I was invited by a friend to go to an author reading last night at the
Portland City Club. There were 15 authors on the reading list, and I confess that I attended with some degree of trepidation, vaguely recognizing a few of the names on the author list.
My trepidation grew worse when I arrived 10 minutes early for the event, poked my head in the window, and discovered that the place was empty except for a woman setting up a microphone with one of those giant puffy heads from the 70's and a crate for the readers. There were no chairs.
Fortunately, Powell's was a few blocks away. I took a peek at the new fiction, the typical chick lit and tragic relationship stories, all set in different eras to somehow make them more enticing, and came back to the City Club lamenting the state of modern literature and wondering if
V.S. Naipaul was indeed right about the novel being dead.And then the reading blew me away.
First of all, the organizers of the event had a very smart format, where they gave the readers only 3 minutes to read. The authors, being authors, all went over by a few minutes, meaning that the 5 minute snippets were all the perfect length--I even enjoyed the poetry. The organizers arranged it so that 5 readers would read and then we would take a 30 minute break. There was also a bar, which happened to be selling my
favorite winter beer at a cheap $2.
The best part of the event, though, for me, was the almost total lack of an audience. I am sure the authors who were there will disagree, but I had access to these authors whose snippets I had just heard and enjoyed for over an hour and a half during break times, and I was enjoying my favorite beer, and I was with my friend Peg who is less shy then I, and I had a great time hob-nobbing with some very eccentric writers without having to worry about some signing line that was a mile long.
I met
David Oateswho wrote
City Limits, a set of essays about his walk around Portland's Urban Growth Boundary. While walking, he invited several political figures to come along with him to discuss the plusses and minuses of the boundary, and the book is the result of the conversations he had.
David speaks with a fire in his eye, and has an obvious passion for his subject, and I have to admit I wasn't entirely sure whether he was serious or not when he told me he invited dead people along with him on his walk. (In the book, he imagines himself walking with John Muir and Italo Calvino, and what they would have to say about Portland's Urban Growth Boundary if they were alive today.) David is a great speaker, so I was surprised when he told me that Powell's wouldn't give him a reading at their store. Damn you Powell's, give us something meaty.
I also spoke with
Monica Drake, whose novel
Clowngirl is coming out about the same time as mine through
Hawthorne Books. Monica was in the same writing group that produced Chuck Palahniuk of Fight Club fame. In the introduction to the book, Chuck talks about how Monica was the star of the writing group, not him. It's funny how fickle fame is. Her book sounds fantastic--it's about a girl who takes jobs as a clown to pay the bills. The snippet she read had me laughing inappropriately loud, which is what I do when someone reads something uncomfortable funny: in this case about how the only books she could find about how to be a clown were written by Christians, and so at her first gig she made Jesus and Mary figures out of balloons.
I also picked up
Peter Rock's book The Bewildered, published through one of my favorite publishers, MacAdam Cage, and edited by Kate Nitze, who I adore. The book is set in Portland, and the prose Peter read in his snippet set me right on the Eastside of the Waterfront in a heavy mist, underneath the tangled freeway above. It's so lovely to read a book about a place you know...
All of this set me to thinking about the publishing world. All these folks are struggling authors, and all of them are talented enough that if they lived in New York, they'd be big names. But we live in Portland, and our books are published by MacAdam/Cage and Hawthorne Books. And the books are lovingly edited and beautifully presented. But not that many people read them or know about them.
At the City Club last night, talking to all these eccentric, yet egoless folks, I can't say for sure that this is a bad thing. I feel like someone with a wonderful secret.
Maybe it's best to be totally ignored...
Labels: Book Lovers, Portlandia
