Conversation Series Fall 2025 Sofa Issues
A Bounce House at the Block Party
“I’m a person who believes that making the world a better place isn’t just going to happen magically, that it takes work and effort and everyone working together to make it happen. I sometimes struggle with wondering, what is my part in that? And what can I do beyond what I’m already doing?”
With larger-scale problems feeling so hard to chip away at, the importance of knowing your neighbors comes back to me again and again. When I did anti-surveillance work in New Orleans before I moved to Portland, a lot of the older folks we would speak to about safety and surveillance would say, “We didn’t used to need cameras, but now I need a camera to feel safe, ’cause no one hangs out on their porches anymore, and we don’t know each other.” We can start to organize ourselves right where we are to make a safer, more sustainable way of life, and perhaps those small actions can give a new sense of hope. That’s why I wanted to interview my neighbor Devin Harkness, a school counselor who lives two houses down from me and often acts as a bit of a neighborhood glue. It turns out Devin’s a big believer in hope and conversations, too.
Lou: What makes you interested in conversations with people who might be different than you?
Devin: It feels like that’s the way to understanding. I feel like there’s no number of things that can happen online that will increase understanding. And that the only way for real understanding to happen is just people sitting down, face to face, talking to each other and seeing each other as human beings. There’s a dehumanization that has happened, and our salvation lies in rehumanizing everyone.
Lou: Cause you do that in your work, especially when there’s a conflict or disagreement. That’s the only way to approach it that would be effective, right?
Devin: Every day. Every day. I’m a school counselor, and I work with kids all day. Part of what I try to do is give them tools to make the world a better place and to connect with other people. A big thing I try to do is help them figure out positive ways to resolve conflicts. ‘Cause a lot of the problems we’re having right now in the world are unhealthy ways of resolving conflicts. I try to give the students the experience of sitting down with a person face to face and working things out, whatever that is, whatever that takes. Even big conflicts, like if somebody has hurt somebody physically.
Lou: What is it like to do that work?
Devin: My favorite thing is to take kids that have a conflict, sit down with them and try to help figure out what creative way of resolving the conflict we can come up with. Sometimes it’s just talking. Other times, it’s some combination of talking and doing something that actually bonds us together and reminds us that we enjoy hanging out together, like playing a game. And when they come up with something different, it’s better than anything that I could have thought of.
Lou: How did you get into school counseling? How’d you know you wanted to do that?
Devin: My dear friend Rafe, with whom I had been very close friends for a long time–we had worked together in two different jobs. He left the job where we were working together, an international student exchange program, and he went back to school to get his school counseling degree. And I was like, “That’s awesome. This sounds like so much fun. I’m going to do that too.”
Lou: It’s good to have someone to follow sometimes.
Devin: Yeah, he has kind of been my role model in many different areas of my life. He also purchased a house, and I was like, “Ooh, I can purchase a house too, I think, because you just did that.” That’s why I bought this house, because of him basically. He inspired me to do that.
Lou: Do you guys still hang out?
Devin: Oh yeah, he’s family. We met in the summer of ‘98 cause we both got hired at this day-camp in Seattle. And he was the first trans person I ever knew, and he introduced me to that world. I was definitely not identifying as straight at the time that I met him.
Lou: Seattle in the nineties. How could you be straight?
Devin: I know! But he introduced me to this queer world that I hadn’t experienced before. And I was just like, “Oh my God, I feel at home.” I’d never felt that level of acceptance before. Not that I didn’t feel acceptance, but people saw me in a whole new way that I hadn’t ever been seen in before. Nobody assumed I was straight, which was just the best feeling. I don’t even know why that feeling is so good, but it’s so good.
Lou: It’s something about being seen, right? It feels good to be seen for all your human complexity. And all the different things that make you.
Devin: There’s nothing like that. It’s a euphoric feeling.
Lou: Absolutely. It’s funny thinking about neighbor stuff. I feel like, especially nowadays, a lot of the queer and trans people that I talk to sometimes are like, “I don’t wanna talk to my neighbors ’cause what if they’re transphobic or homophobic?” And I’m like, totally, that is a risk, and it’s important to think of in the context of all your other privileges and identities, but to take that risk feels important. ‘Cause more often than not, people are accepting when you’re right in front of them.
Devin: I think so, too. I have to believe that. And you might be the first trans person they’ve ever met or talked to. Knowingly. And you might be that person who makes them go, “Maybe if my neighbor’s that cool, trans people aren’t all bad!” I don’t know.
To me, it all starts with just one person sometimes. Maybe you have a person in your family, and because of that, you learn more about their identity or politics, and you’re a little bit more open to these ideas. I have to believe that people want to connect with other people, and that’s the way forward, these single connections.
Lou: That’s something I think about a lot. I’m really curious about what makes people feel safe.
Devin: For me, it’s partly that I see human connection as our way to a better world. And also because I’m just super curious about people. Ever since I was really young, I’ve always loved just talking to people and figuring out what makes them tick and what they care about, and what their stories are like.
It started when we lived in China for a year when I was ten years old. We lived on a university campus in a dorm, and I would just go out and wander around our campus without my parents or anything like that. I’d meet security guards or people building a brick wall, and just talk to them and try to learn about them, and have conversations with people.
Then, when I was a little older, like my late teens, I started carrying around a tape recorder. And I would just interview people and talk to people. And I carried it on my travels and backpacked through Central America and interviewed people from all over the place and just talked to them. Just asked them questions and heard their stories.
So I have these archives of interviews that I’ve done with people from all over the world and all different sorts of places that I’ve never quite figured out what to do with. I want to create some kind of podcast, an interview podcast. There are all these people that I want to interview. I just can’t quite figure out what the crossover point is for all of them. Or what the focus is.
Lou: But could your curiosities be the focus, and could that be enough? I think it’s enough. Maybe it’s because that’s what I’m doing. Laughs. What kinds of people do you want to interview?
Devin: All sorts of people. Mostly people whom I respect. Or people who have done something that I think is amazing. That could be a person who’s an amazing parent, or a person who creates something that I think is really amazing or important, or just somebody whose point of view I want to hear—someone who I want to help tell their story.
I want to go around our neighborhood and interview all the people who have been here for a long time in the neighborhood, especially the families of color, the black families who are still here who have not moved away. There were so many black families on our block here in Northeast Portland when I first moved in. And now they’re all gone. Mostly—they’re almost all gone.
Lou: Gentrification and redlining are such a part of this area of Portland’s history, right?
Devin: I want to find a way to preserve that information. ‘Cause so many of these families are moving away, and then there’s just no way to get that information anymore. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.
Lou: What do you imagine you might find or discover?
Devin: No idea. I want to know, though—just the history of this place. I want to know more about it.
Lou: What do you know about this block or this neighborhood?
Devin: Not much other than just my own experience. Cause I moved into that house in 2003.
I know that the person who lived there before me was a woman who was, I think, in her seventies maybe, a white woman, who I think had a black husband who died. And she had a couple of kids, or at least one daughter, and then the grandkids lived with her because the daughter was either incarcerated or she was MIA. The kids were maybe three or five. That age. They were very young kids.
When they moved out, there was a lot of stuff left behind, including this stack of letters that had been written from the father of the children, who was in prison, to the daughter. And it just tells a story, a very common story, of families being torn apart by incarceration and the impact of that trickling down. It shows the impact that the incarceration system might have on kids–the cycles of oppression, violence, and all that stuff.
Lou: Do you still have the letters?
Devin: Yeah. I have a whole box of stuff. Artifacts that I collected from the house.
Lou: Is there anyone else on the block who you feel like you know?
Devin: I know a lot of the neighbors really well.
Lou: How’d you do that?
Devin: Just being here for a long time.
Lou: If there was one thing you could do to make the neighborhood better, what would it be?
Devin: I think getting people together, giving people opportunities to be together, spend time together, and to get to know each other. That’s the best thing I think. It takes time and it takes effort, and you have to create opportunities for people to get to know each other.
Lou: Can I ask you a deep question?
Devin: Of course.
Lou: What is your orientation towards hope right now? Do you have hope for the future, or do you struggle with that?
Devin: Definitely. I find myself constantly having to pull back into the present moment, whatever that happens to be, and just try to live there as much as possible. I’m also a person who believes that making the world a better place isn’t just going to happen magically, that it takes work and effort, and everyone working together to make it happen. I sometimes struggle with, what is my part in that? And what can I do beyond what I’m already doing?
I feel like my chosen career path is part of my hope for the future.
I have hope that we can make the world better. And I have hope that we can make things better in our country. I know everything that’s happening right now is destroying a lot of things that have taken a lot of time to build. I think that I can’t give up on the idea that things can be rebuilt and regrown and that there will be a rebound.
And because we are in this two-party system, we’re stuck here, and I don’t know what to do to get us out of that. I don’t hold that much hope that it is going to change in my lifetime.
I see a lot of kids doing really cool things, and especially queer kids. And I want them to have hope. A lot of the kids I work with are very insulated from a lot of the horrible things that are happening.
Lou: Yeah. But you get to see what’s possible when they have resources and support, or as much as they can.
Devin: My school in terms of our support for queer students, it could not really be much better. There’s always more you can do, but our queer kids feel as comfortable as I think kids are likely to feel in school. So many kids are out, and people don’t seem to be afraid to say, “I’m non-binary,” “I’m trans,” or “I’m gay,” or whatever.
There’s lots of kids still figuring it out. We had a big queer party at the end of this school year which was created by the students and my intern, who is a non-binary trans person. And they had what they called an L-G-B-B-Q at the end of the school year, the kids just latched onto this idea, I dunno who came up with it. It was just this big beautiful queer party. That was really special.
Lou: I feel like it helps a lot, being present and being with kids. I’m looking for ways to feel a little more hopeful. I feel hopeful on a small scale, like my relationships with people and the garden and things changing, the seasons continuing—but definitely less of it on a large scale.
Devin: What happens four years from now? I know that the next four years will just mean one thing after another that goes beyond my ability to predict or even sometimes comprehend of how awful and bad it is.
But after that, where is our hope?
Lou: That’s why I think it’s great that even after working in an intense job that you’re still interested in investing into the neighborhood and building a closer community. Cause those are the people that are going to have your back if something happens, like a disaster or something. But it does take effort, right? And it does take work. But I commend you for making that effort. We’ve got to celebrate each other, too, right?
Devin: I feel like part of why I want to get to know my neighbors is because—it sounds weird—but I’m a little bit lazy sometimes, and I want my friends to be like right here. I don’t want to have to go far away.
Lou: That’s a great reason. I’m psyched about the block party. I’m about to leave town for a few weeks, but then I’ll be back. Let me know if I can help.
Devin: So you’ll be here for the block party!
Lou: I wish I had a slip and slide. That could be fun.
Devin: Oh, we’ll get a bounce house like last year. That was pretty epic. Our 5-year-old would be very sad if we didn’t. And even the adults…
Lou: Yeah. When do you get to go in a bounce house as an adult?
Devin: At our block party!
Lou Blumberg is an artist, facilitator, and educator with ties to San Francisco, New Orleans, and Portland. With a belief that a better world is possible, their deeply personal practice deals with conflict and its impact on our relationships and lives; surveillance and safety; and joy in despairing times. They are part of the MFA Art and Social Practice program at Portland State University and a co-organizer of Techies 4 Reproductive Justice.
Devin Harkness is a school counselor dedicated to uplifting student voices, with a particular focus on supporting queer youth, students of color, and neurodiverse students. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his role models: his radical partner and children.