Notebook: Alt Writing I

Finding writers, placing writing, on street-corners and in hidden byways

“A Brief History of Willamette Week’s Cover Logo From the People Who Helped Shape It: Cursive, serif and leaning into the future” (I do like the first!)

Susan Orlean, in her recent memoir Joyride (out in paperback in October), wrote that the stories she covered as an absolute beginner at Portland, Oregon’s Willamette Weekly “just dawned on me. They were everywhere I looked. Portland felt so ripe. I was always being surprised by something I came across, so I took note of the surprise, and it would roll around in my head until it started to nag gently at me, demanding to be explored and then written. Often I drove around and looked, and I almost always found something that warranted further looking.” Willamette Weekly was a so-called “alt weekly,” a member of the tribe of papers that flourished between the seventies and the teens, usually passed out for free at train stations, on street corners, in coffee shops, underwritten by local and classified advertising. Journalist Jeff Sharlet, in an essay last summer about his stint in his twenties at the San Diego Reader, wrote that alt weeklies “helped shape a way of thinking about cities: messy, thrilling, sad, funny, queer, glorious, pompous, comically crooked and endlessly fascinating.” Alt weeklies thrived in areas dense with small businesses and readers looking for each other. Early publisher Rob McCamant said of the Chicago Reader, founded in 1971 and inspiration for the San Diego Reader and a host of others, “I think what happened in a number of cities at the same time was that the intellectual and cultural and social life developed in the center city that caused the revitalization of the cities, which were otherwise being sucked dry by the suburbs.” “It’s a picture of how this generation realized that cities were cool places to live,” he wrote. “In Chicago we were people of a certain age who wanted to come downtown, to come into the city, to go to clubs and bars, restaurants and tiny art galleries, and things like that. We were the mechanism by which they discovered that these things existed.”