Episode 4: Banned Books Week, the Portland Book Festival, and a Fall Full of Literary Goodness
Episode 3: Dolly’s Legacy, the Alberta Street Book Row, and the Great Word Loss
Episode 2: An Interview with Local Author, Editor, and Book Designer — Chrys Buckley!
Episode 1: Introducing the Prose City Podcast!
Come talk books with Cricket & Iris
The Prose City Podcast is a laid-back conversation about Portland’s literary life: the people who write books, publish them, sell them, design them, and gather around them. If you’re part of that world and have something you’re excited about, we’d love to hear from you.
The Prose City Podcast is an independent look at Portland, Oregon’s literary scene — its bookshops, presses, writers, and the people building literary community across the city — produced by Prose City.
Every episode starts with Cricket and Iris riffing briefly on whatever is on their minds that week, before getting into the real stuff: a bookstore visit, a recap of a literary event they went to, an interview with an author on tour or a bookshop owner who’s been keeping the lights on for twenty years. You’ll get unfiltered takes on Portland’s literary world by two people who have called this city home for more than 25 years. Some episodes are one deep-dive interview. Others are short segments stitched together. There’s no formula yet, and that’s kind of the point.
This show isn’t for people trying to sound impressive about books, and the hosts have no interest in being influencers. This is for the zine-maker, the MFA student halfway through their program, the person who just finished a novel and has nobody to talk to about it at 1am, and the poet waiting to hear back on whether their latest offering has been accepted by their dream journal. You won’t hear a lot of hand-wringing about who belongs in “real” literature. The Prose City Podcast and community are for everyone, whether you’re a “serious writer,” passionate book collector, or lover of the written word.
Portland’s own Ursula K. Le Guin once argued that books aren’t commodities to be sold like deodorant — that what writers are really owed isn’t profit, it’s freedom.* That’s more or less the compass this show runs on.
The Prose City Podcast grew out of Prose City, a small grassroots literary community that still hosts conversation salons, a memoir-writing group, and other intimate gatherings around Portland. New episodes roughly every two weeks.
*Ursula K. Le Guin — National Book Foundation Medal: Ursula’s Acceptance Speech. (November 19, 2014). Ursula K. Le Guin. Retrieved July 28, 2026.