Andrew Proctor will never forget the time he brought Salman Rushdie to visit a high school in Portland, Oregon. “He’s actually really funny,” Proctor says about the famous author who has faced death threats for decades, along with a 2022 assassination attempt that left him partially blind after multiple stab wounds. “Because these really serious things have happened to him, people assume he’s going to be a very serious person. But he came into this room and totally disarmed them.”
The new Literary Arts headquarters includes office space, public meeting rooms, a bookstore, and a café. (Credit: Courtesy of Literary Arts)
Rushdie appeared at the school on behalf of Literary Arts, the organization for which Proctor is executive director. The day was a remarkable success: Rushdie was by turns thoughtful, insightful, and hilarious. “Humanizing writers is super important to bringing people who have not already been included into the literary world,” Proctor says—and nothing does that quite like humor.
The Writers in the Schools program is just one of many that make Literary Arts a beloved contributor to Portland’s cultural scene. After surviving a remarkably challenging period beginning in 2020, the organization now stands out as a rare, thriving institution in a bleak landscape for arts funding: Having weathered COVID-19 restrictions, months of unrest during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, and a life-threatening medical diagnosis for Proctor, it has managed to return to a remarkable trajectory of growth and success.
Literary Arts began in 1984 as the speaking series Portland Arts & Lectures, merging in 1993 with the Oregon Institute for Literary Arts. During the mid-2010s, it took over local book festival Wordstock, which became the Portland Book Festival, in 2018. Today the now-sprawling organization oversees that book festival, a smash-hit lecture series, the annual Oregon Book Awards and related fellowships, creative writing programs serving four thousand students annually, and the Archive Project podcast, which is recording it all for posterity.
But things weren’t always going so swimmingly. First, the COVID lockdown threw the organization’s 2020 programming and finances into disarray, sending senior artistic director Amanda Bullock scrambling for solutions. At the same time, protesters flooded Portland in response to the murder of George Floyd. Powerful peaceful demonstrations soon “metastasized into something very different,” Proctor says, with downtown carpeted in broken glass, nightly reports of escalating police brutality, and structures set aflame near what was then the organization’s office.
And then Proctor was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer, leading to two years of punishing chemo, radiation, and surgeries. Often onstage to introduce or interview authors and called upon to talk with donors, “I had to learn how to be sick publicly,” he remembers.
Still, he and his organization pushed through. Bullock sent authors such as Colson Whitehead audio kits and taught them how to use then-nascent Zoom technology, turning a previously live festival into a nearly three-week virtual extravaganza. Teachers figured out how to navigate creative writing classes in newly virtual schools. Proctor was able to scrape together money to create an emergency fund for local writers in need. And Literary Arts received an unexpected $3 million gift from a former board member who died of cancer, earmarked for a transformative capital project. A longtime dream—a permanent home for the organization’s staff and programming—suddenly seemed in reach.
Determined that its good fortune would benefit the larger community, Literary Arts bought a historic building in a struggling neighborhood in the heart of Portland in 2022. The new headquarters includes office space, public meeting rooms already home to several book clubs, a bookstore, and a café. Its opening dovetailed nicely with the fortieth anniversary of Portland Arts & Lectures last year—featuring the likes of Timothy Egan, Amy Tan, Abraham Verghese, and Javier Zamora—as well as another big win: Earlier this year the organization announced that its wildly successful capital campaign had raised more than $22 million, enough to hire several new staff and establish a $4 million endowment. And recently Proctor was declared free of cancer.
Andrew Proctor, the executive director of Literary Arts since 2009, oversaw a successful capital campaign that raised more than $22 million. Credit: Andie Petkus Photography)
The capital campaign also included funding for Literary Arts’ next big project: converting beloved Portland author Ursula K. Le Guin’s home into a writers residency. Le Guin had a long-standing relationship with the organization; she even interviewed Proctor for his position. “If any organization is going to get what we’re trying to do here, it’s going to be Literary Arts,” says Theo Downes-Le Guin, the late author’s son and literary executor, of plans to develop the home into a retreat. Residencies at the house will be flexible in length and genre and favor writers from the American West who have been historically excluded from similar opportunities, he says. That might include women and people of color without MFAs and of limited financial means—a corrective for the rejection and discrimination Le Guin experienced in her own lifetime.
Le Guin’s husband’s death in January 2025 began a two-year conversion process, during which the home will gain a ramp and several other accessibility elements, and the family will sort through what of their possessions will remain. (Going: Le Guin’s collection of her own works, one of every edition in every language. Staying: dishes, art, and other cherished books.) At the end, residents will be able to work in the writing room where Le Guin wrote many of her most beloved titles and enjoy the views of Mount Saint Helens she loved to sketch.
“It’s hard to overestimate how important a beacon Literary Arts is in this community,” Downes-Le Guin says. That track record of anticipating community needs and showing up in important ways has proved especially essential in an arts funding context rocked by Trump administration cuts.
“Outside the literary world, individual donors are art’s major source of revenue,” Proctor says, pointing to institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art as examples. More than half the gifts to the Literary Arts capital campaign were individual donations under $1,000, with an average amount of $245. While foundations can still play an important role, he advises other literary organizations to reconsider what individual donors might do for them.
He and Bullock also see the unique programmatic structure of Literary Arts as contributing to its success. The national landscape is full of smaller literary organizations that focus on single issues in similar ways, but bringing it all under one roof makes a difference. “Our programs work together; they’re all complementary and mutually reinforcing,” Bullock says. An author speaking at Arts & Lectures might also visit local high schoolers and meet with Oregon Book Awards finalists. Students learning from those classroom visits get tickets to the Portland Book Festival, where one day they might also read.
This organic, intergenerational, reciprocal connection creates important points of transition and bridge-building among age groups and demographics. In an era of dangerously simplistic narratives, the complexity and nuance that literature promotes is essential, Proctor says—and only a larger literary organization has the power to infuse its community with those values. “We need literature to have a seat at the table in our civic lives.”
Alissa Greenberg is an independent journalist based in Boston and Berkeley, California, who reports at the intersection of science, history, and culture. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and elsewhere.
