La femme de ménage voit tout

Freida McFadden

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The Literary World Upstairs

The second-floor EWN newsroom was full of eccentric, bright, diverse news junkies. The first-floor business and advertising staff stayed away from there. Advertising staff prided themselves on never having even seen the second floor.

But everyone agreed that the real weird lived on the third floor, home to the literary magazine, radio station and a new Center for Innovative Journalism.

There is nothing so essentially Portland as a literary magazine. The Portland Review had been run by a perennial student, Robert Smithson, for nearly a decade. But the English department threatened his credits if he didn't graduate with his M.A. or start his PhD. Since a PhD in English meant a job teaching English in some rural college for the rest of his career, he reluctantly took his M.A. and went out to teach sixth graders in Portland instead.

So, everyone at EWN grinned at the idea of the much tattooed and pierced punk with his yellow-blonde Mohawk teaching sixth graders, but they wished him well. Until they found out that his replacement wasn't going to be Joe Castro, the editor of Folio, the weekly newspaper of EWN, who Robert had been training to be his successor. No, the English faculty had lost their collective minds and chosen Mayra Cantwell, a master's student and self-proclaimed award-winning poet, who promised to return the Review to its roots — a magazine focused on literature and poetry. Leave the art and design to art magazines, she told the English faculty. It was music to their ears since most of them mourned for an era of quill pens and bottles of ink.

The EWN staff knew Mayra. She had, as they say, a history with EWN and it wasn't a pretty one. Now she'd be in their building? Turning their beloved and admired magazine into something that looked like it had been done on a mimeograph? (Most of the staff didn't know what that looked like. Chief Geek Corey Washington sighed, found some images and sent them out during the editors' Zoom meeting.) The editors looked at each other in disbelief. Seriously? That's what she wanted to do? They weren't going to let that happen.

Something must be done, they said, and turned their gaze to their faculty advisor, whose own hijinks as a former EWN staffer were still gossiped about — not only in the newsroom, but across campus. 'Devious bastard' was one of the kinder labels administrators and faculty muttered under their breaths.

But EWN faculty advisor Ryan Matthews had his own history with Mayra Cantwell. He knew her well. (No, not in the Biblical sense. Mayra was one of the few women he hadn't slept with during those years.) She'd targeted him for his humiliation of her at a Powell's poetry slam six years ago when he was a cocky sophomore EWN writer.

Her vendetta had gone on for three years and sucked in EWN staff and editors, PSU student government and Portland's literary community, before she just disappeared. People shrugged it off as the stay-home orders of the pandemic, but Ryan wasn't so sure.

She was back, now, though. She still had an axe to grind. And she thought the Review was the perfect platform to get her revenge. Even if she burnt it all down in the process, she'd happily pour on the fuel and feed the flames.

And dear God, Ryan was faced with being her advisor?

Well this should be fun.

A Literary Life is book 21 of Newsroom PDX, a series of political thrillers set in downtown Portland, Oregon. Foul language, some sex, lots of politics. Portland weird at its finest.

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