical exhibition of an author be without a book? A Larger Reality (Winter Texts), puts Le Guin’s poems, stories, essays, talks, and illustrations alongside words by, among others, Harold Bloom, adrienne maree brown, Lola Milholland, and David Naimon.
More things to do this week
COMEDY Susan Rice
7:30PM FRI, OCT 31; 6:15 & 8:30PM SAT, NOV 1 | HELIUM COMEDY CLUB, $33+
Like the best comics, Rice mines her own life for material. Unlike many stand-ups, though, she happens to be in her mid-70s. She has bits about comedy club sets gone sour, and about Portland in the ’80s, when she got her start, but also about the quirks of nursing home audiences, the Red Hat Society, and the perils and joys of aging. In 2024, her bits clicked with an audience she hadn’t yet courted: the internet. Millions have watched her Don’t Tell Comedy special, which pushed her back on the road, bringing a different audience to comedy clubs than you might expect. “Don’t talk down to them,” she told me this spring, referencing the grandparents who come to her shows, “because they’ll eat you for lunch.”
MUSIC Shintaro Sakamoto
8PM SAT, NOV 1 | ALADDIN THEATER, $44
Sakamoto came up playing guitar in the Japanese psych rock band Yura Yura Teikoku before launching his solo career in the 2010s. Alone, his songs are groovy in the sense that, through a hugely eclectic spread of influences and instrumentation, a deeply felt, intuitive groove seems to guide every song he puts out. They loop, double back, and stride into sunny choruses, like a softened Hall and Oates. (Sakamoto has often been compared to Todd Rundgren, and I guess now he’s been compared to Daryl Hall, too). His latest album is Like A Fable, from 2022. “Dear Grandpa,” his latest single, released earlier this month, works itself around a thick, surf-rock guitar and synthetic organ over swinging ’60s drums.
BOOKS Sara Jaffe & Darcie Dennigan
7PM WED, NOV 5 | POWELL’S CITY OF BOOKS, FREE
Portlander Sara Jaffe’s story collection, Hurricane Envy (Rescue Press), distills several pressing conundrums, including queer parenting, post-punk culture, and anti-Zionist Jewish identity—things, as the jacket blurb has it, like how to be a “good white person” and “a legitimate parent.” It follows her 2015 novel, Dryland (see her interview with Portland Monthly). At this event, Jaffe will chat with Darcie Dennigan, a novelist and critic based in Rhode Island whose latest book, Little Neck, was published by Portland’s Fonograf Editions in September. Little Neck is emphatically a graveyard story. In the gripping and urgently naive prose style of writers like Marguerite Duras or perhaps Clarice Lispector, the book follows a young headstone carver in training as she pieces together a complex web of inherited trauma and cyclical abuse. See Dennigan’s recent essay for LitHub on writing in cemeteries.
Elsewhere...
- Susan Orlean on her latest book, Joyride, a memoir of her writing life, Willamette Week to The New Yorker. (Otherppl with Brad Listi)
- “The myth of feminine hysteria didn’t start in a Victorian sanatorium,” Lindsay Costello writes, reviewing an ongoing Louise Bourgeois and Isabelle Albuquerque show at Lumber Room. (Portland Mercury)
