Portland author Cheryl Strayed lends hand to Buckman program

Cheryl Strayed was terrified.

She wasn’t facing a bear, or a rattlesnake, or a scorching or snowy landscape, as she chronicled in her New York Times bestseller, “Wild,” an account of her 1993 solo journey on 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail.

Strayed, a Northeast Portland mom, was thinking about what she’d say to a bunch of grade-schoolers.

Sure, she was a guest of Oprah this summer to talk about kicking off the billionaire’s book club 2.0.

Sure, Reese Witherspoon has signed the movie rights to portray her in a “Wild” movie set to film next summer.

But Strayed wasn’t sure if the kids at Buckman Arts Focus Elementary School would think she was all that cool. Or if they’d listen.

“I’ve talked to thousands and thousands of people,” 44-year-old Strayed said by phone this week from a hotel room in St. Paul, Minn. “I’ve given probably 200 talks, but none of them have been to children. ... I thought that keeping the attention of a roomful of elementary-school children, they can get easily distracted. What if I’m boring?”

Strayed somehow managed to keep the crowd at bay at Buckman, where she’s sent her second-grade son and first-grade daughter since kindergarten.

Despite the adult-only passages in the book, “I actually did tell them a lot of the story,” she says. “I told them my mom died and in my sorrow I just didn’t know what to do with myself. The two things that made me feel good were walking and being in the wilderness, so I set out on this adventure.”

For the first time in any of her public presentations, she showed the children a slide show of photos, and brought her backpack and pitched the actual tent she used on the trail back in 1993, when she was 26.

Strayed thinks they got something out of it. After hearing her talk, students returned to their classes to do illustrated writing projects that will be on display the night of Oct. 29, when she lends her star power to a fundraiser called “The Arts Have Strayed.”

“My 7-year-old son wrote a poem based on an anecdote she told about a chipmunk,” says Sarah Bowen Shea, a Buckman mother of three, a fellow writer and co-founder of the blog “Another Mother Runner.”

Starving artists

It was Bowen Shea who came up with the idea for the fundraiser, and Strayed was quick to agree.

As her readers know, Strayed — who gained a cult following for her “Dear Sugar” advice columns on a blog called The Rumpus — infuses her life with the arts.

“I’ve wanted to be writer since I was a little kid,” she says. “For me it was those teachers that talked about artists and writers, shared those lives with me — that was the first spark in me that I could be a writer too.”

When it came to her own children, Strayed says she and her husband — filmmaker Brian Lindstrom — sought an arts-rich public education for that reason.

As their son, Carver, was about to enter kindergarten three years ago, they lived in the South Tabor neighborhood but tried to get into Buckman through the district-wide lottery.

When their son didn’t get in, the family decided to rent the South Tabor home and move into the Buckman neighborhood so he could enroll there. A few months ago, they moved from inner Southeast to inner Northeast, still in the school’s boundaries.

Private school wasn’t an option, Strayed says, because both she and Lindstrom are big public school believers, having come from working-class backgrounds and being products of public schools.

Also, until the recent success of “Wild,” she says it was never a financial reality: “We’re both starving artists.”

At Buckman, Strayed says, her kids love to draw, dance and perform in plays.

Buckman students get four classes in the arts each week: six weeks each of visual art, drama, music and dance. There’s also one period in which the art teachers bring art into the classroom.

The school is less affluent than people assume: 40 percent of students are eligible for free- or reduced-price meals. Fifty-seven percent of the students live in the Buckman catchment area; the rest come from across the district.

Strayed also cherishes the community’s high value on the arts — she wishes all public schools had the means to return to their past glory that way.

“It goes back to the arts education I received,” she says. “My mother never went out of her way to make sure we went to the best schools. I had an art teacher, a music class, a librarian, a library. Now these things are considered extra.”

It’s ironic, she adds, that Buckman has to be labeled as an arts magnet school: “I don’t think my kids are being immersed in the arts. I think they’re getting a basic arts education that every kid in the world should receive.”

A school resource

Portlanders will vote Nov. 6 on a general election ballot measure that would provide arts funding for schools and arts organizations. The annual flat tax of $35 for every income-earning resident comes with much support and criticism; Strayed, not surprisingly, is a big supporter.

Buckman Principal Brian Anderson says the school does not receive any extra funds for its arts designation.In fact, like all Portland schools faced with budget cuts this year, he says he was forced to eliminate two full-time art teacher positions, in visual arts and dance.

The community rallied in the spring, and the foundation came up with the funds to restore both positions.

That process, Bowen Shea says, “lit a fire under our feet to organize events that would reach the wider Portland community, not just the Buckman one. Given Cheryl’s immense success and popularity — as well as her generous spirit — it was a logical step to turn to her as a resource we could mine to raise funds.”

Anderson echoes that thought.

“We’re looking at how to sustain the program if we do lose one of those teachers in upcoming years,” Anderson says. “It was a wakeup call.”

The Buckman Foundation will use the proceeds from the Oct. 29 event to stave off future cuts. A third of the funds will go to the Portland Schools Equity Fund.

“When they asked me to do this, I said if you think it’ll bring money in, I’m happy to do it,” Strayed says. “I hope it’ll be a success. I’m really over hearing myself talk about myself at this point. I’ve had enough of me. But if I can use my voice to bring something to the school, I’m really happy to do it.”

The event will feature a reading and discussion with Strayed, who also wrote two other books: “Tiny Beautiful Things” and “Torch.”

The 6 p.m. gathering is an hourlong event for up to 60 people at ENSO Urban Winery, three blocks from the school. It’ll include food from Meat Cheese Bread and sweets from Sweetpea. Tickets are $100 per person.

At 7:30 p.m., Strayed will share excerpts from her books in the Buckman cafetorium, followed by a discussion and book signing. Tickets are $30 per person; both events are a package deal of $120, available at theartshavestrayed.org.

Strayed plans ‘Wild’ vacation

In her pre-”Wild” success, Cheryl Strayed could usually be found at any of her favorite Portland stomping grounds — Powell’s Books on Hawthorne, Broadway Books, Laurelhurst and Mt. Tabor Park.

These days, she’s in and out of town, and still surprised when people recognize her on the street. Recently, she was in a parking lot in Northwest Portland when a man pulled his car up next to her and rolled down his window. “He says, ‘Hey Cheryl, how you doing?’ “ she says. “I said, ‘Oh, I’m great, how are you?’ I said, ‘I’ve forgotten your name,’ just assumed I knew him. He said, ‘Oh, we’ve never met. Congratulations for your success. We’re all so proud of you.’ “

Usually, Strayed says, people will just say, “I loved your book.”

Then there was her recent trip to Minnesota. In the airport, a woman stood next to her holding a copy of “Wild.” Strayed saw it and wondered if she should say anything. She finally introduced herself, and signed the woman’s book.

For the next six weeks or so, Strayed will keep juggling travel and family.

Just before Thanksgiving, she’s planning to take a six-week hiatus from her book tour: a family vacation to Australia, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand.

“It’s the gift I’m going to give to myself and my family for all that we’ve sacrificed this past year,” Strayed says. “My schedule has been positively insane.”

She’ll pull her kids out of school for 2 1/2 weeks (plus all of the no-school days) during the holiday season as they travel — with no set agenda or reservations.

“I just want to walk along the beaches, see the villages and jungles,” she says. “Just play cards, eat good food, savor each others’ company in a foreign place.”

They’ll be overseas until the new year, spending Christmas at a friend’s house in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and making sure to let Santa know to leave their presents at their Portland house, per her kids’ instructions.

Strayed says she’d also like to do some writing on the trip, perhaps in preparation for her next projects — a novel she started before “Wild” that she wants to return to, and another memoir.

For now, she’s enjoying every moment of the fame.

“I obviously have this big thing that happened to me, and I think that as a writer — to be plugging along for so long and have this response — I want to rise to the moment,” she says. “This is a really hard, intense year, and it won’t always be this way. It’s like riding a rocketship."