July 22, 2025, 2:21 p.m.
help us protect space for art and literature in portland!
the grapefruits sometimes art mail
Hello friends and family! I'm emailing to share some news about l'école buissonnière, a new nonprofit I have been helping to get off the ground over the past few months, and to put out the word to our community as we seek support for our next steps.
This is a project that came about after the beloved Mother Foucault's bookshop here in Portland moved into a new building this past January, and invited me to help establish artist studios on the second floor. With support from Mother Foucault’s and now l'êcole buissoniére, we provide working and exhibition space for seven artists including myself, and are getting ready to host our first open studios event this August. (P.S. I promise I'll share more info and updates about us soon!)
This space and community are so special and important to protect, especially in the context of the lack of affordable art studio space in Portland (and most other cities) and the general precarity of maintaining a professional art practice in a culture that prioritizes quick profit over deep thought. Mother Foucault’s has always been a home for this kind of work and the connection it inspires, and the new nonprofit and securing our building will allow us to make sure we can continue to offer this kind of resource and gathering place for many years to come. I hope you will share our fundraiser widely and consider donating if you are in a position to do so--we need a lot of help to make this vision a reality and I think we can do it if enough of us pitch in!
Keep reading to learn more about what we are doing and how you can help. And please feel free to email me if you have questions or want to chat more about any of this! Thank you SO much for your support of and belief in the weird radical creative work and communities that make our lives more beautiful and interesting, even if they don't make us rich : )
Dear Mother Foucault’s Friends, Family, and Fans,
We have big news, and we need your help!
Many of you have gotten to visit our new incredible location in the historic 1892 Nathaniel West building (if you haven’t yet, come by, we’d love to see you!), and guess what - after fifteen years we finally have the chance to buy our building. But we need to raise $300,000 by September 21st, or we lose this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to secure a permanent home.
So, today we kick off our GoFundMe to help Mother Foucault’s to secure the first down payment for our building.
Mother Foucault’s Bookshop is a Portland institution that has fostered a radical community of serious readers for over fifteen years. More than a bookstore, Mother Foucault's has also been an incubator, a stage, a meeting space, a dream space (and a dream) for writers and artists of all stripes where the dream of Portland thrives. Now we're asking our community to help us stay here forever.
This work has been formalized by our new nonprofit, l'école buissonnière, whose mission is to build, hold, and promote spaces for art, literature, literary translation, and scholarship, with the goal of increasing expression, connection (spiritually, emotionally, communally), and other forms of relational action, and to encourage the development of new writers, artists, photographers, scholars, translators, and, most crucially, readers.
Below you will find more specific information about our Go Fund Me, or go directly to our site to make a donation today, and please share this email with folks who are interested in helping us.
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Our Urgent Goal: We must raise $450,000 by September 21, 2025, to secure the first down payment for our building. We have gathered the community support of local social impact investors and donors. Now we want to call on our larger community for their support.
What Your Donation Supports:
Your contribution will help us:
Buffer against Portland's ever-increasing real estate market that recurrently prices out artists and writers who’ve helped create this city;
Ensure that the current and next generations of writers, artists, creatives and musicians continue having a stable, vibrant place to call home;
Expand by growing new programs, including art and writing workshops and literature seminars, art installations and exhibitions, a center for literary translation, and an incubator for launching small press publishing, all of which are what have made Portland’s creative spirit unique in the world;
Sustain our space where misfits, dreamers, makers, radical readers, and visionaries collide.
How You Can Help: Every dollar makes you a part of securing this legendary space.
Donor Perks:
- $50: A Mother Foucault’s tote!
- $100: A curated book bundle + an invite to our “Back-to-Ecole!” party + all above perks.
- $5,000+: Your name on our “Et in Arcadia, Ego” wall.
Join us in building a legacy and being part of yet another way that Mother Foucault’s defies the odds and celebrates the weird, wonderful, and dreamy.