Artist Elizabeth Haidle on Bridging Differences Through Stories and Curiosity
🥳 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. ❤️
artwork by Elizabeth Haidle for Street Books
Street Books has officially kicked off our 2025 Winter Campaign! In keeping with last year’s Pablo Neruda-inspired series, our team selected another literary theme as a way to tell our own story. This year we’re imagining alongside Italo Calvino’s mind-bending novella Invisible Cities: a book that questions what a city is, what it’s for. Sharing stories nurtures a sense of collective imagination, something we believe is a vital part of our vision to build a community where all people belong and are known, where everyone has access to safety and security and the resources to thrive. We want to reimagine a society that respects dignity, justice, and our shared humanity.
To help us bring our vision to life, we teamed up with local illustrator Elizabeth Haidle, who created an imaginative cityscape to go along with our Invisible Cities theme. This creative collaboration was so much fun, we decided to invite Haidle to become an official campaign partner! To celebrate, we asked Haidle to share a bit more about her process and why she chose to work with Street Books.
Street Books: What made you want to work with Street Books for our "Invisible Cities" Winter Campaign?
photo courtesy Elizabeth Haidle
Elizabeth Haidle: I have been living a few blocks from their office and route for the past year, and been wondering how to get involved. I was about to reach out and ask when Martha commissioned me for this project, so that was serendipitous! I was drawn to the humanizing angle of building connections through love of stories and curiosity about ideas—that seems like the perfect place to start to build trust, and extend a helping hand. I find this to be a really compelling approach, bridging differences through spotlighting something that we all have in common.
SB: What was your artistic process like for these illustrations?
EH: A bit haphazard! I was interested to try oil pastels, water soluble graphite powder, and ink....also pan pastels—which kind of stain the page with compacted powder that's feels like illustrating with makeup. I figured I could create an abstract sense of being small in a big city, navigating corners and stairs and bridges, waging that actually not having an expert handle on the materials would help me lean into the shapes, shadows, and scale of the environment in relation to the tiny figure on the bicycle. Some things worked and some things didn't; I made most of it while face timing with a friend from art school who lives in Alabama so that I wouldn't have space in my head to get critical of the process while it was happening. Later, I used collage shapes from cut out textures to get more precise things like stairs and windows. Some things came together digitally, after scanning several pieces and combining.
SB: Is there anything else you're working on or a project coming up that you're excited about?
EH: Well, my mushroom-comics themed postcard booklet just launched with The Pound Project, and there's 3 other stellar artists with postcard booklets too. So excited to combine 3 of my long-term interests within this one booklet—fungi, comics, and analogue correspondence. I was over the moon when The Pound Project reached out to me about getting involved. In order to have them in time for the holidays, sales close on Nov 9, so if this is your thing, hop on it :)
Details at: @_pound_project
Street Books is able to partner with amazing local artists like Elizabeth Haidle thanks to 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. Click here to set up your monthly donation now, and help us reach our goal of 80 new or increased monthly sustainers in 2025! If you are already a monthly sustainer, please consider increasing your gift to help sustain Street Books into the future.
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.