“Portland is the kind of place where a schoolteacher can get elected because so many people know her from the classroom.”


How to be good? 


In Portland, Oregon, the question is never altogether abstract. Beyond the performative do-goodery embodied by the satirical sketches of Portlandia, it’s a city with serious conflicts of worldview that sometimes surface an intractable disconnect between a definition of goodness based on law and order, and a more radical ethos of solidarity, acceptance, and neighborliness.


Novelist and critic Lydia Kiesling didn’t think of herself as an activist when she moved to Portland. But something about the city’s size, culture, and environment invite interdependence and a sense of possibility. She found herself inspired by the people around her who were making positive change in their community, and struck by the paradoxes of a city where a history of racist exclusion and extreme inequality coexists with a deep hunger for social justice and a culture of mutual aid and generosity. 


“People move here because of Portland’s culture and the beauty of its surroundings,” Kiesling writes, “and then the culture changes them.” We see, in her clear-eyed valentine to her chosen home, how those iconic keep portland weird bumper stickers elide an ongoing struggle for the soul of a small, beautiful city with an outsized place in the national imagination.


Part of Travel with a Writer, The Walking Tree's global literary travel series pairing acclaimed writers with the cities and places they know intimately. Combining literary essays and fiction, original infographics, curated walks, and beautiful design, each volume is a literary companion to place, designed to be read in a single sitting. Together, the series forms a growing literary atlas of the world.