Skip to main content
When the neighborhood bookstore Up Up Books, which used to be across from Revolution Hall, shuttered at the end of 2025, owner Michelle Gutman was exhausted. It had been three meaningful but stressful years of hosting book talks and community programs, selling books and trying to make rent. She transitioned the store to online-only sales and thought she was done. It took a very special offer to motivate Gutman to get back in the game, and it came from Rich Perin, co-founder of the Buckman Journal.
“He had a vision,” Gutman says.
That vision is a mixed use-space with a publisher, bookstore and art gallery all under one roof, with space for workshops and events. The newly dubbed PALS building (Portland Arts and Literary Society) has its grand opening this Saturday, Sept. 12 at 1452 NE 28th Ave. The Buckman Journal headquarters is on the second floor and Up Up Books and the new Yikes! Gallery are on the main floor.
Up Up Books will focus on the local scene with a section just for work by Portland writers, including fiction, non-fiction and graphic novels, and a featured area for local small press publications.
“I think it’s going to be great,” Gutman says. “It’s more people to collaborate with. It makes it more fun.”
The Sept. 12 event will launch Buckman Journal’s new issue, Shed. (Tortured writers, take note: there will also be a tarot card reader at the event from 4–6 pm doing mini-readings on melting creative blocks, developing characters and filling plot holes.) Yikes! is showing work from the pages of Shed.
The PALS building marks a new chapter for Buckman Journal, too. The operation started in a garden shed in 2018, then graduated to a shared space with Honey Latte Café. Perin has no qualms about moving the headquarters out of the journal’s namesake neighborhood, he says. (PALS is in Sullivan’s Gulch, not Buckman.)
“Buckman is beyond surveyed geographies,” Perin says. “It is more of a call to action, a dare, a provocation to push boundaries.”
GO: Grand opening of PALS, Up Up Books and Yikes! Gallery, 1452 NE 28th Ave. buckmanjournal.com/events/20269/12/grand-opening-party. 3-7 pm Saturday, Sept. 12. Free.
