1. On the last block to the Schnitz, I realize that it’s still light out at 7pm which means summer is closer than ever. 2. Adichie on stage at the Schnitz, looking fabulous. 3. Rob Spillman and Jon Raymond head over to the post-lecture reception at the Gus J. Solomon U.S. Courthouse. 

Chimamanda Adichie visited Portland for the first time as the season finale speaker for the Portland Arts & Lectures series. Andrew Proctor, Executive Director of Literary Arts, bullied her into coming and held a brief thank-you-a-thon prior to her introduction. I have to agree that the Literary Arts staff is 100% amazing. Adichie said she didn’t mind being bullied by someone like Proctor.

Her talk, A Cultural History of My Writing, began with the words, “As a child in Nigeria . . .” and circled back to #305 Margaret Cartwright Avenue several times as she described her writing life. Adichie has already proven herself in several genres and snagged a genius award. If she cut this lecture to about three and a half minutes and kept the #305 Margaret Cartwright Avenue refrain, it’d probably be an excellent pop song or perhaps a ballad, given that she is drawn to beautiful sadness and has a dark artistic vision which keeps her from writing for children.

1. What do bus drivers do while students are at the event? Eat a sandwich on the bus. 2. Steve and Gretchen were comforted by the fact that Adichie also experiences fear while sitting in front of a computer to write. Seth, not so much—he’s not a writer.

Half of a Yellow Sun, her second novel, gave her an opportunity to explore what it would be like to be deprived of the life you knew. How does it change you? These tiny losses compose the grittiness of being human, being people who eat and have sex. All of the stories were based on real stories collected from interviews and archival research. Her role was to streamline the chaotic nature of life.

1. Melissa appreciated Adichie’s comment on turning facts into truth since she just finished her thesis on Native American Boarding Schools. Mia liked the part about “beautiful sadness” because her thesis was on looking at darkness in order to be whole. I liked their coats. 2. Olivia and Lauren are and were interns for Evan P. Schneider at Literary Arts. Richard, who will eventually be famous, is a Literary Arts volunteer who agrees with Adichie that “fiction does matter.” 3. Judy Peterman, former finance manager for Literary Arts, with Bob Huntington’s fantastic smile.

As a person and a writer, Adichie exudes calm confidence, not necessarily grounded in what she has done, but perhaps in what she would like to do next. I see her as someone who takes inspiration from her own life with gratitude and love.

1. Adichie and Pauls Toutonghi, author of Evel Knievel Days.

 To Adichie, love means time spent. Yet one of the fundamental sacrifices of writing is time. When her writing is going well, she is willing to make that sacrifice and deal with the friend backlash from unreturned calls. At this point in the talk, I got so into what she was saying that I didn’t take good notes on exactly what she said.

During the Q&A, she mentioned writing better about Nigeria while in the US and writing better about the US while in Nigeria. She is an avid note-taker, constantly recording facts which may become truths in the service of fiction. The details may become sharper with distance. Whether she is at her family home in Nigeria, or Philadelphia, or wherever, her writing ritual is to wander around the house to get into the creative space. If that doesn’t work, she mentioned online shopping and watering her thoughts with writers she loves.

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—Judith Ossello currently lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. Find her at www.writerloop.com.

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Are you mindful of the other driver?

Between home and work, those huge digital matrix signs loom over the interstate, the ones intended to keep you abreast of traffic situations. But, except during snowstorms, there are no real traffic situations between home and work. It’s not that kind of town. So, instead, the signs display helpful messages and driving tips. Usually somewhere between self-righteously bossy (“Texting and Driving Don’t Mix”) and winkingly practical (“DUI Patrols Tonight”), lately the DOT has turned more philosophical. The other day, all over the state, the signs asked, “Are You Mindful of the Other Driver?”

It is the word “mindful” that seems out of place in square letters above the interstate. I am used to the DOT being concerned about my driving habits and even about the more physiological aspects of my mental state (who doesn’t like rest stops with free coffee?), but this seems to enter another kind of territory, a territory that is normally the domain of poets and pastors (and—on a side note—of Dinty W. Moore’s new book). I’m not used to hearing about such existential stuff from the lower levels of state bureaucracy. Not that I mind. In fact, I kind of like the idea that they might have more to say than “Merge Left in 1500 Feet.”

But that “mindful” and the abstract “other.” The word choice suggests authorship in a venue that is normally dominated by anonymity. This is not, I think, language that could be produced by machine or by government committee. This language was created, composed. So, reading it, driving beneath this message, I imagine the DOT copywriter in his cubicle, the perfunctory fabric walls, the smell of canned air.

On his breaks, he walks outside. It is spring now. New grass is coming up around the ponderosas. He shuffles his feet, kicks at a cone half-buried. He carries a paperback in his right hand, his thumb holding the place. This week Pedro Páramo, last week that Annie Dillard book, slim volumes that feel to him more like companions. He also keeps a book of poems in the top drawer of his desk, and he steals moments with them between memos and newsletters. He has recently discovered Dana Levin and thinks he might be in love.

The DOT office is in an office park off the highway, so the cars zing past. Most of them don’t notice the little building, one-story with large tinted windows that the copywriter cannot see from his cubicle, buried among the other cubicles. Most of the drivers do not notice him walking there, paperback held loosely between his fingers. But he stops to watch them.

Unless they merge onto 184, they will see one of his signs 2.4 miles ahead. Today, they will see his “Are You Mindful” message, his favorite, the first one he created and the only one he’s created that has gone into the state DOT’s permanent Dynamic Message Sign (DMS) message library. He thinks of this as his opportunity to shape society in his small way: his words, present, glowing above the flow of traffic, sliding easily into the eyes and, thus, the minds of 64,372 commuters each day, on average (based on the December 2010 report; he did the math himself). More on weekdays, fewer on weekends.

Watching the cars pass, he tries to notice each passing motorist. The traffic is light in late morning, so he almost can. The woman in the new Hyundai, probably his own mother’s age, hands at ten and two, sitting up straight so her hair doesn’t press against the headrest and deform. The man in the wax-sheen 4-ton pickup, broad shoulders and short hair: a contractor, he thinks, not a laborer. The girl in the early-90s Honda Civic, a carseat in the back, too young and pretty to have planned for that. These are his audience, his readers, and they are legion. It is a kind of power. More people will read his words today than will read Dana Levin: 64, 372 readers. And that’s vehicles; it doesn’t account for passengers. How many people will read Annie Dillard today? How many people will read Rulfo? Shakespeare? 64, 372 people will read him. Every day he has something to tell them, and every day they hear it.

He thinks of the sign past the 184 exit as his sign because the control box is in his cubicle. For the most part, each sign is controlled locally—normally by a sheriff’s dispatcher, but since this sign is so close to the main DOT offices, the duty defaults to him.

His fifteen-minute break is nearly over, so he dog ears the page in Rulfo and tucks it into his back pocket. He thinks he’ll steal another moment with Levin before writing the weekly road status update, a press release that no one in the press actually reads. If his supervisor were to catch him reading poems on the clock, he has decided he will explain that it is vocationally necessary. He will explain that, since he is a copywriter (a writer, really), he must keep language in his mind. If he does not keep the language fresh, he won’t be able to do his job well. His supervisor is the kind of person who believes in things like inspiration, and she already sees him as a creative type, so he thinks she’ll buy it. And, anyway, he hopes not to be at this job for long.

He fantasizes about his last day on the job, about how he will sign off. He’ll need to leave his readers with something larger than the normal fare. For some among his 64, 372, his words are the only thing they’ll read that day. He’ll need to leave them with something substantial. Like that line from Howard Nemerov: “The world is full of mostly invisible things,/ And there is no way but putting the mind’s eye,/ Or its nose, in a book, to find them out”

But that’s a bit pedantic, and it won’t fit on the sign.

Maybe this one, from Gerard Manley Hopkins, “And, for all this, nature is never spent”—But that’s too topical. Or, “For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his”

Or this one he just read in Levin: “I know,/ I’m tired of the battle too”

It is his duty, he thinks, not sacred but nearly so, to reach into their lives for an instant, to remind them that, for better or worse, they are not alone.