Craig Thompson at the Portland Book Festival
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.
Like many kids who grew up in slow towns in the ’80s, Craig Thompson found an alternate universe in comic books. What’s more, his fundamentalist Christian parents didn’t register the comics’ subversive themes. In Marathon, Wisconsin, one of the largest US producers of ginseng, Thompson, who’s lived in Portland for 20 years, began helping farmers cultivate the medicinal root when he was 10—perfumed by pesticides, a grueling, dirty summer job of manual labor that funded his comic book obsession. He published Blankets in 2003; the illustrated memoir of his childhood marked his break from religion. It was a megahit, a bestseller, and a lasting example of what nonfiction comics can do. Maus creator Art Spiegelman even wrote a fan letter. But the book didn’t have much to say about ginseng.
Thompson retreads that ground in his latest book, Ginseng Roots, which he’s bringing to a panel I’m moderating on nonfiction comics at the Portland Book Festival this Saturday from 11:30am to 12:30pm at Shemanski Park. (See who Portland authors are excited to see at this year’s festival.) Ginseng Roots is a gorgeous, gigantic book—in scope and size—that sees Thompson revisiting his hometown (he and his family get along, despite political and religious divides). The tone is, “Oh yeah, that was strange that we farmed ginseng as kids, wasn’t it?” But American ginseng, a cash crop for local farmers that’s prized by Chinese markets, takes center stage as a story of settler colonialism and blindly capitalistic devastation of natural resources.
Also on the panel are Portland Monthly contributor Shay Mirk and comics artist Eleri Harris, coauthors of Making Nonfiction Comics; recording much of what Mirk and Harris learned editing the comics website the Nib, the book is a guide to the developing field of comics journalism, tracing the ethics, methods, and effects of illustrated reporting.
More things to do this week
MUSIC The Decemberists w/ Oregon Symphony
7:30PM THU & FRI, NOV 6 & 7 | ARLENE SCHNITZER CONCERT HALL, $54+
Oregon Symphony’s Sounds Like Portland festival, which runs for three weeks and has included collaborations with M. Ward, esperanza spalding, and Gabriel Kahane, continues with a pair of dates at the Schnitz backing the city’s favorite literary indie folklorists, the Decemberists. The setlist, or program, draws from the band’s 25-year catalog, including its latest album, from 2024, As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again.
BOOKS Artists in Recovery
8PM FRI, NOV 7 | SHOW BAR, $32
New Yorker writer, poet, and author Hanif Abdurraqib; best-selling memoirist Melissa Febos; former Oregon poet laureate Anis Mojgani; experimental folk musician Lizzie No—the lineup feels exceptionally heavy for a local benefit show, but the addiction recovery organization the Alano Club of Portland has a history of throwing pleasantly understated fundraisers with big-name artists. Its executive director, singer-songwriter Kasey Anderson, often hosts a group of musicians and writers who take turns performing songs, poems, and prose, all the while casually chatting about each other’s work.
VISUAL ART Ralph Pugay
3–5PM SAT, NOV 8; thru DEC 20 | ADAMS AND OLLMAN, FREE
For about a decade, Pugay, who lives in Portland, has shown two related bodies of work side by side: cartoonish, tragicomic paintings and spirited drawings that prize spontaneity. The drawings first showed up as a wall of ruffled newsprint, a loose-edged counterpart to the more composed paintings. Soon they became site-specific installations, framed inside murals painted ad hoc on gallery walls. One such installation centers in ShangriLIEF, Pugay’s second solo show with Adams and Ollman; the title references the ways the fictional utopia Shangri-la has been mutated by exoticized resort branding: a gimmicky marketer’s vision of paradise. But instead of paintings, collages that capture the same fleeting sweetness of the installations—and perhaps the fleeting sweetness of paradise itself—surround it.
Elsewhere...
- Author Jon Raymond’s life of regional literary realism. (OPB)
- Portland is getting a cartoon museum. (Willamette Week)
