Prose City Podcast

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Iris and Cricket recorded this one smack in the middle of Banned Books Week, so they start there, then bring it home to the festivals, readings, and launches filling the city as literary season begins.

Cricket explains how Banned Books Week began in 1982 through the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, and the difference between a challenge and a ban. The ALA tracked 4,235 unique challenged titles in the 2025 to 2026 reporting period, and most challenges came from organized pressure groups rather than individual parents. Cricket shares why the year's most challenged book, Sold by Patricia McCormick, hits close to home after her years working in sexual assault and domestic violence services. For a lighter listen, they recommend the audiobook of Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books by Kristen Miller, a funny, cozy, satirical read you can borrow through the Multnomah County Library app.

Next, two events to put on your calendar. The Portland Book Festival runs November 2 to 8 and is now a multi-day, multi-venue event with more than 100 authors, plus music, art, and food. Iris shares its history, from Larry Colton founding Wordstock in 2005 to Literary Arts reviving it in 2015. The free, masked Portland Zine Symposium takes over the PSU Smith Memorial Student Union October 17 and 18, and Cricket explains why zine culture is so welcoming and fast-moving.

Then a roundup of what they've been up to:

• The Portland Poetry Confluence, where they heard a long-form reading of Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead, plus a zine turned into a toss-and-read poetry globe from the Chautauqua Poetry Gathering
• The Endless Wonders Book Fest near Hawthorne, followed by the inevitable stop at Powell's and the Fresh Pot
• The release party for the Buckman Journal's 16th issue, Shed, at the PALS building, where Up Up Books celebrated its grand reopening and Cat Scratch Bakery kept everyone fed

They also look ahead to November with a conversation about NaNoWriMo's closure, the grassroots volunteer-run successor, and NaPoWriMo in April.

Know about an event we missed? Write to us at [email protected], and we'll share it on the website, the newsletter, or the next episode. Links to everything mentioned are in the show notes at prosecity.org. If you like the show, share it with a friend.

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Dolly Parton's passing leaves a giant hole in the world — but before anything else, Iris and Cricket pay tribute to the legacy she said she wanted to be remembered for: not the queen of country music, but the book lady. They dig into the Imagination Library, which started in 1995 in her Tennessee home county as a tribute to her father who couldn't read, mailing one free book a month to children from birth to age five — and which, thanks to Governor Tina Kotek's 2024 statewide expansion and 2026 legislation, now reaches every Oregon child under five in all 36 counties. Cricket remembers the mail-order Pickle Things days of the Parents Magazine Press Read Aloud Originals, Iris gives a shout-out to Mrs. Munson at their hometown library and the Multnomah County Library, and both agree: being read to as a kid is part of why they're here.

Then: the first leg of the Prose City Portland bookstore tour, on the stretch of NE Alberta Street known as Alberta Street Book Row. Highlights include Green Bean Books (children's, in a converted house), Midslumber Media (queer, woman-owned horror, guarded by a life-size alien), Parallel Worlds Bookshop (small, tightly packed speculative fiction heaven — Klune, Anders, Le Guin), Monograph Bookwerks (art monographs and rarities, just steps off the row), Vivienne Culinary Books (cookbooks, vintage cookware, cooking classes — like visiting the home of a talented friend), and Melville Books (self-proclaimed Portland's smallest bookstore, easy to miss, impossible to forget). Plus Botanica La Sirena, stellar coffee, and more in the newsletter.

The big topic: a July 2026 study in Perspectives on Psychological Science found that between 2005 and 2019, we spoke an average of 338 fewer words per day each year — 28% fewer, or more than 120,000 words per year — with participants under 25 losing about 44% more than those over 25. Iris and Cricket connect the dots to the loneliness epidemic, screen time, and headphone-induced solitude, and share their own antidotes: Confluence Cafe, their monthly curated discussion groups, and the quarterly Undercurrent Salon. Want to join or start your own? Email [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]).

Iris also recounts a moving Friday night at Interviewing the Audience with Leif Olsen of the Life Recording Company — four strangers, twenty-minute live interviews, and a potent reminder of what happens when we're in a room together.

And save the date: the Buckman Journal celebrates the launch of issue ***Shed*** on September 12, 3–7 p.m. at the PALS building — free, ADA accessible, complete with cake, crafts, a gallery, literary tarot, and the return of Up Up Books to brick and mortar. Iris and Cricket will be there — come say hey.

Links in the show notes on our website: the study and coverage, the Imagination Library, all the Book Row shops, Interviewing the Audience, Willamette Writers, Literary Arts, and more. Sign up for our newsletter at prosecity.org.

Keep the conversations going out there. Keep reading. We'll talk to you in about two weeks.

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Cricket sits down with Chrys Buckley, a Portland-based author, editor, and book designer whose debut memoir Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays just won the Wandering Aengus Press Book Award. Before diving into the book itself, they talk Summer Beam Books — that revelation of a bookstore Iris and Cricket stumbled onto on the way back from Yachats, where the shelves are so thoughtfully stocked with everything from foraging guides to watercolor instruction books to woodworking volumes that Iris jokes you could build an entire town and thrive on nothing but what's in there. (Iris and Cricket even walked out with the same herbal tea recipe book, which felt like serendipity.)

Then the real conversation begins: Chrys talks about her first time at the Willamette Writers Conference and how she picked sessions that mattered to her — a "Funding Your Muse" workshop on grants and fellowships, screenwriting tracks (she's returning to that form), and the people she wanted to support by showing up. She also introduces the term "intuitive plotter," which stuck with her as a way to describe her own process.

On Invisible Violets itself: the book's seven essays are structured as "tracks" (keeping with the mixtape metaphor), and they move between music, relationships, legal blindness, albinism, and navigating complex life experiences — all held together by humor and the lyric essay form, which Chrys first fell in love with in an undergrad nonfiction class at Portland State. She walks Cricket through a couple of standout essays, including "Distant Lights," a braided essay with three interlocking timelines that she came up with in the shower, and "Names," built around given names, screen names, and pen names. The hardest piece to write was "Reasonable Doubt," which required an entire independent study with Professor Susan Reese just to pare down and shape.

Chrys also talks about synesthesia — she sees words and letters as colors while writing, which makes her a "painterly writer," though she always prioritizes precision over visual beauty. And on writing about her own vision: legal blindness for her isn't total blindness, but less detail and resolution. The best way to convey it is through specific, relatable scenarios — walking down a street, looking at the ocean — so readers can picture what she can and can't see.

One big thing: Invisible Violets is currently print-only, which means her disability community can't yet access it. But all three accessible formats — e-book, large print, and audiobook — release together on October 13th (Meet the Blind Month). Chrys is narrating the audiobook herself, because she hears her own voice while writing and revising, and memoir readers want the author's voice anyway.

Looking ahead: she's doing a book conversation with A. Malotkov at Annie Bloom's Books on October 27th, followed by a group reading at Orcas Island Library with other Wandering Aengus authors. She's also working on a second book — expanding those four linked essays that got cut from Invisible Violets into something much more linear, and she's in the early stages of building a live show for the memoir, complete with a B-side essay she's been performing at storytelling events. Her big 2027 goal is a mini tour. Plus she's got two screenplays sitting at about 85% done, waiting to be dusted off.

And Chrys is currently enrolled in a stand-up comedy class with a friend, discovering that she's a storyteller who's sometimes funny — not a comedian — which has its own set of challenges.

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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.