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 back in 2022, and we'd really only done a handful of that at that point.
(We decided) to document the history of Street Books, and the people that used their services. Oral history just seemed like a natural way to do that. We've been going to Trinity (Cathedral, at regular 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 have a set of questions people could respond to. They could do one, they could do all of them, or they could just talk about something they wanted to talk about. Then, we'd record about a 15-minute oral history about their memories of life in Portland.
It took a long time to get people comfortable with seeing us there. And I think the way we presented ourselves also changed, you know. The first day we were there with clipboards and pens, and (after a while) you're like, maybe that's not the vibe. If you just wanted to come chat with us, you could just come chat with us. We didn’t have to record anything... (it was like) “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 is preserving what was just a conversation at the time. (But) sometimes, years down the line, you look back and you're like, ‘that's an important story.’ If you record them, they (can) become part of the bigger story.
We are a city archive. It is often very government-focused, which means the people creating the record (have been), for a long time, exclusively white rich men. The full community voice is not as present in our collection. And so this oral history project is kind of a way to change that, and get community voices into the archives as well. I would say Street Books and the people using these services are an important community that don't often get heard from in an official record. Or just in general. So it was a good way to get at that perspective that we don't often get to see in a historical collection.
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.