The story of Portland is made from everyday conversations
🥳 Our Winter Campaign is officially underway! Learn more and all the ways you can donate here. If you already donated to Street Books this season, thank you! We can only do this work with your support. ❤️
Street Books nurtures our city’s collective imagination by bringing stories and connection to the streets. We want to reimagine a society that respects dignity, justice, and our shared humanity. For our Winter Campaign this year we’re imagining alongside Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: a book that questions what a city is, what it’s for.
Invisible Cities is structured according to eleven themes that capture the many faces of a city. This week we are thinking about the theme of “Cities and Memory” through the incredible work of the Portland City Archives’ oral history project, produced in collaboration with Street Books. We spoke with Outreach Archivist Devin Busby about the project and the forthcoming book and exhibition based on the stories that their team collected over the course of a year working with our Street Librarians and library patrons.
Street Books: How did the oral history project with Street Books and the Portland City Archives come together?
Devin Busby: We started the oral history program at the City Archives back in 2022, wanting to collect stories of the City’s impact on Portlanders’ lives from perspectives outside of those that work for City government. We’d only done a handful of interviews when we first met with Street Books.
We saw the potential to document the history of our community of Portlanders that live outside, which are largely unrepresented in the City Archives despite being present in so many conversations in the city. What is life in Portland like for them, as told in their words? We also wanted to document the history of Street Books as an organization. Oral history just seemed like a natural way to do that as it’s a collecting of conversations, and we could go out to where Street Books was already having library shifts. We went to the Trinity Cathedral Street Books shift once a month for about a year.
SB: How do you collect stories for an oral history project?
DB: We would pop up at library shifts and had a set of questions prepared that people could respond to. They could answer one, they could answer all of them, or they could just talk about something they wanted to discuss. From those prompts, we would record a 15-minute oral history about their memories of life in Portland.
It took a long time for folks to feel comfortable with us. It took us continuing to show up, and the way we presented ourselves also changed as we got to know people. The first day we were there with clipboards and pens, and after a while, we were like, maybe that's not the vibe. It turned into, if you just wanted to chat with us, you could come chat with us. We didn’t have to record anything. It became, “we're here to do the project, but, also, how are you?”
SB: What makes projects like this one important for the city as a whole?
DB: The cool and weird thing about oral history is that it’s really just preserving history one conversation at a time. You might not recognize the significance in the moment. But years down the line, you look back and realize the importance of the story or history. By recording those conversations, they become part of a bigger story and, ultimately, city history.
We are the City Archives. It is often very government-focused, which means the people creating the record have historically been primarily white, hetero, cisgender men, often with a lot of money. So, Portland’s full community voice is not present within the City’s historical record. This oral history project is a way to change that and get community voices into the Archives as well. I would say Street Books, and the people using the organization’s services are an important community that are not often included in the official record. So, it was a good way to include perspectives that is not typically present in a historical collection.
In November, the City Archives is putting up an exhibit highlighting its work with Street Books. We transcribed every oral history that is a part of the project and printed them in a small book so that the histories can be circulated in print form for the Street Books mobile library and at Multnomah County Library. The transcripts will also be featured in the exhibit, and we have a listening station with headphones so that people can browse and listen to the oral history recordings. We will welcome people in and hope that through the exhibit, they will learn more about our Portland community and the diverse experiences we all have as Portlanders.
Check the Portland City Archives website for updates about the book launch and exhibition opening at their downtown space in PSU’s Urban Center at SW 6th Ave and Montgomery. You can browse the oral histories here, and make sure to follow the archives on Instagram at @vintageportland!
This collaboration with Portland City Archives to record oral histories with Street Books library patrons was only possible because of the support of our wonderful community of donors, volunteers, and friends–THANK YOU! If you want to see more projects like this in the future, please consider donating to our Winter Campaign through Give!Guide so we can continue to share stories and make connections out on our streets for years to come.
Street Books is celebrating 15 years of providing books, resources, advocacy and building community on the streets of Portland. If you want to reimagine our city together, we’re asking you to start a monthly, recurring donation or to consider a special gift to honor this milestone. If you are already a monthly sustainer, please consider increasing your gift to help sustain Street Books into the future. We are in Give!Guide this year as part of our Winter Campaign–will you donate today and help us reach our goal?
Don’t forget! All donations in November and December will be matched 1:1 up to $10,000. A $100 gift automatically doubles to $200 in support to help us cultivate mutual relationships rooted in dignity and autonomy by showing up every week, year after year, in all kinds of weather, all around the city, to meet people where they are, literally.