Portland's Newest Reading Series: Literary Mixtape

Too bad I’m not an actual journalist, or I would have caught wind of this in time to plug their inaugural reading this past Thursday at Valentines, but in case you missed it too I wanted to pass along some info on Portland’s newest reading series.

Literary Mixtape hopes to chart a new course when it comes to your standard reading, as instead of participants getting up and reading from their own work they will be asked to read “other people’s literature of whatever stripe (poem, fiction, essay) that they’re genuinely, personally excited about, and that they think other people would be excited about.”  I like this concept as it immediately opens up the field of potential readers to people that aren’t necessarily writers, and that in turn should allow for a broader audience.  The series is organized by Matthew Korfhage and Erik Bader, who were interviewed last week by The Mercury’s Alison Hallett (an actual journalist, and a darn good one at that…):

Why does Portland want/need another reading series? What do you hope to add to the local literary culture with this?

Well, we’re not worried about somehow having too much literature floating around. If you could pop into a random bar or cafe and hear good lit the same way you can always go see a band or watch a movie, we wouldn’t see the downside. It’s true, though, that good writers are rarer even than good drummers (who are also rare), so aside from excellent series like Loggernaut or Mountain Writers, people’s whole notion of local reading series has been hurt by a lot of Plath-damaged slam poets or self-serious fidgeters. And then people start wondering things like: is this all necessary? Still, we’re not concerned about demand so much—despite what you hear on the news, people are always hungry for literature, art, and other good things—just about what we can bring to an audience. This is all for love, not money, so we want everybody to be having a good time, us included.

That said, Literary Mixtape is a much different deal from a regular author reading. We’re pretty much asking people to DJ books. (We avoid the term BJ for this.) People don’t normally do that, that we’re aware of.

We’re tapping the city’s taste, not its writing talent, so it’s pretty much limitless. People love to share the stuff they love, and that kind of enthusiasm is contagious. Could be Gargantua and Pantagruel, could be Icelandic fables, could be the dirty bits in Samuel Delaney’s science fiction, should hopefully be amazing stuff we’ve never heard of at all. For the first event one of the things Matthew will read is a really wild, really beautiful passage from a much-maligned book by Harold Brodkey, about what it’s like to physically become one’s own sister. Maybe somebody else thinks Larry McMurtry is underappreciated, who knows? (We sort of think he’s underappreciated.)

In general, though, we’re trying to invite people whom other people might want to hear from, people who are publicly or privately interesting. Mixtape-making was always sort of a romance, as it goes, so it matters who sends you one.

The plan is to hold Literary Mixtape readings “more than quarterly, less than monthly,” and you can keep an eye on their website for announcements.  I will make sure they are included in our event coverage as well.

Image credit Daily Miltonian.