Sara Ryan

Ten years ago, I was part of a group planning an event that I couldn’t believe was going to happen until it did: Susan Cooper’s 2001 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture at the Scottish Rite Center here in Portland. It seemed impossible that the person who’d written my beloved, frequently-reread The Dark Is Rising sequence [...]

The other night I went to hear David Levithan read from The Lover’s Dictionary at Annie Bloom’s Books. The Lover’s Dictionary is, as you may know, a novel in the form of dictionary definitions. It was an excellent reading from a concise and elegant book. The book is especially well-suited to readings, since each entry [...]

Sometimes when friends return borrowed books, I feel compelled to reread them right away, to welcome them home. Tove Jansson’s Fair Play came back recently. It was an especially fast reread because it’s so short and clear, not a wasted word, a credit both to her and to translator Thomas Teal. Fair Play is connected [...]

This is the sort of thing that people have Tumblrs for now, I know. Just pretend this is a Tumblr post, okay? Because I find this sentence from the introduction to the Paris Review’s Art of Fiction interview with James Thurber so delightful I am compelled to share: “Opening the interview with a long history [...]

Have you read Jenny Davidson’s The Explosionist and Invisible Things? If you haven’t, I suggest you go do that and then come back because portions of this interview contain OMG SPOILERS!!! Here, let me make it easy: If you need more persuasion, let me tell you that the books take place in a world where [...]

Reading the cold-medicine dream that is The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich, I have to slow down my usual reading speed to absorb it all — teenage slutty hobo junkie vampires marauding their way through a dripping mouldering Pacific Northwest landscape, in feral supermarkets and 7-Elevens, subterranean squats and filthy punk clubs, treacherous woods [...]

“If you’re the kind of person who likes that sort of thing, it’s the sort of thing you’d like.” Though I’m a fan of clever Venn diagrams, I could not in good conscience wear the shirt with the above design. I’m not a music geek. I’m relatively musically adventurous, but I tend not to actively [...]

If you’ve ever doubted that books change lives, I suggest you attend a Tamora Pierce event. I took this inadequate photo at eleven o’clock last night (and futzed with it slightly in Flickr’s Piknik mode). At that point, these fans had been waiting about three hours to have their books signed — and more importantly, [...]

I’ve turned in my revisions to the Bad Houses script. This may or may not be the last round of changes. I’m waiting to hear. I’m waiting as I write for Tamora Pierce’s flight to arrive. I always like to be early; knowing that I’m where I’m supposed to be. (Portlanders, do you have tickets [...]

I wasn’t surprised that there were a lot of people, but I was surprised that I knew so few of them; further evidence that Portland’s nerd community is multifaceted. We were mostly quiet while he read. Not, I would attest, because we weren’t appreciating the humor and nuance of the language, but because we wanted [...]