From two ground floor rooms at Catholic Charities’ St. Francis Park Apartments, a small organization uses literature to humanize life on the streets.
Street Books, founded in 2011, sends three small bicycle-driven libraries around Portland’s Old Town, offering books and conversation to people who are homeless. Back at St. Francis, residents of the apartments can come down to the office to borrow and chat about a good plot. If disabled, they can have a few novels delivered right to their rooms.
One unidentified citizen was about to cross Burnside Street and saw the book-laden bicycle rolling past. The woman hollered, “Hallelujah for Street Books!”
Street Books board member, the fiction writer Karen Russell, drapes an arm around the organization’s founder, Laura Moulton. Another board member, Pati Moran, joyfully gestures in the background.
In this outfit, talking about literature – and anything else that comes up — is as important as the books themselves.
“Books are common ground everywhere it seems,” says Kerry Robison, one of the street librarians. She knows personally what it’s like to be a homeless book lover.
Robison and husband Tim came to Portland in 2009 and found it was hard to land a job that would pay the rent. They ended up living in a tent.
Robison recalls the thrill of seeing the Street Books bike for the first time.
“I had some bad times when I was younger,” she says. “Especially when I was a young woman trying to raise kids, my only solace sometimes was a book. . . . It’s something that engages your whole self, your whole mind.”
A selection is set out next to the Street Books bicycle library.
Robison became an avid patron and then was hired. Charlie, her Pomeranian, goes along on library runs.
Crediting Street Books for giving her something to do, Robison says she’s been clean and sober for more than two years. She puts herself “in the line of fire” when taking the book bike under bridges and to camps where people may be drinking and using drugs, but would have it no other way.
“I love my job,” she says, explaining the flourishing of relationships among staff and patrons. She suggests good reads and takes requests – true crime and westerns are popular. She delivers books and has long talks about plot twists and character development.
The Street Books library is open for patrons on the Park Blocks in Portland.
“I realize I am not the only smart person on the street,” she explains.
Ben Hodgson, widely known as “Hodge,” serves on the Street Books board. He also once was homeless and knows there are some keen intellects out there.
He tells the story of a man who asked for a work by Friedrich Nietzsche, a demanding German philosopher. Amazingly, the book was on board the trailer. The man leafed through it, frowned and said, “No thanks. This is the wrong translation.”
“Literature in general has a universal appeal,” says Hodgson, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force. “For those who read it’s a wonderful escape.”
Diana Rempe (left), community outreach director for Street Books, and board member Ben Hodgson meet with two City of Portland archivists in the Street Books offices.
Hodgson noticed that the street libraries lacked one of his favorites, the humorist P.G. Wodehouse, author of the Jeeves and Bertie Wooster novels. Hodgson insisted and Street Books delivered.
Laura Moulton, a Portland artist, began Street Books in 2011 as what was supposed to be a three-month literary arts mobile installation. But then, just as she planned to close shop, a man camped in Forest Park borrowed several books and said he’d see her in a week to return what he’d finished and pick up more.
Moulton could not let him down, so found a way to extend the project.
“Books are a compelling object for transaction because they are so full of dreams and stories,” she says. “They are part of what can transport a person out of their current reality. Books are a way of developing empathy, a way of living inside someone else’s existence.”
Now in its 13th year, Street Books is thriving in its home at St. Francis Park Apartments, a 106-unit development completed in 2017. It gets the space in return for providing some staffing and serving residents.
A Street Books bicycle library sits in a quiet spot downtown, ready for homeless patrons.
“Having a little hub that people can come to is enormous,” says a grateful Moulton. “It feels like a rare and beautiful partnership.”
Moulton describes the power of a street librarian calling patrons by name, remembering what they like to read and mentioning details of their lives they once shared.
“Street Books is an opportunity for us to re-see each other,” said Moulton. “We all feel gifted by this reason to connect with people when we are given by the media and assumptions every reason to walk a wide berth around someone.”
Diana Rempe, a street librarian and community outreach director, has been involved with Street Books for a dozen years. She recalls the first time she took the mobile library out.
“I thought, ‘Well, I’ll talk about books with people.’ What I ended up doing was just talking about everything,” says Rempe.
She says most patrons are generous and open-hearted and that there is a wide variety of tastes, including a lot of interest in religion and spirituality.
“What we do so well at Street Books is we create and build long term consistent relationships,” Rempe says. “We show up when we say we’re going to and we keep showing up.”
Diana Rempe (left), community outreach director for Street Books, hugs a patron.