Allan read a story about the time he went vibrator shopping at Target. Gwen rehearsed a slam poem, “Why I’m Not a Mechanic Anymore,” in which a mechanic twists “transmission fluid” into an anti-trans joke. Taking the podium, Erin confessed to never having done this before. Grace read an assignment from an Octavia Butler–themed writing class. May simply said, “This is something I wrote for myself.” Mike read a campfire parable—“or, the first page of it.”

It was the first Wednesday of December and the last One-Page Wednesday of 2025. Hosted by Portland novelist Emme Lund (The Boy with a Bird in His Chest) at the Literary Arts bookstore, the free monthly event is an open mic that functions more like a public writers’ group. Students, aspiring writers, and National Book Award–winning authors hang out and read aloud one page from a work in progress. Sometimes the big names are the night’s featured reader—Erica Berry, Omar El Akkad, Karen Russell—and sometimes they just show up and throw their name into the bowl, hoping to be one of a dozen or so readers. Others in the audience of 20 or 30 just come for the show.

Lund helped relaunch One-Page in person in 2022 after lockdown and soon became its host and public face. She liked the vulnerability it encouraged, and how watching accomplished writers share rough-hewn works pulled back the curtain for newcomers. (At Portland State University, Lund requires her students attend a live reading.) Her presence has an effect, too. She kicks off each gathering by reading a page of her own unfinished prose—lately, bits of her next novel. “We look for permission from others,” she says. “I hope that when people get up there and read, they feel like they’ve been given permission to write more.”

When Lund drew her name in December, Alana Storm took the stage with confident familiarity. “I read the first third of this two months ago,” she told the audience, adding, after a bullet-point synopsis: “That’s all you need to know.” After the event, Storm told me she was intimidated when she started coming a year and a half ago. She writes stories and poems often and is a regular at local reading series, but she isn’t pursuing a career as a writer, and she wondered how she would fit in. Easily, it turned out. “People just come up and say, ‘Oh, hey, I really liked your thing,’” she says. “Or you say to them, ‘I really liked your thing.’” Soon enough, she stopped wondering, “Why am I telling you these horrible details of me and my worst moments?”

There are no memberships or threads connecting one meeting to the next, but coming back has its rewards. To those who didn’t already know him, Jim W. introduced himself as a former math teacher before explaining that he wasn’t violating the rules, he was merely going to read “two half-pages” from his new chapbook. Lund smiled from the crowd and said she remembered Jim reading some of the poems at past gatherings. “There’s very little math,” he promised.

Like Jim W., the night’s featured reader had been here before. Poet RJ Equality Ingram shared works in progress at One-Page Wednesdays over the past 18 months or so while assembling their forthcoming collection. On theme with the book, which matches its poems to tarot cards, Ingram, in a witchy felted hat, made an altar next to the podium. A dollhouse Betsey Johnson bag and crystal ball sat by Leonora Carrington’s Major Arcana and several other tarot decks. Asking audience members to draw cards, they then read the corresponding poems. All were sassy and loaded with double and triple entendre.

“I really like the idea of convening once a month, sharing what you’ve got,” Ingram told me after. “It’s kind of like checking in on the family.”