Portland creators are getting in on the boom.
By
Julia Silverman
12/13/2020 at 5:00am
Published in the December 2020 issue of
Portland Monthly
An hour before the panel of authors was set to take the stage, the line at the 2019 Portland Book Festival event was already at least 1,000 hard-core, book-clutching fans deep, most of them craning their necks and standing on tiptoe, trying to game out whether they were close enough to the front of the line to snag a spot inside the 376-seat Whitsell Auditorium in the Portland Art Museumâs basement.
Clearly, festival organizers had underestimated the intense enthusiasm for the featured authorsânot pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell or former United Nations ambassador Susan Rice, who were the festivalâs nominal headlinersâbut instead a group of middle-grade graphic novelists, among them one of the formatâs biggest rock stars, Bay Area author-illustrator Raina Telgemeier, whose 2010 debut memoir,