Portland: Travel with a Writer (Travel with a Writer)

Did Portland teach acclaimed novelist Lydia Kiesling how to be good? 

“Portland is the kind of place where a schoolteacher can get elected because so many people know her from the classroom.”

How to be good?

In Portland, Oregon, the question is never altogether abstract. Beyond the performative do-goodery embodied by the satirical sketches of Portlandia, it’s a city with serious conflicts of worldview that sometimes surface an intractable disconnect between a definition of goodness based on law, order, and soaring economic growth, and a more radical ethos of solidarity, acceptance, and neighborliness.

Novelist and critic Lydia Kiesling didn’t think of herself as an activist when she moved to Portland. But something about the city’s size, culture, and environment invites interdependence and a sense of possibility. She found herself inspired by the people around her who were making positive change in their community, and struck by the paradoxes of a city where a history of racist exclusion and extreme inequality coexists with a deep hunger for social justice, passion for art, and a culture of mutual aid, generosity, and joyful anarchy. 

“People move here because of Portland’s culture and the beauty of its surroundings,” Kiesling writes, “and then the culture changes them.” We see, in her clear-eyed valentine to her chosen home, how those iconic keep portland weird bumper stickers elide an ongoing struggle for the soul of a small, beautiful city with an outsized place in the national imagination.

About TRAVEL WITH A WRITER

Travel with a Writer begins with a simple idea: places become more interesting in the company of someone who knows them well.

The series brings readers together with bestselling, award-winning, and acclaimed writers in places they know intimately. Some will already be familiar to English-language readers. Others are major literary voices in their own countries and regions whom we are delighted to introduce in English.

At a time when information about where to go has never been easier to find, these books offer something harder to access: somebody else’s way of seeing a city. They invite readers to experience it like a local by entering it through the memories, observations, and imagination of a writer who has called it home. Literature has always allowed us to spend time inside another life. Travel with a Writer brings that literary intimacy to place.

We give every writer the same invitation: write a short narrative about a place you have called home, for the would-be traveler. We choose writers whose work we admire and trust their instincts about how best to bring a place to life. What each writer makes of the invitation is entirely their own.

Original writing is accompanied by curated walks, maps, infographics, and cultural recommendations, allowing readers who do travel to follow the writer’s perspective off the page and into the place itself. 

Read a book before a trip, carry it through a city, return to it after coming home, or travel entirely from home.

Author by author, place by place, a global literary atlas takes shape. 

In 2027 and beyond, the series will continue to expand with acclaimed writers taking readers inside cities around the world, with forthcoming and developing titles including Chicago with Rebecca Makkai, Bogota with Santiago Gamboa, Berlin with Norman Ohler, Athens with Amanda Michalopoulou, Lisbon with Gonçalo Tavares, Buenos Aires with Martín Caparrós, Vancouver with Ian Williams, Hanoi with Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, and Taipei with Michelle Kuo.

About THE WALKING TREE

Founded in French in March 2025 as L’arbre qui marche by former journalists and editors Nadia Krovnikoff and François Saugier, The Walking Tree is an independent publishing house devoted to new ways of writing about place. Travel with a Writer has expanded internationally, with editions now available in French, Italian, and Spanish.

Its U.S. and UK publishing program, The Walking Tree, is led by Kristina Kearns, former executive and editorial director of McSweeney’s and operations director of Fitzcarraldo Editions, with Daniel Levin Becker, former literary and features editor of The Believer.