I've often said to folks, listen, if you want to 'experience' Portland, I mean really experience it through the eyes of one of it's most willful daughters, read Monica Drake's works.
In both works The Stud Book and the Folly of Loving Life, you'll read the ending and close the back cover feeling as though you were born and raised in this complicated city. And, it is so important to tell the story of this--complicated city.
It is important because it is changing, some may say it is even dying.
Though many hold out hope for it's assuming an ultimate healed and recovered form, the phase we are in now is attrition. There is a grieving or a nostalgia as we face an uncertain future.
The last time I'd felt like I'd stepped into the skin of a character and really lived their verisimilitudes in experiencing a city, you could almost smell the air...that was Renata Adler's Pitch Black and Speedboat. The city was New York.
For me, the arrival of 'Come Closer' was at a cross roads in my life. I'd just come back from doing street outreach for my agency, a Portland homeless advocacy. In addition I'd looked at the electrical in our Chinatown warehouse, and passed the Annual Rose Festival on the way home. It was cross section take on post apocalyptic Portland the year 2023 where everything has changed.
In 'Come Closer' Monica transported me back to Mayor Vera Katz Portland. I'm back there, right back in that tumultuous time in my life, now remembering what I'd forgotten. Weaving back and forth into and out of the reader and the character. It was another successful teleportation.
To bring life to the City of Roses in the mind of a reader is no easy feat. Though much smaller, you may as well attempt to do the same with New York. Many try, few succeed.
I think I'll carry these memories with me into the future, a future so elusive to prediction.