Required Reading

BEVERLY CLEARY’S Ramona Quimby takes her last name
from a street in Northwest Portland. Fight Club author Chuck
Palahniuk might very well be the mild-looking dude sitting behind you
at the coffee shop, sipping tea as he mulls over the autoerotic
potential of household appliances. It’d be impossible to list all of
the novelists, poets, zinesters, and self-publishing publishers who
call Portland home, but here’s a crib sheet of five names to drop as
you’re trying to impress your dormmates with your soulful appreciation
of regional literature.

BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS—Portland is swarming with comic
creators, from indie authors that dominate the annual Stumptown Comics
Fest, to big-name artists and writers of some of the most popular
titles around. Big case in point: Brian Michael Bendis, essentially the
most significant creative force in the Marvel universe. If you’re not
quite ready to dive into Ultimate Spider-Man, consider some of
his darker, more adult work—women, in particular, should check
out Alias, about a superhero who trades in her tights to start a
new life as a hard-drinking private investigator.

KATHERINE DUNN—This one’s a gimme, since if you’re true
to type as the sort of slightly alienated liberal who gravitates toward
Portland, odds are good that Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love is
already one of your favorite books. Dunn went to Reed College, and her
account of a traveling family of circus freaks is one of the most
beloved books ever written by a Portland author.

CHARLES D’AMBROSIO—Fiction writer and essayist Charles
D’Ambrosio turned in one of the weirdest and best short story
collections in recent memory with The Dead Fish Museum, eight
stories that evoke Pacific Northwest author Raymond Carver—if
Carver had been into amphetamines instead of booze.

KEN KESEY—Okay, so he’s not exactly local—Kesey lived in Pleasant Hill, in Southern Oregon. He’s also
dead. But neither of these factors undercut the relevance of Kesey’s
work; his brilliant Sometimes a Great Notion, which describes a
logging family’s struggles with a local union, is criminally under-read
by Oregonians.

JON RAYMOND—Aspiring writers, take note: All the
insights you think you have about the nature of this city—the
peculiar dynamics of male friendships, the conflicted attitudes about
race, the uneasy class distinctions—have already been
unassumingly unpacked in Jon Raymond’s short story collection
Livability. Extra credit for watching the movies: Recent films
Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy are both based on short
stories from Raymond’s collection, which is as good an introduction to
contemporary Portland as you’re going to find.