On a gray February afternoon at a Starbucks in Northeast Portland, Jacqueline Arante, a professor of English at Portland State University, sits at one of two wooden tables that have been pushed together, surrounded by several people. Quickly and clearly, she begins reading from Christina Lamb’s The Sewing Circles of Herat: “Anyone carrying an un-Islamic book is to be executed. Women who show their ankles must be whipped. No keeping of birds; any bird-keepers are to be imprisoned and the birds killed.” Her mostly middle-aged audience is quiet. “And no flying of kites.”

She puts down the book and asks, “Why no flying of kites?”

“Because kites are like birds, and birds are traditional sexual symbols?” suggests a woman in the group. “And maybe women weren’t allowed to keep birds because if they did, they could’ve released them with messages begging for help?”

“Well, no, but that’s a great book idea,” Arante replies. “You should write it!”

Arante is leading a public discussion of The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini’s bestselling novel about contemporary Afghanis. The novel, chosen as the 2006 book for the Multnomah County Library’s fourth annual Everybody Reads program, follows the lives of two boys whose friendship is destroyed by class, history, and betrayal.

Each year, participants in the community-oriented program are encouraged not just to read the novel but, as the library’s website suggests, to “talk to each other about issues that matter.” This year, Portland State University and the library created a partnership to broaden the opportunities for readers to do just that. Hence the dozen-odd discussion groups at coffee shops, bookstores and libraries, as well as exhibitions, lectures and panels.

Maude Hines, an assistant professor of English at PSU, approached the library with the partnership idea and then began talking to her colleagues. Soon she had gathered enough pledges of time and resources to make PSU a major sponsor of Everybody Reads. “PSU faculty are eager to participate in the intellectual life of the city,” says Hines. “I was overwhelmed by the response.”

“It’s a natural extension of PSU’s vision of itself in the community,” says Ann Marie Fallon, a university-studies professor and PSU’s partnership facilitator for next year’s Everybody Reads program. “In the last twelve years, the university has really taken on community-based learning as one of its central experiences.”

PSU English professor Lee Medovoi agrees. “In Portland, there’s tremendous public interest in all sorts of social, cultural, and political issues,” he says. “People want to know more about literature, about the arts, about the political situation in other parts of the world, how we got to where we are now.”

In the fall of 2003, Medovoi, Hines, and several other PSU academics founded the Portland Center for Cultural Studies (PCCS) at PSU. Initially, Medovoi says, the goal was “to try to build a larger intellectual community at PSU, to use that energy to build relationships between scholars and the public.” By spring of 2004, however, the group had decided to broaden its vision to include faculty from around the Portland metro area.

“There’s a balkanization of academic life in Portland, with multiple institutions with different strengths and limitations,” says Medovoi. “Cultural studies brings people together from different disciplinary backgrounds, and it also encourages people to ask questions that express social commitment of some kind, to think critically about the society we live in, and to imagine ways to make it a better place.”

Today, the center has about eighty affiliated faculty from such institutions as Lewis and Clark, Reed, the University of Portland, and Pacific University, and Medovoi says it’s building connections with schools farther afield in both Oregon and Washington.

In 2005, the PCCS hosted a conference on globalization that attracted PSU students and members of the public, as well as academics. This year’s April conference, “Spelling Disaster,” aims to strengthen those connections between the academy and the wider world with a focus on what Medovoi calls “a pressing public issue.”

“Disaster is something that’s on everybody’s mind, yet it’s a topic that academics haven’t thought about much,” says Medovoi.

The PCCS helped create PSU’s partnership with the Multnomah County Library and sponsored two Everybody Reads lectures by visiting scholars. Next year, says Fallon, the PSU/MCL partnership might expand to draw in more high school and college students and to include more films and performances.

At Starbucks, a man with glasses clears his throat and addresses the group. “I want to find out what people think of that one dream,” he asks. “The one with the serpent in the water.”

“That’s the one scene I wish he’d cut—it really feels contrived,” says Arante. “What does water represent?”

“Cleansing,” suggests a man with a beard.

“Redemption,” offers a woman in a long green scarf.

Bewildered, another woman in a purple sweatshirt shakes her head. “I just thought it was a dream,” she blurts out.

Arante laughs. “See, everybody reads this differently,” she says. “And that’s okay.”