Episode notes
Episode 1: The Bookstores We Lost (and the Ones We're Just Discovering)
Cricket and Iris kick off the Prose City Podcast by wandering back through Portland's bookstore history — starting with the Press Club, the Clinton Street wine bar and magazine haven where they once watched Ursula K. Le Guin read, about a month before the place closed for good. From there the conversation drifts through a cluster of beloved spots that didn't make it: Countermedia, Reading Frenzy, Laughing Horse Books and Film Collective, all gone within a couple years of each other back in the mid-2010s.
Along the way: Iris tracking down a copy of Le Guin's The Dispossessed in a Greek translation, in a bookstore in Athens, of all places. Cricket's stint shelving books at a Borders in Beaverton. A tangent about growing up burnt out on reading after grad school, then finding your way back and into science fiction a decade later. The Independent Publishing Resource Center's zine library, one of the largest in the world. And In Other Words, one of the last feminist bookstores then standing from a wave that once numbered over a hundred across the continent.
They also lay out what Prose City actually is — a two-year-old grassroots literary community built out of their own home in Southeast Portland, plus a newly launched Portland Literary Directory listing dozens of the city's still-standing indie bookstores. No velvet rope here: Cricket and Iris are upfront that this isn't a show for people trying to sound impressive about books, it's for anyone who just genuinely loves reading and writing and wants in on a scene that welcomes them exactly as they are.