By Raymond Rendleman

To see Oregonian columnist Anna Griffin around town, you wouldn’t think she’d have much in common with a rock star.

Griffin, 37, keeps her brown hair at about two inches long. Her button-up shirts almost always peek above her large sweaters. But it’s unlikely any Portlander gets as many passionate voicemails as this professional provocateur.

On any given morning, she’ll hear from irate readers claiming her latest yarn damaged the city’s reputation. But Griffin’s insistence on speaking her mind also garners daily messages of encouragement, even after five years on the West Coast.

“People tell me how proud they are of my being out, which means a lot, but I don’t want to just be the lesbian columnist or the mom columnist,” she says. “I’m a firm believer that the world is not a black-and-white place.”

During a recent conversation with Just Out at Costello’s on Northeast Broadway, Griffin delves deep into her worldview while breaking up her wooden coffee stirrer into a hundred splinters. “It’s about characters, so journalism to me is a way to play psychologist,” she says. Between praises for her own therapist, she discusses how important it is to get into people’s heads so that the public not only gets the news, but also gets why it happened and why it matters. “The fact that people let you into their lives the way they do astounds me,” she adds.

And Griffin’s not planning on stopping anytime soon. She and her partner Judy Siviglia, who works as an Oregonian multimedia producer, keep a cozy Irvington home with their 6-year-old son, Griffin, and 3-year-old daughter, Ruth.

The family is glad to have escaped North Carolina. As a reporter for the Charlotte Observer, Griffin never felt completely comfortable covering the state’s political scene. “People were allowed to smoke in the Capitol, and women were supposed to wear skirts on certain days, which was a problem for me because I hate wearing them,” she recalls. “Moving to Portland was liberating.”

Griffin was raised in suburban Connecticut and ended up attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after her parents divorced. “I was always the geeky nerd outcast,” she says. “I just found an outlet for that when I started working for the student newspaper my sophomore year.” (She also took classes in psychology.)

After a decade, she was fed up enough with North Carolina to take the Oregonian’s offer, even though at first the position at Portland City Hall seemed a demotion. But editor Sandy Rowe persuaded her that Stumptown was interesting, and she hasn’t looked back since. “There will always be an appetite for real news where there’s such a history of civic engagement,” Griffin says.

Real news did hit, and painfully, this year when Portland’s first openly gay mayor admitted to lying on the campaign trail about his relationship with a Capitol intern. Before meeting any other local politicos, Griffin had joined then-Commissioner Sam Adams at a sushi restaurant in late 2004 and was impressed. She reported on Adams denying allegations in 2007, but “didn’t think that Sam was dumb enough” to have shielded “progressive-enough Portland” from the truth. When he tried to explain the cover-up at a January 20 press conference, Griffin considered herself the angriest person in the room.

“It’s sad for Portland because there are a lot of decisions that need to be made, without a mayor with the creditability,” she says. “But I don’t know that the people behind the recall are really doing the best thing for the city either.”

However, she sees good news for journalists who can bounce back with renewed diligence. In addition to two 625-word columns a week and incessant blogging, Griffin regularly writes long-form features on topics ranging from the personality of stadium-booster Merritt Paulson to the struggles of a local mother and daughter with cancer.

Eager college students and writers packed her “Storytelling with Style” seminar with Oregonian editor Jack Hart at the University of Oregon last month. She participated in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Building a Better Journalist Conference to inspire other nerds to ask the tough questions, memorably telling the crowd how she puts in unpaid overtime to develop the stories that matter most.

Back at her favorite neighborhood café, Griffin ruminates on why that dedication is so critical. “I’m not really covering politics, but I’m covering power and how power works,” she says. “And people are endlessly fascinating as you hear them figuring themselves out as they’re talking to you.”