More than 400 people made their way to downtown Portland on Saturday to celebrate the opening of Grand Gesture Books, the state’s very first romance-only bookstore.

“Isn’t love grand?” the lettering on the store’s exterior window asks. Walking inside, you’ll see the answer is, of course, “Yes.” Muted pink walls, a rosy rug, delicate vases of blooming flowers and velvety armchairs surround dark brown bookshelves filled to the brim with every romance reader’s dream: a wide variety of subgenres to please even the pickiest of customers.

Katherine Morgan, romance enthusiast and owner of Grand Gesture, hopes the bookstore will offer a plethora of books about love, provide a space for book clubs to meet and host romance authors on book tours. It’s also one of just a handful of Black-owned romance bookstores in the nation.

At the store’s grand opening, Morgan estimates at least $15,000 worth of books were sold, with the line extending out the door and around an entire block. The store remained packed until 10 minutes before closing.

“Within five minutes, the whole store was full,” Morgan said. “… It was a lot, but it was wonderful.”

The local author section was particularly interesting to customer Kate Szorm. Currently, she’s reading the third installment of “The Murderbot Diaries” by Martha Wells, which chronicles the story of a cyborg searching for the meaning of life. Now, Szorm wants to branch out and try reading a sci-fi romance novel.

“The line to check out is super long and everybody’s just chatting, so the vibe is great,” Szorm said.

Filling a long-empty space in Oregon’s romance literature community, Grand Gesture boasts books focused on love with all kinds of central themes: LGBTQ+, mystery, paranormal, erotica, contemporary, historical, fantasy, nonfiction, self-love, platonic love and Pacific Northwest authors.

“It’s the one genre where you know for sure how it’s going to end, and that’s one of the things people like to make fun of,” Morgan said. “But it’s like no, how it ends doesn’t matter. It’s what happens on that journey. You want to root for these people.”

Growing up a lonely child in an environment with frequent abuse, Morgan said she discovered reading as a means to escape into a wonderful world separate from her own. She fell out of reading but came back into the romance genre with full force with “The Wedding Date” by Jasmine Guillory in 2019 when she was managing the romance section at Powell’s.

“Something about it just makes me swoon and realize how I want to be loved as a person, and how I want to love people in my life, whether it’s platonic in a friend group or romantic with my partner,” Morgan said.

OPB previously interviewed Morgan when she was a Powell’s bookseller. She left her job at Powell’s to fully run Grand Gesture, which first opened online last November.

The love spreads

Romance bookstores are still something of a novelty though. In 2016, there was only one dedicated romance bookstore in the United States — The Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles.

But love for the love genre has grown quickly over the past eight years, corresponding to the opening of more than 20 romance bookstores in the nation. Until now, the closest romance bookstore for Oregonians was The Romance Era, a queer and Black-owned used romance bookshop in Vancouver, Washington, opened by Ren Rice in 2023, who has been a big supporter of Grand Gesture’s opening in Portland.

“Grand Gesture is the hard work of someone who really loves what they do,” Rice told OPB in an email. “I am excited that Katherine is able to bring all the knowledge and skill she has to provide books and titles to everyone in the PDX community. I love that she has her own spin on the bookstore and between us we have a great deal of coverage, something for everyone!”

Romance sales have soared in recent years, from 18 million copies sold in 2020 to more than 39 million in 2023, The New York Times reported. Some point to readers’ desire to escape from certain circumstances, like the pandemic or increasingly stressful politics, while others say younger generations, through spaces like BookTok, are embracing the formerly stigmatized genre with open arms and less shame.

The romance genre has not just boomed nationally or only in sales — Portland metro area libraries have also observed the increase. The Multnomah County Library organization, which manages more than 20 libraries across Portland, has observed a doubling in the number of romance checkouts in e-books and audiobooks since 2018.

Washington County Cooperative Library Services, which is a partnership between Washington County, nine cities and three nonprofit organizations that operate local libraries, also noticed a skyrocketing increase in romance novels post-pandemic.

WCCLS saw the number of physical romance novel checkouts increase by nearly 30% from 2017-18 to 2023-24. In the same time frame, romance audio checkouts increased by around 16% while romance e-book checkouts grew by around 40%.

“I think there’s a parallel to a rise in the popularity of (cozy) mysteries — as the real world becomes more fraught with uncertainty and things beyond our control, it seems only natural to turn to reading that will have a full and satisfactory conclusion: all conflicts are resolved, the couple lives happily ever after (or happily for now), the murderer is caught,” said Rian Debner, WCCLS library systems and collections supervisor, in an email.

Courtney Sheedy, an e-content librarian with WCCLS, noted that romance sub- and micro-genres have grown massively as previously niche areas of interest have become mainstream, and self-published authors used social media to gain an engaged audience.

“The genre as a whole has also expanded in its inclusivity with regards to body size, gender expression, sexual orientation, non-monogamy, and beyond,” Sheedy said.

For Chris Walters, a Portland author who writes cozy contemporary romance and urban fantasy/paranormal romance, Grand Gesture is a chance to help boost the genre locally by attracting more authors to this city, from bestsellers to small-press and indie authors.

“I feel like romance has this weird reputation as perhaps not real writing or only for women, and Grand Gesture can hopefully help break some of those stereotypes,” he told OPB via Instagram. “Romance is for everyone, and I believe Katherine is going to help spread the word about how incredible romance books can be.”

Inclusivity is definitely at the heart of Grand Gesture. That’s why, in addition to housing BookTok’s most popular romances, Morgan is focusing on highlighting underrepresented love stories — from a Sapphic Black romance to a multiracial zombie love story — you name it, she’s got it (or something similar).

Happily ever after

And Grand Gesture doesn’t just house books. Morgan knows her target audience too well.

“Romance girlies love three things,” she said. “They love books — and they get more than one book, they’re not just buying one — they get tote bags, and they get stickers.” The bookstore has all three things, she promises, as well as t-shirts and literary-themed candles.

On top of all that, Morgan — who is an ordained minister — would love nothing more than to host weddings at Grand Gesture. Or at least have it be a couple’s meet-cute (definition: where two love interests meet for the first time).

“I am very open and honest about the fact that my whole personality is wanting people to get married in my store, or engaged in my store, or first dates, I want that to happen,” Morgan said.

Grand Gesture is located at 814 Southwest 10th Avenue in Portland. Morgan will be tabling at the Portland Book Festival on Nov. 2.

Go-to romance recs from the two PNW bookstore owners:

Morgan’s recommendations:

• “Before I Let Go” by Kennedy Ryan
• “The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy” by Megan Bannen

Rice’s recommendations:

• The Brown Sisters trilogy by Talia Hibbert
• The Raven Cycle series by Maggie Stiefvater

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• Trillium Lake

• White River

• Mirror Lake and Tom Dick and Harry Mountain

• Indian Heaven

• Larch Mountain

Goodbye, plant beds and street view. Hello, woodlands.

Why wait for other people to solve the climate crisis when you can create wee woodlands right in your own yard? Enter the tiny forest movement, which took root in Japan a couple of decades ago and is now jumping the pond to Oregon.

Just ask Andrew Millison, who grows 30 trees and native berry bushes in his tiny forest. His one-third-acre corner lot in suburban Corvallis looks like a rainforest from above; from the street, trees and foliage completely block the house from view. Millison founded the permaculture design program at Oregon State University, and he aims to show neighbors the possibilities of abundant foliage on small lots, and to provide passersby with a browsable, edible landscape. “Permaculture is a road map to making your home and garden paradise,” he says. Or at least very leafy.

Less Is Mori

Portland’s reverence for forests is shared by the Japanese, so it’s little surprise that the concept of creating pocket-size forests emerged from Japan. The concept was born in the 1970s by plant ecologist Akira Miyawaki, who noticed that the small, undisturbed forests surrounding Shintō shrines, called chinju-no-mori, looked healthier than the tree plantations commonly installed after logging. Miyawaki developed an approach to reforestation that involves restoring soils and then planting very densely. How densely?? I hear you asking. A robust 20,000–30,000 trees per hectare is the Miyawaki method; this comes out to around 8,000–12,000 trees per acre, which is 8–12 times denser than the norm for reforesting timberlands … or roughly one tree for every 3–5 square feet. 

Planting trees in a clump is not unlike sowing a vegetable garden bed with a few seeds per hole. Once started, tiny forests fill vertical space fast. Think of the scene in My Neighbor Totoro, when Satsuki and Mei look out the window one moonlit night to see Totoro and friends marching around a small garden where the girls have planted acorns, coaxing the soil to spring forth. Within moments, seedlings sprout and magically burst into a thick grove of giant trees. It doesn’t happen quite that fast in real life, but that’s not much of an exaggeration. A tiny forest usually goes from bare earth to lush copse in just a couple of years, substantially faster than on tree plantations. Some keep growing beyond one property. In Southeast Portland’s Sunnyside neighborhood, Evrim Icoz shares a property line with Esther Lev, a retired executive director of the Wetlands Conservancy, and their unfenced, naturescaped yards blend into one contiguous habitat. His plants are “really happy, so they tend to take over a little bit sometimes,” Icoz says. “The bleeding hearts and the Oregon grape escape to my neighbor’s yard.”

Yet even wayward tiny forests have many benefits. At a small scale, thick patches of trees sequester carbon and improve air quality, slow stormwater, and cool the air. They also look really neat. But they do function differently than typical forests. Survival rates are initially fairly high—85 to 90 percent for the first three years—though that number drops precipitously once you cut irrigation (you’re supposed to water for three years), and dips again as the trees grow and begin to self-thin, which happens when trees compete for sunlight, soil, and moisture. And trees alone do not make a diverse forest: in wild forests, a diversity of tree, shrub, and herbaceous species occupy distinct vertical niches, called strata. Free-growing forests rotate through sequences of ecological communities over time, while tiny forests mostly maintain the species that you plant. Adding shrubs and flowering plants from the beginning will bring that I-am-a-jungle-dweller feel.

Stumptown, Eh?

Why go for tiny forests in a tree-loving town like Portland? It’s easy to assume all is well with Portland trees. Our darling (yet unimaginatively named) Forest Park is one of the largest urban greenspaces in the world. And walk around beyond downtown and you’ll see very average-size lots randomly dotted with massive trees, like the three 150-plus-year-old giant sequoias in Save the Giants Park, or the odd forested natural area that isn’t a designated park (we’re looking at you, River View Natural Area). But tree canopy in Portland dropped between 2015 and 2020, losing 823 acres. Though that’s a less than 1 percent loss in total tree cover, it’s the wrong direction. We also have some of the smallest backyards in America, so tiny forests might be all we can muster. Small collective actions have big benefits.

Patches of mature trees still exist, left standing by housing developers of yore, especially in the West Hills, to facilitate scenic views and better bird-watching. Drive through pretty much any suburban subdivision and you’ll doubtless see what appears to be a tiny forest—and is actually a compensatory mitigation site, replanted by requirement, after developments impacted wetlands or waterways.

But classic, Miyawaki-method tiny forests are rare here, especially at companies or organizations—in fact, Catlin Gabel School has the only one in the city, and it was planted two years ago. Portland has largely had to rely on homeowner altruism (and the hypothetical lure of increased property values) to prioritize trees. It’s 100 percent legal to grow a tiny forest at your house. No permit is required to plant trees on private property (unless you’re planting designated nuisance species like holly or English hawthorn, which you wouldn’t want to do anyway). The city provides a helpful official list of suggested trees and shrubs. Tiny forests don’t need to include food plants, but Millison appreciates edible tiny forests, which can also support wildlife corridors and pollinator habitats. He shies away from native-plants-only ideology, especially in urban and suburban settings. “We don’t just eat native plants,” he says. “If you’re buying food from the grocery store, then you’re displacing native plants from somewhere else.”

Potential Snags

It’s worth mentioning possible drawbacks. First, anyone who loves gardening knows that plants are expensive. However, you can get free (or nearly free) permits to collect native plants under two feet tall for personal use in many of Oregon’s state and national forests—you just have to drive out and dig them up yourself (and follow the rules about which species you can take). You’ll probably need to amend your soil, and newly planted areas will require irrigation for years, so factor that into your cost estimate. (On the plus side, it’ll be too shady for you to grow many vegetables, so you’ll save on tomato starts!)

Densely planted areas can also create an “if you build it, they will come” situation. In my decade working as a wetland mitigation specialist, almost all the urban restoration sites and natural areas I monitored faced anthropogenic impacts, from illegal dumping to camping. And hungry deer and rodents can annihilate a freshly planted site with a merciless quickness.

A final consideration: your neighbors might think it’s ugly. My own have griped about my trees along their property line; I simply remind them that  birds need a place to hide from their cats. And a bit of neighbor tension is a small price to pay for living in leafy paradise. “The world could be a garden of Eden,” says Millison, “if we choose to make it one.”

How to build a tiny forest of your own

Read up on Miyawaki. Start with Mini-Forest Revolution by Hannah Lewis.

Pick the right plants. If you’re envisioning a haven where birds hide from outdoor cats (or you fancy heavy metal naturescaping), think about a thicket of spiny plants like black hawthorn, Nootka rose, Oregon grape, devil’s club, and stinging nettle. Hot and dry spots aren’t ideal for moisture-loving Pacific willow, red alder, or western red cedar; in shady sites, keystone species like Douglas fir and Oregon white oak will suffer.

Add zones. Put edible or fragrant plants closer to human paths, and native plants further away, where they can sit densely and provide greater benefit.

Team up. The Facebook group Friends of Backyard Habitats for greater Portland (11,000 members) is where many neighbors partner up to maximize efforts.

Get certified. The Backyard Habitat Certification Program, a partnership between the Bird Alliance of Oregon and Columbia Land Trust, offers on-site guidance and coupons for native plants, and you’ll even get a little yard plaque to lord over your neighbors.

Don’t forget a rain garden. Tiny forests slow down storm runoff before it enters sewers and streams. Check with the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services for information on creating a rain garden. The city even provided free native shrubs and groundcovers when its team installed my rain garden back in 2018, and let me choose the species. Planting trees also earns you a discount on your sewer bill.

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The warm and welcoming group, led by the torta shop’s kitchen manager, transforms novices into nerds. It worked on me.

It took what felt like forever to spot him. I was pretty sure I had identified the correct tree, but the correct branch? The tree had so many branches! And they were all covered in leaves! But finally—

“Oh!” I gasped. “Oh.” For there was the purple finch, and the tiny thing was beautiful: a little ball of a bird that to my eye looked more rose red than purple. Through my binoculars I watched him swivel his head, then throw it back—what an adorably chunky beak he had—as he began to trill. His feathered throat pulsed. Mine froze in awe.

My first outing with Güero Bird Club was off to a cracking start. Yes, that Güero: I’d gathered early that morning with about 10 others, Gen Z to boomer, for a birdsong walk organized by Audrey Tawdry, kitchen manager of the popular Kerns torta shop. (No tortas were served, but Tawdry brought coffee and mini muffins.) Over the next two hours, as we weaved slowly through Kelley Point Park, I marveled at the weird and delightful descriptions unleashed by my fellow birders. House finches, Tawdry said, have a song that reminds her of Benson Bubblers. Swallows, said someone else, sound like ray guns. The brown-headed cowbird? That one’s a TV turning on. We used our eyes, too, of course. Someone pointed out two American goldfinches perched high in a tree like lemon drops. For many minutes, we simply watched a bald eagle that had landed near us, its back turned but its face in profile, the sharp hook of its enormous beak slicing the air.

The bird-watching boom could have been a pandemic blip, a hobby for the stressful but stagnant days of lockdown. But the old-fashioned pursuit has held on. In part this is thanks to newfangled tools such as Merlin, an app with an amazing (though imperfect) ability to identify birds by sound; it’s seen more than 10 million new users since the Sound ID function, developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, was added in 2021. And, in Portland, it’s also thanks to groups like Güero Bird Club, just one of many grassroots bird-watching gangs turning novices into nerds.

On that morning with the purple finch, I felt the pull.

The bird-watching bug bit Tawdry when she was a senior in college in Binghamton, New York. She and her best friend had signed up for a biology class taught by a hippie wetlands ecologist and a vest-wearing British entomologist. Students received a CD with about a dozen local birdsongs on it, and Tawdry played hers as she drove friends around in her 2001 silver Volkswagen Beetle.

“I would probably fit, like, seven college kids in at once, and I’d always have my birdsongs on,” she says. “I still remember those songs.”

Her aunt and uncle gave her binoculars for graduation, and she had her own moment of awe that summer, at a park near her childhood home in the Hudson Valley. As sunset approached, a yellow-shafted flicker flew by. “I remember seeing this gold flash underneath their wings and gasping,” she says.

She took to carrying her binoculars everywhere, which meant that looking at birds “just kind of followed [her] around,” including on her 2015 move to Portland. But the idea of assembling a flock didn’t spark until 2020, when the city was in lockdown and Güero was doing a brisk takeout business. She and then-coworker Greg Smith, who also happens to be a seabird biologist, were constantly swapping reports. Owner Megan Sanchez noticed. “She would hear us and be like, ‘Did you bring enough to share?’” Tawdry says. “I guess we made it sound fun.”

Güero Bird Club officially launched in 2021. Three years in, the format is largely unchanged. Weekly walks, which are free and open to all, take place year-round, in both morning and evening, at one of any avian hot spots in Portland: Mount Tabor, Oaks Bottom, Powell Butte. Tawdry provides binoculars to those who need them. After coffee, socializing, and quick intros, the group strolls for about two hours, pausing often.

The simplicity and consistency are part of the appeal. But each outing takes on a different flavor. A few weeks after my birdsong walk, I joined a Wednesday gathering at Whitaker Ponds, a nature park in the Cully neighborhood. This time I gawked at the fancy feathers worn by a great white egret; the breeding plumage looked to me like a ballerina’s long tulle skirt. I learned from Tawdry that flycatchers hatch with innate knowledge of their song, unlike most other birds that learn it from their parents, and from another member of the group about the carpenter bees that shimmered iridescent green on a decaying log.

Inspired, I began carrying my binoculars on neighborhood walks. Suddenly I was the one pointing out goldfinches. My ears, too, began to parse one sound from another. I finally understood the song sparrow’s mic check—the bird, which abounds in Portland, has a way of announcing itself with a few clanging notes before dashing into something more melodic.

While birding alone had its pleasures, I missed the collective knowledge of the group, the experience of shared wonder. Tawdry’s main goal with Güero Bird Club is to encourage curiosity, and she describes what she does as hosting: she makes a plan, disarms by explicitly inviting oohs and aahs, and then steps back. Sometimes she greets a mere handful on a frigid February morning. Other times it’s a blowout, as on a Sunday in May when I found myself among more than 40 others, moving amoeba-like up the slopes of Mount Tabor.

The party, admittedly, was too big. But at the summit, we spread out. Many were drawn to a regal pair of bald eagles. Others delighted at a red-breasted nuthatch dancing up and down the trunk of a tree. I hung back for a moment and watched not the birds but the people watching the birds—watched as they flapped their arms, summoning others to come see the cool thing they could see. “Objectively the cutest, most wholesome thing in Portland,” said Morgan Quirk, an architectural historian I’d met that morning. “I can’t get enough.”

Neither can I.

Gateway Birds: Five feathered friends that call Portland home

Anna’s Hummingbird

Tough, tiny, year-round Portland resident. Buzzy, high-pitched song recalls an exceptionally squeaky door hinge. Males sport brilliant magenta feathers from throat to head and court potential mates with dramatic dive-bombs.

Northern Flicker

Brownish, distinctively spotted woodpecker likely drumming in a backyard near you. Typically nests in holes in trees (in early summer, listen for nestlings chirping nonstop). Frequently found rooting in leaf litter for ants. Look for red mustache on males and black bib on all.

Dark-Eyed Junco

Abundant, energetic, seed-eating sparrow. Often seen hopping on ground and darting in underbrush. Vast geographic variation: all juncos have pinkish bills and white tail feathers that flash in flight; Oregon’s dark-eyed form has handsome black hood, brown back, and whitish belly. Ticking, metallic trill.

Wood Duck

Striking, ornately patterned duck living in watery habitat across Portland. Significantly smaller than mallards (ducklings, accordingly, are stupid cute). Nests in tree cavities. Males wear iridescent purple and green; females have eyes ringed in white.

Cooper’s Hawk

Crow-sized raptor with a barrel-shaped body, steely face, and sharply hooked beak. In flight, look for long tail feathers edged in white. Fast, stealthy, and possibly preying on other birds at your backyard feeder.

 

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