I had a wonderful time yesterday in Portland, Oregon, about 200 miles south of my home town. It’s a beautiful city, home to a bunch of cool bloggers, one of the wiggiest highway systems you’ve ever seen, the only theoretically active volcano in the lower 48, and the you-gotta-see-it-to-believe it Powell’s Bookstore.

It’s so big that the main store, which last I was there already took up much of two blocks, has several also-very-large satellite stores. Which is where I got to hear Rachel Kramer Bussel, Portland local Shanna Germain, and LA’s Stan Kent read from Rachel’s twin anthologies, He’s on Top: Erotic Stories of Male Dominance and Female Submission and She’s on Top: Erotic Stories of Female Dominance and Male Submission..

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The reading was way better attended than the store had expected — there were maybe 30 chairs and about 50 people there, which, I gather, is a pretty good turnout. The audience was about two-thirds women, the average age was somewhere in the high 30s to low 40s.

Rachel started out reading sections from Donna George Storey’s “Yes,” about an impromptu two-and-a-half-way from He’s on Top, and ended with her own (pseudonymous) “Feeder” from She’s on Top about a dominant woman who shares a cooking and hand-feeding fetish with her partner. (Mmm, sex and food!)

Shanna Germain read from “The Sun is an Ordinary Star” from He’s on Top, a sweet and very erotic story about a top coming to terms with his partner’s just-concluded lumpectomy and chemotherapy.

Stan Kent, who as a boy went to an archetypical English boy’s school, complete with paddling, read a funny, barkingly pornographic, and highly convoluted story about a schoolmistress who turns the tables on the “head student” of a kinky, BDSM-intensive “executive training” school. (The convolutions involved Kent trying to fit his story inside the tropes of a boy’s school without going to jail for writing anything to do with, well, an ordinary schoolmistress disciplining an actual boy who’d previously gotten the drop on her.)

So, you might ask, was it worth driving the equivalent of Boston to New York and back in a day worth it? Definitely. The weather might have been worse but it’s a lovely drive even in the rain. I had a great time and it was good to see Rachel again anyway. It was also the first time I’ve really gotten off the main drag and taken in the town — it’s got some extremely cool neighborhoods, sort of like a cross between Greenwich Village, Vancouver, B.C., and Gray’s Harbor County (logging-port home of Kurt Cobain) all rolled into one.