A beautiful Donor Appreciation Event preceded this year’s Hillsboro Reads Author Event at the Brookwood Library on March 7th. Emma Pattee, author of best-selling Tilt, joined donors for an hour before her official talk, chatting and enjoying wine and hors d’oeuvres.
It had been years since a Foundation-sponsored Author Event had occurred at the Brookwood Library, so it was a wonderful homecoming. City leaders, dedicated library supporters, and members of the public came together to hear Pattee speak about her book. One couple even came all the way from Corvallis.
During the talk, held in the large – and packed – Event Room, Pattee was interviewed by Foundation Advisor Board Member, David Edwards, to guide a conversation that delved into the craft, symbolism, and interventions made by Pattee in her novel, Tilt. The book follows 9-month-pregnant Annie as she traverses Portland after “The Big One” – an overdue destructive earthquake – hits the city.
Pattee described her writing process. As an environmental journalist, she spoke of the amount of environmental study that went into planning the accuracy of the earthquake’s destruction – she went so far as to work with a geology professor and graduate student to ensure accuracy of description! Additionally, Pattee explained that she wrote the book after many drafts, each of which was one layer of study about the story: science, psychology, logistics, locations, and more. Then, to compose the novel, she wove these layers together, deciding which to foreground in each moment of the story.
In terms of symbolism, the hardbound book’s cover displays an image of a bird. For Pattee, as well as for her main character Annie, the bird represents the freedom to create despite the many challenges that women – especially women in the past – have faced. Pattee herself feels that her ability to be a creative person, a writer, is thanks to the many sacrifices that her mother and other female ancestors made. In the book, as well, Annie’s mother sacrifices her dreams of creativity for her daughter’s freedom to create.
Pattee explained that Tilt is a feminist re-framing of disaster tropes. Whereas U.S. American disaster novels and books are often about the individual male outsurviving thanks to ingenuity and a gun, this book demonstrates the communal urge that often occurs in real life after disaster strikes – people helping one another out even while outsized emotions take charge of amygdalas and nervous systems. The main character was not written to be a hero, but to be a vehicle for seeing what post-disaster reality might look like.
And it turns out that the book has had an impact on real life too. In her book, one of Pattee’s characters speaks about how many schools in the city would not hold up to a large earthquake’s destabilizing forces. As a result of her careful research, Portland has designated funds toward retrofitting older schools to be in better shape against earthquake damage.
Hillsboro’s schools, on the other hand, are in great shape!
After the talk, Pattee signed books for participants and chatted with them. To one person, she said “this is one of the best run events that I have been to as a speaker.”
