The Old Church

Authors Julia Cooke (Starry and Restless) and Lance Richardson (True Nature) sit down to discuss their new biographies.Both works explore the lives of trailblazing journalists and activists. Moderated by journalist Charley Locke.

About Starry and Restless:

The page-turning story of three women reporters and the way they changed the world, work, and journalism.

She hid on a Red Cross boat to reach Omaha Beach on D-Day. She walked the abandoned streets of Hong Kong to take food to her daughter’s father, a prisoner of war. She fought off the advances of overzealous Yugoslavian diplomats, found overlooked details of world history in a dentist’s kitchen in Sarajevo. She traveled alone to Mexico. She traveled alone to Congo. She traveled alone to the American South. She married Hemingway. She married a Chinese poet-playboy-publisher, then married a British war hero. She fell in love with H. G. Wells. She gave birth and raised a child on her own. She landed on the front page of the newspaper. She wrote for the great magazines of her time—Vogue, The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar. She wrote a play. She wrote a memoir. She wrote a genre-breaking travel narrative. She wrote bestsellers. She wrote and wrote and wrote. She changed the very way we think about writing and the way journalists craft stories—which sources are viable, which details are important—and the way women move and work in the world.

She was Martha Gellhorn. She was Emily “Mickey” Hahn. She was Rebecca West. Each woman was starry-eyed for success, for adventure, and helped ensure that other starry and restless women could make unforgettable lives for themselves. They fought for their lives and their work. They were praised and criticized for it all.

In language as lively and nimble, in passages as intimate and adventurous, and with conviction as fierce and indefatigable as her subjects’ own, Julia Cooke’s Starry and Restless plays out the stories of three women across three decades and five continents. Martha, Mickey, Rebecca—journalists, authors, mothers, lovers, friends. These women didn’t just bear witness to the great changes of the twentieth century; their curiosity, grit, ambition, and stories changed the world.

About True Nature:

The firstbiography of Peter Matthiessen, the novelist, naturalist, and Zen roshi, whose trailblazing work championed Native American rights and helped usher in the modern environmental movement, by award-winning writer Lance Richardson.

“A stunning, formidable achievement by a brilliant biographer. Lance Richardson takes his readers on a wild ride with Peter Matthiessen.” —Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus

“A fair-minded, grippingly paced, and tremendously readable narrative.” —Pico Iyer, Air Mail

Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), a towering figure of twentieth-century American letters, achieved so much during his lifetime, in so many different areas, that people have struggled to pin him down. While ambivalent about his WASP privilege—as a teenager he demanded that his name be removed from the New York Social Register—he attended Yale and cut his teeth in postwar Paris, co-founding The Paris Review as he worked undercover for the CIA. But then, after a rebellious stint as a Long Island fisherman, he escaped into a series of wild expeditions: floating through the Amazon to recover a prehistorical fossil; embedding with a tribe in Netherlands New Guinea; swimming with sharks off the coast of Australia. His novels, inspired by his travels, were unclassifiable meditations about Caymanian turtle hunters and frontier outlaws in the Florida Everglades. Meanwhile, his nonfiction became legendary: nature books like Wildlife in America—“key parts of the canon of emergent environmental writing,” says Bill McKibben—as well as advocacy journalism supporting Cesar Chavez, Leonard Peltier, and Native American land claims.

Underlying all Matthiessen’s disparate pursuits was the same existential search—to find a cure for “deep restlessness.” This search was most profoundly articulated in The Snow Leopard, his famous account of a 250-mile wildlife survey across the Himalayas. In True Nature, Lance Richardson reconstructs the full scope of a spiritual quest that ultimately led Matthiessen, even as he inflicted great pain on his family, to the highest ranks of Zen. Drawing on rich primary sources and hundreds of interviews, Richardson depicts Matthiessen’s life with page-turning immediacy, while also illuminating how the writer’s uncanny gifts enabled him to sense connections between ecological decline, racism, and labor exploitation—to express, eloquently and presciently, that “in a damaged human habitat, all problems merge.”

Authors Priyanka Mattoo (How to Be Less Useful) and Emily Nemens (Clutch) sit down to discuss their latest books that explore the pleasures and challenges of midlife. Whether in the fictional world of Clutch, or the personal stories in How to Be Less Useful, both authors question our professional prioritiesand the joy that really matters most. Moderated by author Maris Kreizman.

About How to Be Less Useful:

A delightful book about reclaiming pleasure in mid-life—a potent mix of self-help and memoir, from one of today’s wittiest, wisest voices.

“I have done everything right, and I have missed everything.”

When did our lives become entirely about efficiency and optimization? Especially as office workers, as parents, as consumers, as exercisers and healthy eaters. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all be less useful?

With self-deprecating humor, devastating insight, and bracing honesty, Priyanka Mattoo shares her own journey toward being a less useful human, to investigate why pleasure gets back-burnered in American culture.

Think about what we choose to systematically cut out or overlook as we mature: Solo travel. Dessert. Sweaty dancing. “Pointless” hangs with friends. And then there are the activities that used to be fun and have somehow lost their luster, usually in the decade between 30 and 40: Cooking (ruined by exhaustion). Bad tv (the algorithm). Other humans (bandwidth). Eating at restaurants (Instagram).

Mattoo takes on the zeitgeist, delivering invaluable, laugh-out-loud entertaining life lessons without an ounce of preachiness or pressure. She looks at where pleasure begins, what it serves, how we learn to repress it—in families, in friendships and romantic relationships, in jobs. And she shows us a way back: to identify and accept the things that give us pleasure, then to welcome them into our lives. What if, instead of being useful, we could all learn how to be happier, lighter, more present, more engaged? How to Be Less Useful is refreshing, funny, sparklingly astute, unignorable–a book for the current moment.

About Clutch:

A close-knit group of women navigate mid-life’s biggest challenges—marriage, career, addiction—in what Lynn Steger Strong calls a “sharp, funny, utterly engrossing” novel.

“White Lotus with more sincerity and heart.” —Los Angeles Times

Named a Best Book by The New York Times Book Review, People, Los Angeles Times, Alta Journal, Bustle, and more

Join us in Portland on November 16—two weeks after election day—for a conversation about trust, elections, and our political systems and culture with Paul Gronke, director of the Elections & Voting Information Center at Reed College, and Susheela Jayapal, a former Multnomah County Commissioner and current fellow with the North Star Civic Foundation.

Polling of voters in the US shows that confidence in elections and political institutions has fallen over the past two years. In this onstage conversation, moderated by Adam Davis, we'll dig into the factors that affect the public's faith in our democracy and how that declining trust shapes how we vote and how we govern ourselves.

The conversation will take place at The Old Church in Portland (1422 SW 11th Ave.) at 7:00 p.m. on Monday, November 16, 2026. The event is part of our 2026–27 Consider This series, What Do We Trust?

About Our Guests

Paul Gronke is the founding director of the Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC), an emeritus professor of political science at Reed College, and a senior fellow at the Center for Public Service. Gronke is a nationally known scholar of American politics, elections, and research methods. Under his leadership, EVIC has become a national center of excellence for policy research and publicly engaged scholarship into election administration, election reform, and electoral integrity. A major focus of Gronke's current research is the Local Election Official (LEO) Survey, which EVIC has been undertaking since 2018. Gronke received a PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan and has been a member of the faculty of Reed College since 2000. In his spare time, he is an avid gardener, cook, and he likes to ski, hike, and experience the great outdoors.

Susheela Jayapal is a lawyer and community advocate whose leadership has spanned the public and private sectors. Born in India, she grew up in India, Indonesia, and Singapore and came to the US at the age of sixteen to attend college. As a lawyer, she was a litigator in private practice and served as general counsel of Adidas America, Inc. She has served on the boards of directors of a wide range of nonprofit organizations; and served for five years on the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners, representing North and Northeast Portland. As a Commissioner, Susheela’s priorities included homelessness, community safety, and public health, all with a focus on racial, social, and economic justice. She currently consults on and leads projects focused on building a truly participatory and equitable democracy.

Tickets

Tickets are $15 and available from The Old Church.

To ensure that everyone who wants to attend is able to, a limited number of tickets are available for free. To get free tickets, use the code CONSIDERTHIS100.

Other ways to participate

Can't make it in person? Tune in from anywhere! The conversation will be streamed live, for free, on our YouTube channel, and will remain available for viewing after the program.

About the Venue

• The space: This event will be held indoors at The Old Church in downtown Portland.
• Parking: Metered street parking is available around the venue. It is free after 7:00 p.m. There are disabled person parking spaces two blocks away, on SW Mill St. between 10th Ave. and Park Ave. There is a paid parking lot next to the venue on 10th Avenue that costs $4 per hour, and a garage three blocks away at Portland State University that costs $2.50 per hour: PSU Parking Lot #3 on SW 12th Ave. between Market and Montgomery.
• Food and drink: Light concessions are available at the venue. Outside food and drink is not allowed.
• Lighting: The venue is well-lit inside. Lights will be dimmed during the program.
• Video and Sound: The program will be amplified. There will be no loud music.
• Mobility access: There is an accessible entrance next to the main entrance on SW Clay St. There is designated seating for patrons with mobility devices, other assistance requirements, and their companions. Seating consists primarily of church-style pews and some high-back chairs without arm supports. All of TOC’s restrooms, including accessible restrooms, are located below the main level and are reached either by two sets of stairs or by elevator.
• Questions: You can read more about accessibility at The Old Church here. With further questions, email [email protected].

Thanks to our sponsors

Consider This is made possible by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Oregon Cultural Trust.