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Cari Luna originally started writing her debut novel, \u201cThe Revolution of Everyday,\u201d as a Dear John Letter to New York City. She was born there and lived there on and off until 2007, when she just couldn\u2019t afford to stay any longer. But after she moved to Portland and got some distance, the book became a love letter as well.

The story is about a group of people squatting in New York City\u2019s Lower East Side in the \u201890s. It was the early days of gentrification, when then Mayor Rudy Guliani was cracking down on squats, meaning the characters are living under constant threat that their building will get torn down.

Now the novel is one of five finalists for the Oregon Book Award\u2019s Ken Kesey Award for Fiction. You can hear our conversations with the other four finalists in our Fiction Episode.

In this extended interview, we cover a range of topics:

What Luna wanted to write about
\u201cWhat came first was the idea of how new york had changed in the time I\u2019d been there and gentrification.\u201d

Gentrification
\u201cIt\u2019s one thing to move into a neighborhood that already has an existing population and culture and try to fit yourself into that and join the neighborhood and be part of the community. It\u2019s another thing to try to change the neighborhood to resemble what you came from.\u201d

Occupy Wall Street
\u201cIt was wonderful to see there was a genuine appetite for radical protest in the country. It was really disheartening, though unsurprising, to see how it was squashed. My daughter\u2026was eighteen months old when the Portland campus cleared, and I had been going down there for general assembly that day. We watched the Occupy Portland get evicted from a safe distance, because she was a little one. That was hard and really disappointing. I thought we were placed in a moment where real change might happen\u201d

New York and Portland\u2019s fights for affordable housing
\u201cI feel a little guilty as a transplant from New York. Though I think we are less vilified than the transplants from California. I\u2019m hoping that Portland does a better job at protecting its citizens and its housing than New York has\u2026\u201d

And here\u2019s Luna\u2019s full reading that we excerpted in the Fiction Episode.