Episode 3: Dolly’s Legacy, the Alberta Street Book Row, and the Great Word Loss
Before anything else, Iris and Cricket pay tribute to Dolly Parton — not the queen of country music, but “the book lady” whose Imagination Library now guarantees every Oregon child under five a free book each month. Then they lace up for the first leg of their Portland bookstore tour, wandering Alberta Street Book Row: six walkable stops from a life-size alien guarding a horror shop to a converted-house children’s bookstore to what may genuinely be Portland’s smallest bookshop. Finally, the two dig into a startling 2026 study showing we’re speaking hundreds fewer words every day — with young people losing the most — and connect it to the loneliness epidemic. Antidotes on offer: their own Confluence Cafe discussion groups, a stranger-interviewing night in Southeast Portland, and the Buckman Journal’s Shed launch party on September 12th.
Episode 2: An Interview with Local Author, Editor, and Book Designer — Chrys Buckley!
Cricket sits down with Chrys Buckley, a Portland-based author, editor, and book designer whose debut memoir Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays just won the Wandering Aengus Press Book Award. Before diving into the book itself, Cricket and Iris talk Summer Beam Books — that revelation of a bookstore they stumbled onto on the way back from Yachats. Then the real conversation begins: Chrys talks about her first time at the Willamette Writers Conference and her new book: Invisible Violets: the book’s seven essays are structured as “tracks” (keeping with the mixtape metaphor), and they move between music, relationships, legal blindness, albinism, and navigating complex life experiences — all held together by humor and the lyric essay form. She walks Cricket through a couple of standout essays, including “Distant Lights,” a braided essay with three interlocking timelines that she came up with in the shower, and “Names,” built around given names, screen names, and pen names.
Episode 1: Introducing the Prose City Podcast!
Cricket and Iris kick off the Prose City Podcast by wandering back through Portland’s bookstore history — starting with the Press Club, the Clinton Street wine bar and magazine haven where they once watched Ursula K. Le Guin read, about a month before the place closed for good. From there the conversation drifts through a cluster of beloved spots that didn’t make it: Countermedia, Reading Frenzy, Laughing Horse Books and Film Collective, all gone within a couple years of each other back in the mid-2010s…
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.