The Archive Project: Recent Episodes
Literary Arts
In partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting, Literary Arts is building a retrospective of some of the most engaging talks from the world’s best writers over the first 30 years of Portland Arts & Lectures in Portland.
Tune into this conversation from the 2025 Portland Book Festival featuring author Angela Flournoy in conversation with author Renée Watson.
In this episode, we feature Timothy Snyder as part of a Literary Arts Special Event at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
Every once in a while, a writer arrives in a historic moment who can explain it, even while it is still actually occurring. M. Gessen is one of these writers. They are a part of the lineage of other incredible writers of their moments, like George Orwell, and Hannah Arendt.
Gessen is the author of eleven books and has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2014, and is a columnist for the New York Times. They won the National Book award in 2017 for The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, and became a household name with their bestselling book Surviving Autocracy, which was published in 2020 and written as both a warning and a call to action in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election.
Gessen’s talk is a rare glimpse into their childhood and early professional life – growing up in the Soviet Union and emigrating at the age of 14; their early experience in Boston and how it shaped their life personally and professionally; their return to Moscow as a journalist and a rare and strange meeting with Vladimir Putin, and how their grandmothers’ life stories shaped their work.
Gessen is one of the rare contemporary commentators on authoritarianism who has lived under such a regime, and in a democracy – and they have an urgent warning for us all.
“I’ve always thought that I was very lucky to know when I had to leave (Russia) because one of the hardest decisions that somebody has to make…is figuring out when your home is no longer your home. It was kind of a great favor that Putin did to me.”
M. Gessen is a Russian American author, translator, and journalist. They’ve written 11 books, including Surviving Autocracy, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction), and an award-winning account of the Boston Marathon bombers titled The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy. They spent years covering Putin’s regime in Russia and was famously dismissed as the editor of the Russian popular science magazine Vokrug sveta for refusing to cover a Putin event they felt was propaganda. Gessen received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, an Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. They’ve written for many US publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. Gessen is a distinguished professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College. They live in New York with their wife and children.
In this episode, we feature Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation with Omar El Akkad from the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in October 2024.
Coates’ versatility and virtuosity as a writer makes him one of the most singular and important writers at work today. He first rose to national recognition as a staff writer at The Atlantic Magazine, and in particular for an article he wrote in 2014 titled The Case for Reparations. A year later, Coates published his second book, a long essay called Between the World and Me which became an international bestseller. Coates went on to write a novel called The Water Dancer, for Marvel’s Black Panther comic book series, and a published collection of essays titled We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. For his work he has won a National Magazine Award, a MacArthur fellowship and the National Book Award, among many other prizes.
He joined us in fall 2024 to talk about The Message, a new book of essays set in Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine about how our stories – personal or political – can both hide and reveal the truth.
Coates is in conversation with Omar El Akkad, who is a journalist and author of the novels American War, What Strange Paradise and most recently One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, his debut book of nonfiction which publishes in February 2025.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. His books include Between The World and Me and The Water Dancer. He is currently a writer-in-residence at Howard University.
Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award and the Oregon Book Award. His books have been translated into 13 languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shaped our world.
Emily Wilson was cast as Athena in a stage production of The Odyssey at the age of eight. It turned out to be a defining moment in her life, that ultimately set her on a course of decades of passionate and devoted study.
Her 2018 translation of The Odyssey garnered overwhelming critical acclaim, became a bestseller, and is defining how a generation reads Homer, and by extension understands the relevance of classical literature in general. She followed up, in 2023, with her translation of The Iliad.
Her genius has been to render these ancient stories in swift, unpretentious, contemporary language, allowing us to see that despite the rise and fall of empires, despite dramatic cultural shifts and technological progress, there are some essential truths about human nature—we are creatures of hubris and humility, of conflict and collaboration, of profound selfishness and of profound sacrifice.
It is not hard to see in Homer’s Greece a startling similarity to our present-day world. Wilson assures us this is embedded in the text, writing in her introduction to The Iliad, “For a twenty-first-century reader, there is nothing unfamiliar about a partisan society riven by constant striving for celebrity dominance and attention.”
“Tell me about a complicated man,” begins The Odyssey. From this first line, Wilson establishes herself as one of the most astute translators working in the English language, a translator both of Ancient Greek and of human complexity.
“A translation, just like an original work of art, needs to have its own vision. And you need to have the humility to know that you can’t do everything. You have to commit to your own vision.”
Emily Wilson is a classicist, translator, professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of the bestselling translations of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad (winner of the 2024 Audie Award for Best Literary Fiction and Classics). In addition to Wilson’s Odyssey and Iliad, she has also published several other translated works, including translations of four tragedies of Euripides published in The Greek Plays: Bacchae, Helen, Electra, and Trojan Women, and translations of Six Tragedies by Seneca. Her other books include The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca, The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint, and Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton. Wilson was named a fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Wilson is a Professor of classical studies and chair of the program in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Wilson lives in Philadelphia with her family and pets.
Every year, the Multnomah County Library chooses one book they hope the whole city of Portland will read. Between January and April, the Library, and their partner organizations, host events based around the themes of the book, and they distribute thousands of free copies—thanks to the Library Foundation—to readers of all ages from across the county. Here at Literary Arts, our role is to bring the author to town for a talk in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
This year, the 2025 Everybody Reads selection is the memoir Solito by Javier Zamora. For information about how to engage with the program, visit the Multnomah County Library’s web site. I am thrilled to say Javier Zamora will be in Portland on Tuesday, March 11 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall for the culminating event of the 2025 Everybody Reads Program.
For now, let’s return to the 2024 Everybody Reads event, featuring Gabrielle Zevin and her novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.
Gabrielle Zevin has been steadily publishing fiction for almost two decades and has also written occasional criticism as well as award-winning screenplays. But it was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow that catapulted her to the stratosphere of literary stardom. It was a #1 New York Times bestseller and spent over 50 weeks on the fiction bestseller list.
To be sure, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is about video games, and makes a convincing argument for the power and potential of narrative storytelling in video games. But really, it is about making art, and questions about originality, appropriation, and ambition that come with that pursuit. And perhaps more so, it is a love story, about friends and creative partners, and the excitement, joy, tragedy, and betrayal that come with any long relationship. It’s about something, I’d wager, we’ve all been thinking about the past few years: connection.
Tickets for Everybody Reads 2025 with Javier Zamora are on sale now! Find your tickets here.
Gabrielle Zevin is a New York Times best-selling novelist whose books have been translated into forty languages.
Her tenth novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, was a New York Times Best Seller, a Sunday Times Best Seller, and a selection of the Tonight Show’s Fallon Book Club. Tomorrow was Amazon.com’s #1 Book of the Year, Time Magazine’s #1 Book of the Year, a New York Times Notable Book, and the winner of both the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction and the Book of the Month Club’s Book of the Year. Following a twenty-five-bidder auction, the feature film rights to Tomorrow were acquired by Temple Hill and Paramount Studios.
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry also spent many months on the New York Times bestseller list. A.J. Fikry was honored with the Southern California Independent Booksellers Award for Fiction, the Japan Booksellers’ Prize, among other honors. A.J. Fikry is now a feature film with a screenplay by Zevin. She has also written children’s books, including the award-winning Elsewhere.
She is the screenwriter of Conversations with Other Women (Helena Bonham Carter) for which she received an Independent Spirit Award Nomination for Best First Screenplay. She has occasionally written criticism for the New York Times Book Review and NPR’s All Things Considered, and she began her writing career, at age fourteen, as a music critic for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. Zevin is a graduate of Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles.
This week features a conversation from the 2024 Portland Book Festival, featuring best-selling author Ijeoma Oluo, who is a self-described “writer, speaker, and internet yeller.” She discusses her latest book, Be a Revolution: How Everyday People are Fighting and Changing the World — and How You Can, Too with Portland’s Hanif Fazal, author of An Other World and co-founder of the Center for Equity and Inclusion.
They engage in a very honest conversation about the impact that “being loud” about race and racism has had on Oluo’s personal life and mental well-being. She shares that thought she wouldn’t write another book because of that strain, but that through centering loving action that she found a new way of doing her writing work with this project. They also discuss the general writing life and process, and the importance, in the often difficult and consuming work of fighting for systemic change, of centering joy as an outcome of activism.
Oluo’s book, Be a Revolution, highlights the way people all over the country are working to create real positive change for intersectional racial equity; as Fazal points out, giving new perspectives on big ideas through the stories of real, actual people. Their stories and Oluo’s work are intended to inspire action and change, and this conversation
Ijeoma Oluo (ee-joh-mah oh-loo-oh) is a Seattle-based Writer, Speaker and Internet Yeller. Her work on social issues such as race and gender has been published in The Guardian, Esquire, Washington Post, ELLE Magazine, New York Times, NBC News and more. She has been featured on The Daily Show, All Things Considered, BBC News, and more. Her #1 NYT bestselling first book, So You Want To Talk About Race, was released January 2018 with Seal Press. Her second book, MEDIOCRE: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, was published December 2020 with Seal Press and her upcoming book, Be A Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World – and How You Can Too, was January 2024 with Harper One. Oluo was named one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine, one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Seattle by Seattle Met, one of The Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans in 2017 & 2018, and is the recipient of the Feminist Humanist Award 2018 by the American Humanist Association, the Harvard Humanist of the year 2020, the Media Justice Award by the Gender Justice League, and the 2018 Aubrey Davis Visionary Leadership Award by the Equal Opportunity Institute.
Hanif Fazal, author of An Other World, has developed and delivered innovative equity and inclusion programs across education, philanthropic, public, and non-profit sectors for over twenty years. He is currently the co-founder of the Center for Equity and Inclusion and is also an author, who writes about the fight for freedom, joy, and belonging in Black and Brown communities. His first book, An Other World, offers a hopeful path forward by nurturing identity and centering community. It’s a path where joy is the norm rather than struggle, where home and work are inclusive rather than exclusionary, and where Brown and Black relationships lead to a unique experience of freedom. Along with local and national news and podcast appearances, Hanif has spoken at South by Southwest, National Equity Summit, a two-time presenter at the CCAR summit on race, and many other equity and education-focused events. He is a National Pew Civic Change award winner, Multnomah County Hilltop award winner, and was awarded the Taste of Portland’s Changemaker award for his prolonged impact on equity and inclusion throughout Portland. Most recently, An Other World was awarded a silver medal at the 36th annual IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.
Every year, the Multnomah County Library chooses one book they hope the whole city will read. Between January and April, the Library, and their partner organizations, host events based around the themes of the book, and they distribute thousands of free copies—thanks to the Library Foundation—to readers of all ages from across the county. Here at Literary Arts, our role is to bring the author to town for a talk in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. The 2025 Everybody Reads book was the memoir Solito by Javier Zamora.
Written from the perspective of his nine-year-old self, Solito is a gripping and beautiful account of Zamora’s three-thousand-mile journey from a small village in El Salvador to his new home in United States. Epic in scope and intimate in detail, it’s a book about the family one comes from, the family one longs for, and the family one makes. Zamora conjures all the wonder, fear and imaginative capacity of his young self; clear-eyed in his depictions of cruelty and danger, insistent on recognizing kindness. He also renders his journey with vivid detail with breathtaking lyricism, paying close attention to the power of language – this comes as no surprise, given that Zamora is also an award-winning poet. The writer Sandra Cisneros said, “I have waited decades for a memoir like Solito.”
Solito isn’t simply a story of a migrant’s harrowing journey, it’s the story of a writer becoming a writer. It is also one of the most important American stories of our time.
“Poetry and history were the first tools I had to begin to explain my life so far away from the land that watched me be born and grow up for the first nine years of my life.”
Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. When he was a year old, his father fled El Salvador due to the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). His mother followed her husband’s footsteps in 1995 when Javier was about to turn five. Zamora was left at the care of his grandparents who helped raise him until he migrated to the US when he was nine. His first poetry collection, Unaccompanied, explores some of these themes.
In his debut New York Times bestselling memoir, SOLITO, Javier retells his nine-week odyssey across Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually through the Sonoran Desert. He travelled unaccompanied by boat, bus, and foot. After a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants.
Zamora is the winner of a 2024 Whiting Fellowship and the 2022 LA Times-Christopher Isherwood Prize. He holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University (Olive B. O’Connor), MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly), Stanford University (Stegner), and Yaddo. He is the recipient of a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University, a 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2017 Narrative Prize, the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign. Javier lives in Tucson, AZ, where he volunteers with Salvavision, The Kino Border Initiative, and The Florence Project.
A life-long Northwesterner, Egan has spent much of his career exploring his home region. One might even say he is the quintessential Pacific Northwest writer. He served as the first Pacific Northwest correspondent for the New York Times and he also wrote one of the definitive books about our region in 1990, The Good Rain.
During his eighteen-year tenure at the New York Times, Egan covered everything from the Exxon Valdez disaster to the OJ Simpson trial. In 2001, he and a team of reporters received a Pulitzer Prize for the series, How Race is Lived in America. Somehow, between reporting trips, he also found time to write multiple award-winning, best-selling books. He won the National Book Award in 2006 for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those who Survived the Great American Dustbowl, which was a New York Times bestseller and led to a Ken Burns documentary.
Egan joined us to talk about his most recent book is A Fever in the Heartland: The Klu Klux’s Plot to Take Over American, and the Woman who Stopped Them. Once again, Egan turns his attention to an American disaster—this time, a social and political disaster of monstrous moral proportions, tracing the swift rise and eventual collapse of the Klu Klux Klan in 1920’s Indiana. A place and time, he notes, “where one in three white males swore on a Bible to uphold white supremacy.”
A Fever in the Heartland is rigorously researched, and deeply — overwhelmingly — troubling. As a reader, it is not hard to draw parallels between these events that occurred a century ago, and all that is happening now. Egan himself said, in a recent interview, “I’m a big believer in the line that history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.” But, to explore such a dark chapter in our history requires a firm belief in our potential as a country and as a species. The only way to rise to that potential is to see ourselves clearly and learn from our past.
Timothy Egan is an American journalist and author of ten books. The most recent, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, was an immediate New York Times bestseller. Egan worked for The New York Times for 18 years, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, and then as a national enterprise reporter. As part of a team of reporters Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2001 for writing a series called How Race is Lived in America. Egan lives in Seattle with his family.
This week’s episode features one of the most highly anticipated conversations from the 2024 Portland Book Festival. Author Rachel Kushner joined the festival with her most recent novel, the Booker Prize finalist Creation Lake, her take on a noir spy thriller. We paired her with Danzy Senna, whose new novel is Colored Television, the story of a struggling novelist attempting to break into Hollywood. We invited Oregon-based writer Mat Johnson, whose most recent book is the fantastic Invisible Things, to moderate their conversation.
This conversation was titled “Deceit and Dark Humor.” Both novels featuring protagonists who are knowingly lying to the people around them: Kushner’s narrator is a spy tasked with infiltrating an anarchist cooperative in France and is actively deceiving everyone she encounters, while Senna’s protagonist, Jane, spirals into more and more lies as she tries to create a television show with a big-shot Hollywood producer.
We have a special treat at the end of the episode. Another feature of Portland Book Festival is the annual launch of our Writers in the Schools anthology, featuring creative writing from Portland-area public high school students. We’ll hear from two students:
William Nobles, Franklin HS, short story Ceiling Man
Ari Romero, junior at Lincoln HS, piece called Missing the Mark
Rachel Kushner is the author of Creation Lake, her latest novel, The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection, and the internationally bestselling novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books are translated into twenty-seven languages.
Danzy Senna is the author of four previous works of fiction, including the bestselling Caucasia and, most recently, Colored Television, as well as a memoir. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.
Mat Johnson is a Philip H. Knight Chair of the Humanities at the University of Oregon. His publications include the novels Invisible Things, Loving Day, and Pym, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the graphic novel Incognegro. Johnson is the recipient of the American Book Award, the United States Artists James Baldwin Fellowship, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.
This episode of The Archive Project features author Salman Rushdie reading from and discussing his 1999 New York Times bestseller The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Just one year after almost a decade in hiding from the Iranian government, Rushdie made his first public appearance in Portland, discussing the ideas, both mythical and musical, that inspired this New York Times bestseller. In his remaking of the myth of Orpheus, Rushdie tells the story of Vina Apsara, a pop star, and Ormus Cama, an extraordinary songwriter and musician, who captivate and change the world through their music and their romance. Beginning in Bombay in the fifties, moving to London in the sixties, and New York for the last quarter century, the novel pulsates with a half-century of music and celebrates the power of rock ‘n’ roll. In this episode, Rushdie discusses the musical and mythological influences that inspired this ambitious work of magical realism.
“The thing that I wanted to do most of all was to write a love story. And to find a way of writing a contemporary love story that was neither gushily sentimental nor fashionably cynical, but which could face up to great passion and try and make sense of it. And so, in my usual perverse way, while trying to write a modern story I found myself thinking about an ancient myth.”
Salman Rushdie is the author of several novels, including Grimus, Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and Shalimar the Clown. He has written collections of short stories, including East, West, and co-edited with Elizabeth West a collection of Indian literature in English, Mirrorwork. He has also published several works of nonfiction, among them The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, and Joseph Anton, a memoir of his life under the fatwa issued after the publication of The Satanic Verses. His fourteenth novel, Victory City, released in 2023.
This week we have a conversation between one of the ultimate literary power couples: Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt.
Paul Auster passed away in April of 2024. The New York Times obituary called him the “patron saint of literary Brooklyn.” He wrote screenplays, poetry, and nonfiction, but is probably best known as a novelist, and as an novelist his best known work is the New York Trilogy—City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, all published in the mid-1980s–which he discusses in this conversation, along with his early career as a translator of poems from the French.
Siri Hustvedt is a novelist and essayist; her essays include the collections A Pleas for Eros and the memoir The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. Her novels include The Summer Without Men and The Blazing World. In this conversation she talks about the book she was writing at the time, The Sorrows of an American.
Auster and Hustvedt were married in 1982. They came to Portland in January of 2006 and interviewed each other. At times it feels as if you are eavesdropping on an especially intelligent dinner table conversation. Their respect for each other’s work is delightful to hear – and several of the questions they remark they’ve never asked the other! It’s a rare opportunity to listen in on two great minds in conversation.
Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Bloodbath Nation, Baumgartner, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. Among his other honors are the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, and the Premio Napoli for Sunset Park. In 2012, he was the first recipient of the NYC Literary Honors in the category of fiction. He was also a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions), the PEN/Faulkner Award (The Music of Chance), the Edgar Award (City of Glass), and the Man Booker Prize (4 3 2 1). Auster was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He died at age seventy-seven in 2024.
Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, three collections of essays, a work of non-fiction, and six novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her most recent novel The Blazing World was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won The Los Angeles Book Prize for fiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.
This week’s episode features the trailblazing, legendary journalist: Connie Chung, in conversation about her new memoir, CONNIE. In her book, Chung shares the story of her decades-long career as an Asian woman in the white-male-dominated world of broadcast journalism, when she relentlessly pursued stories and fought hard for scoops. Her hard work – her schedule for many years was truly unbelievable, with six days of work on multiple programs at her own request — Her hard work, which she connects to her Chinese family tradition, catapulted her onto the co-anchor chair on the CBS Evening News and made her a household name.
Chung relates her battles and her victories with wit and humor and doesn’t hold back from calling out the sexism and racism she endured throughout her career. The book is also a portrait of an era in broadcast news where the lines between serious investigative journalism and tabloid fodder became blurred, a line Chung was often forced to walk against her will.
Journalist Lisa Ling, of CBS News, said, “For generations of Asian Americans, Connie Chung will always be our superhero. Someone who looked like us who, on a national stage, held our most important political leaders accountable. She was bold, aggressive, and unafraid. So many of us pursued broadcast journalism because she singularly showed us it was possible. I didn’t think I could respect her any more than I already do, but this most candid account of her journey reminds us that Connie Chung is nothing short of a true American icon.”
Connie Chung was interviewed by Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor, in front of a live audience in September 2024.
Connie Chung, pioneer news anchor and reporter was the first woman to co-anchor the CBS Evening News, the flagship news broadcast on CBS. Connie was only the second woman to anchor any network evening broadcast in television history.
This episode features readings and conversations from an event entitled “I See My Light Shining.” The event was a part of the Elders Project, which is sponsored by Columbia University and features interviews with African Americans from across the country. Here in Portland, acclaimed writer Renée Watson interviewed dozens of Portlanders about their lives for the project.
Through the episode, we’ll take you through the event and hear the stories of some of the elders Watson interviewed. In this episode, we interview Watson about growing up in a predominantly black neighborhood in Northeast Portland, and how that community shaped her as a person.
The event was hosted by Watson, and our guide for the episode is The Archive Project producer Matthew Workman.
Renée Watson is a #1 New York Times Bestselling author. Her young adult novel, Piecing Me Together, received a Coretta Scott King Award and Newbery Honor. Her children’s picture books and novels for teens have received several awards and international recognition. Many of her books are inspired by her experiences growing up as a Black girl in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry and fiction center around the experiences of Black girls and explore themes of home, identity, body image, and the intersections of race, class, and gender.
Watson was a writer-in-residence for over twenty years teaching creative writing and theater in public schools and community centers throughout the nation. She founded I, Too Arts Collective, a nonprofit that was housed in the Harlem brownstone where Langston Hughes lived the last twenty years of his life. The organization hosted poetry workshops for youth and literary events for the community from 2016-2019. Watson is on the Council of Writers for the National Writing Project and is a member of the Academy of American Poets’ Education Advisory Council.
Watson grew up in Portland, Oregon, and splits her time between Portland and New York City.
This episode features Malcolm Gladwell in conversation about his newest book, Revenge of The Tipping Point. He spoke with Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor in front of a live audience in downtown Portland in October 2024.
The Tipping Point hit shelves in 2000 and became a true cultural phenomenon, spending a whopping 334 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and turning everyone—from your priest to your barista—into budding social scientists. Multiple New York Times bestsellers followed, including Blink and Outliers, and in 2018, Gladwell co-founded Pushkin Industries, which that seeks to “expand the possibilities of spoken word audio,” and launched his wildly popular podcast, Revisionist History.
In both his books and his podcasts, Gladwell reveals a world of hidden connections, everyday illusions, and overlooked details. He illuminates patterns in our policy and culture, and identifies the tiny tics that drive group behavior, introducing terms like, the Law of the Few, and the 10,000-hour rule into the larger cultural lexicon.
Now, twenty-five years after The Tipping Point, Gladwell has returned to the ideas that first made him a household name. His new book, Revenge of The Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering, finds him once again exploring epidemics and viral behavior. This time, he is driven by a somewhat darker inquiry. We see the consequences of contagious phenomena and rethink the two most significant epidemics of our time: the opioid crises and Covid. Don’t worry, we are still treated Gladwell’s tremendous curiosity and humor, delving into such topics such as cheetah reproduction and the world’s most successful bank robbers.
It is his most serious and personal book to date. With Revenge of The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell again proves himself one our finest storytellers. But more importantly: He helps us reimagine the stories that we tell about ourselves.
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers — The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces the podcasts Revisionist History, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood, and Broken Record, where he, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musicians across a wide range of genres. Gladwell has been included in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list and touted as one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers.
We have been proud to partner with the National Book Foundation to present conversations featuring National Book Award finalists as part of the annual Literary Arts Portland Book Festival. The 2024 event was on the theme of awards and activism. National Book Foundation executive director Ruth Dickey led a conversation between journalist Robert Samuels, co-author of His Name Is George Floyd, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and poet m.s. RedCherries, author of Mother, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award in poetry.
RedCherries’s Mother is a multidisciplinary work of poetry and prose about Indigenous identity; the narrator has been adopted out of her tribe and raised by a non-Indian family, and is now an adult seeking to connect with her origins. RedCherries brings in oral testimony, family lore, and more exploring pasts and futures both real and imaginary. She explains some of the research that she did for the project, and how it came to be in the form it took in Mother.
Likewise, in His Name Is George Floyd, Robert Samuels and his co-author conducted hundreds of interviews with his family and friends in order to understand George Floyd’s singular life, as well as reporting and research into the history of institutional racism in the United States to place that life in the context of the systems this one man was up against. The result is a portrait of a man as well as that man’s America.
The day this episode airs on the radio is May 25, 2025, which marks five years since George Floyd’s death – the book, His Name Is George Floyd, reckons with that day and its aftermath, but is, crucially, also the story of his life.
Both books are deeply personal stories that offer insight into wider histories, drawing together both individual and shared past, present, and future. As m.s. RedCherries says, “storytelling is an act of sovereignty;” telling stories ensure survival.
Robert Samuels is a national enterprise reporter for The Washington Post who focuses on politics, policy and the changing American identity. He is also the co-author of His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction and finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Nonfiction. Samuels has covered social issues in the District of Columbia, national politics and also serves as the newsroom’s analyst for figure skating. He grew up in the Bronx and is an alumnus of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, where he was editor in chief of the school newspaper, the Daily Northwestern. He has also worked as a staff writer at The Miami Herald and the New Yorker.
m.s. RedCherries received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a JD from Arizona State University College of Law. She is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and lives in Brooklyn.
Every once in a while, a writer arrives in a historic moment who can explain it, even while it is still actually occurring. M. Gessen is one of these writers. They are a part of the lineage of other incredible writers of their moments, like George Orwell, and Hannah Arendt.
Gessen is the author of eleven books and has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2014, and is a columnist for the New York Times. They won the National Book award in 2017 for The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, and became a household name with their bestselling book Surviving Autocracy, which was published in 2020 and written as both a warning and a call to action in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election.
Gessen’s talk is a rare glimpse into their childhood and early professional life – growing up in the Soviet Union and emigrating at the age of 14; their early experience in Boston and how it shaped their life personally and professionally; their return to Moscow as a journalist and a rare and strange meeting with Vladimir Putin, and how their grandmothers’ life stories shaped their work.
Gessen is one of the rare contemporary commentators on authoritarianism who has lived under such a regime, and in a democracy – and they have an urgent warning for us all.
“I’ve always thought that I was very lucky to know when I had to leave (Russia) because one of the hardest decisions that somebody has to make…is figuring out when your home is no longer your home. It was kind of a great favor that Putin did to me.”
M. Gessen is a Russian American author, translator, and journalist. They’ve written 11 books, including Surviving Autocracy, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction), and an award-winning account of the Boston Marathon bombers titled The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy. They spent years covering Putin’s regime in Russia and was famously dismissed as the editor of the Russian popular science magazine Vokrug sveta for refusing to cover a Putin event they felt was propaganda. Gessen received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, an Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. They’ve written for many US publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. Gessen is a distinguished professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College. They live in New York with their wife and children.
This week we have a conversation from the 2024 Portland Book Festival on first-generation American food: cooking that combines tradition and lineage with evolution and personal stories. The conversation features a cookbook author and home chef, restaurant co-owners, and a writer and food editor.
We’ll hear from Kristina Cho, author of the cookbook Chinese Enough, which blends the flavors of traditional Cantonese cooking with California ingredients, reflecting her current home, and a midwestern sensibility drawn from her upbringing in Ohio. Kristina is joined by Jolyn Chen and Louis Lin, co-owners of the Portland restaurant Xiao Ye, which bills itself as “first-generation American food.” Jolyn is the general manager of Xiao Ye, and Louis is the chef – they’re both business and life partners. They grew up in California, and each worked in hospitality for years before embarking on their own restaurant, where Jolyn designed the space and Louis designed the menu. Our moderator is novelist Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans, who was the editor of the esteemed food magazine Lucky Peach, and also grew up in California.
Kristina, Jolyn, Louis, and Rachel discuss the intersections between their Asian-ness, their American-ness, and their Asian-American-ness, and how that all plays out in their relationships to food. They also talk about how where they grew up shapes their understanding of both food and family, and how the cooking and food they were drawn to comes from what was accessible or not to them early on. This relates to a conversation about the idea of authenticity, which is often misunderstood as being about tradition, but Louis eloquently describes as being true to oneself and where you are – Kristina gives an example of one of the women in her family using Bisquick in her steamed cupcakes.
One thing I loved about this conversation is how clear it is that making food, and, crucially, feeding people – which is the ultimate goal, after all, of both home cooks and restauranteurs – is about nourishment but also about making art, and art that is reflective of both where you came from and where you are now.
Let’s get into the conversation about what it means to make first-generation American food. Here are Jolyn Chen, Louis Lin, and Kristina Cho in conversation with moderator Rachel Khong.
Kristina Cho is an award-winning cookbook author, recipe developer, home cook, baker, food stylist, and photographer. Her groundbreaking debut cookbook, Mooncakes and Milk Bread, won two James Beard awards and was described as an instant classic by The New York Times. Her latest cookbook is titled Chinese Enough.
Jolyn Chen has worn many hats and lived many lives; born and raised in a small suburb of Los Angeles, she attended Cal Poly Pomona’s renowned Collins College and received her Bachelor’s in Hospitality Management. She spent her early years in the industry working in Washington, DC, soaking up all that the burgeoning food scene had to offer. Most notably was her time at Rose’s Luxury, where she really began to foster her own sense of hospitality. In true Jolyn fashion, while working two part-time jobs, she took a third at El Camino Travel, a start-up boutique travel company specializing in small, curated trips to emerging destinations. It was through that experience that she discovered her passion for design.
Jolyn would move back to LA to pursue a career in Interior Design, completing the UCLA Extension program for Interior Architecture while working at Croft House & Ginny Macdonald Design. A few years later, she and Louis would begin their chapter in Portland, where she worked as a designer at Jessica Helgerson Interior Design before embarking on their own personal project, Xiao Ye.
Louis Lin is a child of Taiwanese immigrants and was born and raised in that same suburb outside of LA. Unlike Jolyn, Louis always knew where his path would take him. After getting his degree in Business Economics and Accounting at UC Santa Barbara, he enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone. From there, his career in kitchens began; Louis spent his externship working behind Nancy Silverton at her fine dining Osteria Mozza. Upon graduating from culinary school, at the behest of his best friend, Louis moved to Washington, DC to work for James Beard winner Aaron Silverman at his first restaurant, Rose’s Luxury. Rose’s would go on to receive numerous accolades- Bon Appetit’s best new restaurant in 2014 and a Michelin Star, amongst others. When Silverman opened his second venture, Pineapple and Pearls, Louis would follow him as an opening line cook and help the tasting-menu restaurant earn 2 Michelin Stars in its inaugural year.
In 2017, Louis moved back to Los Angeles and began working at Evan Funke’s Felix Trattoria. It was there that he found his footing; working his way up from line cook to Chef de Cuisine, running day to day operations and overseeing the restaurant that has become the standard bearer for handmade pasta in the country.
Rachel Khong is the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction, and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR; O, The Oprah Magazine; Vogue; and Esquire. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Cut, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and Tin House. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission District. She lives in California, and her latest novel is titled Real Americans.
Emily Wilson was cast as Athena in a stage production of The Odyssey at the age of eight. It turned out to be a defining moment in her life, that ultimately set her on a course of decades of passionate and devoted study.
Her 2018 translation of The Odyssey garnered overwhelming critical acclaim, became a bestseller, and is defining how a generation reads Homer, and by extension understands the relevance of classical literature in general. She followed up, in 2023, with her translation of The Iliad.
Her genius has been to render these ancient stories in swift, unpretentious, contemporary language, allowing us to see that despite the rise and fall of empires, despite dramatic cultural shifts and technological progress, there are some essential truths about human nature—we are creatures of hubris and humility, of conflict and collaboration, of profound selfishness and of profound sacrifice.
It is not hard to see in Homer’s Greece a startling similarity to our present-day world. Wilson assures us this is embedded in the text, writing in her introduction to The Iliad, “For a twenty-first-century reader, there is nothing unfamiliar about a partisan society riven by constant striving for celebrity dominance and attention.”
“Tell me about a complicated man,” begins The Odyssey. From this first line, Wilson establishes herself as one of the most astute translators working in the English language, a translator both of Ancient Greek and of human complexity.
“A translation, just like an original work of art, needs to have its own vision. And you need to have the humility to know that you can’t do everything. You have to commit to your own vision.”
Emily Wilson is a classicist, translator, professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of the bestselling translations of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad (winner of the 2024 Audie Award for Best Literary Fiction and Classics). In addition to Wilson’s Odyssey and Iliad, she has also published several other translated works, including translations of four tragedies of Euripides published in The Greek Plays: Bacchae, Helen, Electra, and Trojan Women, and translations of Six Tragedies by Seneca. Her other books include The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca, The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint, and Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton. Wilson was named a fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Wilson is a Professor of classical studies and chair of the program in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Wilson lives in Philadelphia with her family and pets.
This week we have a 2024 Portland Book Fest conversation about Planet Earth, and remarkable people who are working to understand it and protect its wonders. Our moderator is Zoë Carpenter, a writer and editor who has reported all over the United States and South America for Rolling Stone, The Nation, Guernica, and other publications. She currently teaches for the Writers in the Schools program with Literary Arts.
Zoë led a conversation with two Portland-based writers. Ferris Jabr is the author of Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life, which shifts our perception of the planet from an inanimate place on which life evolved, but instead a planet that came to life and is itself alive. Jabr reveals a new vision of Earth as a vast interconnected living system – and humans are one of the most radical impacts on those systems. Jabr introduces readers to different people who are working to protect Earth’s ecology and find a way to stabilize the planet in the face of the climate crisis.
Amy Stewart is known for both the Kopp Sisters detective series along with popular works about the natural world such as The Drunken Botanist and Wicked Plants. Her latest book, which she wrote AND illustrated, is The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession. Stewart profiles fifty remarkable people whose lives have been transformed by their obsessive passion for… trees. This passion comes from a deeper commitment to being in community and radical vision for the future.
Both books explore both the human relationship to the planet and the things that make it alive, and make it livable. It’s a wondrous conversation.
Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He has also written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Scientific American. He is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from UC Berkeley and MIT. His work has been anthologized in several editions of Best American Science and Nature Writing. Ferris Jabr lives in Portland, Oregon, with his husband, Ryan, their dog, Jack, and more plants than they can count. His book is titled Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life.
Amy Stewart is the New York Times bestselling author of The Drunken Botanist, Wicked Plants, and several other popular nonfiction titles about the natural world. She’s also written seven novels in her beloved Kopp Sisters series, based on the true story of one of America’s first female deputy sheriffs. She lives in Portland, Oregon. Her most recent book is titled The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession.
Zoë Carpenter is a journalist and fiction writer from Oregon. Her writing has been published in Rolling Stone, The Nation, Guernica, Narratively, and elsewhere. A recipient of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, she has also received grants and fellowships from the Pulitzer Center, the Catwalk Art Institute, Fishtrap, and PLAYA. She has an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was a postgraduate Zell Fellow. Prior that she was an editor at The Nation, where she worked on reported features, investigations, and opinion pieces for print and online.
Each year, Portland area youth spend months writing and competing in poetry slam competitions on high school campuses across the city. And each April, 20 finalists compete for the title of city-wide Portland slam champ at Verselandia! in front of an audience of nearly 1,000.
We’re excited to share that the 2025 Verselandia! competition returns to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Thursday, April 24 at 7 pm. For more information visit our website literary-arts.org.
This episode, the theme is looking forward and looking back. We’ll look back to the 2024 Verselandia!, hear some of the best poems of the night, and talk to the winner of last year’s competition about what it was like to win and how she’s preparing for this year’s event. We’ll also hear some poems from students competing in this year’s Verselandia.
We’ll also talk to student poets and educators about how they’re getting ready for this year’s Verselandia and what writing and performing poetry does for the participants.
A quick note to listeners: Portions of this episode contain mature themes that may not be suitable for all audiences.
Every year, the Multnomah County Library chooses one book they hope the whole city will read. Between January and April, the Library, and their partner organizations, host events based around the themes of the book, and they distribute thousands of free copies—thanks to the Library Foundation—to readers of all ages from across the county. Here at Literary Arts, our role is to bring the author to town for a talk in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. The 2025 Everybody Reads book was the memoir Solito by Javier Zamora.
Written from the perspective of his nine-year-old self, Solito is a gripping and beautiful account of Zamora’s three-thousand-mile journey from a small village in El Salvador to his new home in United States. Epic in scope and intimate in detail, it’s a book about the family one comes from, the family one longs for, and the family one makes. Zamora conjures all the wonder, fear and imaginative capacity of his young self; clear-eyed in his depictions of cruelty and danger, insistent on recognizing kindness. He also renders his journey with vivid detail with breathtaking lyricism, paying close attention to the power of language – this comes as no surprise, given that Zamora is also an award-winning poet. The writer Sandra Cisneros said, “I have waited decades for a memoir like Solito.”
Solito isn’t simply a story of a migrant’s harrowing journey, it’s the story of a writer becoming a writer. It is also one of the most important American stories of our time.
“Poetry and history were the first tools I had to begin to explain my life so far away from the land that watched me be born and grow up for the first nine years of my life.”
Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. When he was a year old, his father fled El Salvador due to the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). His mother followed her husband’s footsteps in 1995 when Javier was about to turn five. Zamora was left at the care of his grandparents who helped raise him until he migrated to the US when he was nine. His first poetry collection, Unaccompanied, explores some of these themes.
In his debut New York Times bestselling memoir, SOLITO, Javier retells his nine-week odyssey across Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually through the Sonoran Desert. He travelled unaccompanied by boat, bus, and foot. After a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants.
Zamora is the winner of a 2024 Whiting Fellowship and the 2022 LA Times-Christopher Isherwood Prize. He holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University (Olive B. O’Connor), MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly), Stanford University (Stegner), and Yaddo. He is the recipient of a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University, a 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2017 Narrative Prize, the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign. Javier lives in Tucson, AZ, where he volunteers with Salvavision, The Kino Border Initiative, and The Florence Project.
This week features a conversation from the 2024 Portland Book Festival, featuring best-selling author Ijeoma Oluo, who is a self-described “writer, speaker, and internet yeller.” She discusses her latest book, Be a Revolution: How Everyday People are Fighting and Changing the World — and How You Can, Too with Portland’s Hanif Fazal, author of An Other World and co-founder of the Center for Equity and Inclusion.
They engage in a very honest conversation about the impact that “being loud” about race and racism has had on Oluo’s personal life and mental well-being. She shares that thought she wouldn’t write another book because of that strain, but that through centering loving action that she found a new way of doing her writing work with this project. They also discuss the general writing life and process, and the importance, in the often difficult and consuming work of fighting for systemic change, of centering joy as an outcome of activism.
Oluo’s book, Be a Revolution, highlights the way people all over the country are working to create real positive change for intersectional racial equity; as Fazal points out, giving new perspectives on big ideas through the stories of real, actual people. Their stories and Oluo’s work are intended to inspire action and change, and this conversation
Ijeoma Oluo (ee-joh-mah oh-loo-oh) is a Seattle-based Writer, Speaker and Internet Yeller. Her work on social issues such as race and gender has been published in The Guardian, Esquire, Washington Post, ELLE Magazine, New York Times, NBC News and more. She has been featured on The Daily Show, All Things Considered, BBC News, and more. Her #1 NYT bestselling first book, So You Want To Talk About Race, was released January 2018 with Seal Press. Her second book, MEDIOCRE: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, was published December 2020 with Seal Press and her upcoming book, Be A Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World – and How You Can Too, was January 2024 with Harper One. Oluo was named one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine, one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Seattle by Seattle Met, one of The Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans in 2017 & 2018, and is the recipient of the Feminist Humanist Award 2018 by the American Humanist Association, the Harvard Humanist of the year 2020, the Media Justice Award by the Gender Justice League, and the 2018 Aubrey Davis Visionary Leadership Award by the Equal Opportunity Institute.
Hanif Fazal, author of An Other World, has developed and delivered innovative equity and inclusion programs across education, philanthropic, public, and non-profit sectors for over twenty years. He is currently the co-founder of the Center for Equity and Inclusion and is also an author, who writes about the fight for freedom, joy, and belonging in Black and Brown communities. His first book, An Other World, offers a hopeful path forward by nurturing identity and centering community. It’s a path where joy is the norm rather than struggle, where home and work are inclusive rather than exclusionary, and where Brown and Black relationships lead to a unique experience of freedom. Along with local and national news and podcast appearances, Hanif has spoken at South by Southwest, National Equity Summit, a two-time presenter at the CCAR summit on race, and many other equity and education-focused events. He is a National Pew Civic Change award winner, Multnomah County Hilltop award winner, and was awarded the Taste of Portland’s Changemaker award for his prolonged impact on equity and inclusion throughout Portland. Most recently, An Other World was awarded a silver medal at the 36th annual IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.
In this episode, we feature the celebrated novelist and screenwriter Alice Hoffman. She’s in conversation with the former Director of the Multnomah County Library, Vailey Oehlke, at the Portland Book Festival in 2016.
Hoffman has published over 40 books, including the 2024 novel about Anne Frank’s life, When We Flew Away. Most of her books have been novels, but shas also published short story collections, and books for young adults and children. Her work almost always contains a magical element, something she attributes to her childhood, in which she was a veracious reader of fairytales. Hoffman was at the Festival to discuss her book Faithful, which had just been published.
She is perhaps best known for her novel The Dovekeepers, which Toni Morrison called quote “a major contribution to 21st century literature.” It is considered by many to be Hoffman’s masterpiece.
“A book you love makes you feel like you are known.”
Alice Hoffman is the New York Times bestselling author of Practical Magic, Here on Earth, and The Dovekeepers, which was praised by Toni Morrison as, “beautiful, harrowing, a major contribution to twenty-first century literature.” Hoffman has published over thirty novels, three books of short fiction, and eight books for children and young adults. Her work has been published in more than twenty translations and more than one hundred foreign editions. Hoffman’s novels have received mention as notable books of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, and People Magazine. Her short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Times, Architectural Digest, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and other magazines. Hoffman’s latest installment of the Once Upon a Time Bookshop Stories series titled The Bookstore Keepers is released February 2025.
In this recording, Michael Ondaatje shares his fourth novel, Anil’s Ghost. He begins by giving an overview of the plot, which is set in a civil war-torn Sri Lanka at the end of the twentieth century. The story follows Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, and educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist to investigate human rights violations. Anil, along with archaeologist Sarath Diyasena, discovers the skeleton of a recently murdered man in an ancient burial ground, and becomes determined to identify the man and bring about justice to the countless nameless victims of the war. Ondaatje then shares selected readings from the novel, which paint the novel as a deeply powerful story of love, family, identity, and the attempt to unlock the hidden past.
On Anil’s choosing of her own name: “Later, when she recalled her childhood, it was the hunger of not having that name, and the joy of getting it, that she remembered most. Everything about the name pleased her. Its slim, stripped down quality, its feminine air, even though it was considered a male name.”
“Gamini rarely saw himself from the point of view of a stranger. Though most people knew who he was, he felt he was invisible to those around him.”
Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, novelist, editor and filmmaker. Ondaatje’s literary career began with his poetry in 1967, publishing the books The Dainty Monsters, and then in 1970 the critically acclaimed The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. He is widely recognized for his nationally and internationally successful novel The English Patient (1992), which was adapted into a film in 1996. He is the recipient of multiple literary awards such as the Governor General’s Award, the Giller Prize, the Booker Prize, and the Prix Médicis étranger. Ondaatje is also an Officer of the Order of Canada, recognizing him as one of Canada’s most renowned living authors.
This week we are taking you back to Portland Book Festival 2024, with a conversation on the theme of “reconciliation” featuring Renée Watson, discussing her latest book, Skin & Bones, and Joe Wilkins, author of The Entire Sky, plus one of my absolute favorite moderators, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Mitchell S. Jackson.
Renée’s novel, Skin & Bones, is about a plus-size Black woman building a life in Portland, Oregon, and navigating motherhood, daughterhood, friendship, and romance. Joe Wilkins’ The Entire Sky is set in rural Montana, and the cast includes a grieving, aging rancher, his daughter, and a runaway teen boy as they search for home.
Despite the surface differences, the stories have a lot in common and the authors definitely had a lot to talk about. Moderator Mitchell S. Jackson does a wonderful job leading this conversation, covering common threads such as forgiveness, how fiction can be “the lie that tells the truth,” place and home. Every kind of reader will find something in this generous and wide-ranging conversation.
Renée Watson is a #1 New York Times bestselling author. Over the past decade she has authored twenty books for young readers, which have collectively sold more than a million copies. She received a Coretta Scott King Award and a Newbery Honor for her novel Piecing Me Together and high praise for 1619 Project: Born on the Water, co-written with Nikole Hannah-Jones. Her debut adult novel, Skin & Bones, was published May 7th, 2024. Watson is on the Council of Writers for the National Writing Project and is a member of the Academy of American Poets’ Education Advisory Council. She splits her time between Portland, Oregon and New York City. She is also the writer of Black Girl You Are Atlas, and Cicely Tyson.
Joe Wilkins is the author of the debut novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, praised as “remarkable and unforgettable” in a starred review at Booklist. A finalist for the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, Fall Back Down When I Die won the High Plains Book Award and has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, and German. Wilkins is also the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, and four collections of poetry, including Thieve and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Wilkins lives with his family in western Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield University. His latest novel is The Entire Sky.
Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. Jackson’s debut novel, The Residue Years, won a Whiting Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His essay collection Survival Math was named a best book of 2019 by fifteen publications. Jackson’s other honors include fellowships, grants, and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Creative Capital, the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, the Lannan Foundation, PEN America, and TED. His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Time, and Esquire, as well as in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, the Guardian, and elsewhere. Jackson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Esquire. He holds the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professorship in the Department of English at Arizona State University. Jackson’s latest book is Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion.
To close out the celebration of National Poetry Month, this episode featured poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil at the final event of the 2023-24 season of Portland Arts & Lectures.
Nezhukumatathil is an accomplished poet: Literally every one of her four published poetry collections is prize-winning, and she is the first-ever poetry editor of Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of the Sierra Club.
In 2020, she turned to prose with a book of essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments, which combines personal memoir with reflections on the natural world. World of Wonders was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in non-fiction and was named Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year. It’s one of those books that will change the way that you see the world around you – the animals, the plants, and the human animals. And who could argue against approaching our own lives, and the lives of others, with a little more wonder?
The San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “The nature writing we have been exposed to has been overwhelmingly male and white, which is just one reason that Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s latest essay collection is a breath of fresh air. What makes her work shine is its joyful embrace of difference, revealing that true beauty resides only in diversity.”
The lecture is followed by an audience Q&A moderated by Amanda Bullock, Literary Arts’s Senior Artistic Director.
Nezhukumatathil published a new essay collection, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Other Jamborees, on April 30, 2024.
This week, we continue to celebrate National Poetry Month with a conversation from the 2023 Portland Book Festival.
Jane Hirshfield is one of our most important living poets, and last year she released The Asking, a new and selected volume. Hirshfield has published ten volumes of poetry, two now-classic essay collections on the craft of poetry, and she has co-translated four books presenting world poets from the deep past.
Hirshfield is in conversation with her friend and fellow poet, Major Jackson, host of The Slowdown podcast and newsletter, who also released a new and selected, titled Razzle Dazzle, which collects two decades of his work. Hirshfield and Jackson share a send of the global and the personal, and a love of language.
Our moderator is a celebrated poet himself, Matthew Zapruder, whose most recent book is the memoir Story of a Poem.
They talk about the experience of revising the past to create these overviews of their work, and their excitement about the new poems. Hirshfield talks honestly about how emotional it was to revisit her past work and therefore a version of her past self, which Jackson described as a kind of time travel. They also talk about our present moment, and the role of art when there is so much urgency in the world at large—the importance of poetry, of art, to bear witness to that urgency.
Writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections and is one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. Hirshfield’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s also the author of two now-classic collections of essays on the craft of poetry, and edited and co-translated four books presenting world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield’s work, which has been translated into seventeen languages, appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019.
Major Jackson is the author of six volumes of poetry. His honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The poetry editor of the Harvard Review and the host of the podcast The Slowdown, Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently I Love Hearing Your Dreams, forthcoming from Scribner in September 2024, as well as two books of prose: Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine, and was the Editor of Best American Poetry 2022. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.
As part of 2023 Portland Book Festival Cover to Cover, a weeklong event series with bookish events happening all over the Portland area, local bookstore Broadway Books hosted an evening honoring the late Oregon writer Barry Lopez. Broadway declared 2023 the “year of reading Barry Lopez,” and we gathered three writers to share their memories of Barry and what his work meant to them, centered on his posthumous essay collection, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World.
Barry Lopez passed away in December 2020. He was known as a nature writer and was awarded the National Book Award and the Oregon Book Award. For many years he made his home in the woods of Oregon, and longtime listeners will have heard him on this program before as Literary Arts hosted him many times, including the book launch for his final publication, Horizon.
To remember Barry as part of Broadway’s celebration of his work, his widow, Debra Gwartney; celebrated poet and his friend Jane Hirshfield; and his editor and friend John Freeman came together to read from the new essay collection and talk about his life and legacy.
Barry Lopez is the author of Arctic Dreams, for which he received a National Book Award and an Oregon Book Award; Of Wolves and Men, a National Book Award finalist; and eight works of fiction, including Light Action in the Caribbean and Resistance, which also won Oregon Book Awards.
We continue to celebrate National Poetry Month with a deep dive into Verselandia!, the annual city-wide high school poetry slam championship. In this week’s episode of The Archive Project, we’ll hear from some of the 2023 competitors, and we’ll follow a few 2024 hopefuls as they compete in their school slams.
Verselandia! was founded by a visionary team of Portland public high school librarians and educators who ran individual poetry slams at their schools. As the competitions grew, Literary Arts became a partner and the producer of the championship event in April 2012. Now, during the last week of April, National Poetry Month, our annual Verselandia! Youth Poetry Slam Championships draws 1,000 people to cheer on youth poets at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
We’ll hear from some of those youth poets over the next hour.
A quick note to listeners: Portions of this episode contain mature themes that may not be suitable for all audiences.
Our guide on the road to Verselandia! is our Archive Project producer and editor, Matthew Workman.
Click here to learn more about Verselandia! 2025.
In this episode, we bring you a talk from Ruth Ozeki. It was the culminating event of the 2023 Everybody Reads program.
Every year, the Multnomah County Library chooses one book they hope the whole city will read. Between January and April, the Library, and their partner organizations, host events based around the themes of the book, and they distribute thousands of free copies—thanks to the Library Foundation—to readers of all ages from across the county. At Literary Arts, our role is to bring the author to town for a talk in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
The 2023 Everybody Reads program featured Ruth Ozeki and her novel A Tale for the Time Being.
Ozeki is the author of four novels, several of which have been international bestsellers. She is also a filmmaker, a teacher, and, astonishingly, also an ordain Zen Buddhist Priest. In many ways, all of these facets of her professional and spiritual life can be found shaping and influencing A Tale for the Time Being.
Ozkei’s talk is both fascinating and refreshing for her candor about how hard the work of writing fiction can be— a process for her that is, by her own account, frustrating, time consuming, mysterious, and deeply rewarding. The story of how A Tale for the Time Being was completed— and it almost wasn’t— is a ten-year journey interrupted and upended by personal and world events, and sustained by the voice of Nao, the main character, that kept talking to Ozeki the whole time.
“Here’s a tip for emerging writers […] when a character deigns to speak to you, you must stop whatever it is you are doing and write down what they are saying, otherwise they will go an find another writer to talk to.”
Get your copy of A Tale for the Time Being from Bookshop.org
Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the award-winning author of three novels, My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, and A Tale for the Time Being, which was a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and has been published in over thirty countries. The Los Angeles Times called the novel “exquisite,” the Washington Post called it a “dazzling tapestry of metaphor and meaning,” and the Oprah Magazine declared it “masterfully woven.” Her latest novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness. Her nonfiction work includes a memoir, The Face: A Time Code, and the documentary film, Halving the Bones. She is affiliated with the Everyday Zen Foundation and teaches creative writing at Smith College, where she is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities.
The 2024 Everybody Reads book is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. For information about how to engage with the program, visit the Multnomah County Library’s web site. Gabrielle Zevin will be in Portland on Thursday, April 4 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall for the culminating event of the 2024 Everybody Reads Program. For information about tickets, visit literary-arts.org.
This episode is a conversation from the 2023 Portland Book Festival on food, cooking, family, traditions, and storytelling. And like some of the best meals, it just happens to be … vegetarian.
Portland’s superstar chef Gregory Gourdet, chef/owner at kann, which was awarded “Best New Restaurant 2023” from multiple outlets, including the James Beard Awards, is also the author of a wonderful cookbook, Everyone’s Table. Gourdet led a conversation between fellow Portland chef and restauranteur Aaron Adams of Fermenter, which last year published a Fermenter cookbook co-authored by Portland’s own Liz Crain (DumplingsEqual Love) about vegan fermentation.
Joining our Portlanders is recipe developer Hetty Lui McKinnon, frequent contributor to New York Times Cooking and author of To Asia, with Love and, most recently, the cookbook Tenderheart. Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, McKinnon is now based in Brooklyn, New York.
So why are we talking about cookbooks on a literary show? Food is storytelling, and this conversation reveals the rich stories in our recipes, in what we cook and what we eat. Food connects us to our ancestry and personal food traditions, and can open our world to new tastes, much like we can find both reflections of ourselves in stories and doors to new worlds. Food tells a story, and the group talks about how our food connects us not only to the past but to our present community, and even to the future, in creating new traditions.
“Everything I do has this kind of nostalgia, a kind of homesickness, a longing for what I had growing up.” – Hetty Lui McKinnon
Aaron Adams: Forever curious about all things culinary, Aaron started venturing into fermentation when seeking to expand his repertoire after switching to a vegan diet. Years later, you can find house fermented and cultured foods, from tempeh and koji to sauerkraut and kombucha, finding center focus at his restaurants. Wanting to share his fermentation knowledge in an easy-to-understand way, Aaron worked to create his first book, Fermenter: DIY Fermentation for Vegan Fare. Come say “Hi” to Chef Aaron while he’s working service at Workshop or Fermenter when you’re in Portland, Oregon.
Liz Crain is the author of Food Lover’s Guide to Portland and Dumplings Equal Love, and coauthor of the cookbooks Toro Bravo and Hello! My Name Is Tasty, as well as Grow Your Own: Understanding, Cultivating, and Enjoying Cannabis. Her latest cookbook is Fermenter: DIY Fermentation for Vegan Fare coauthored with chef Aaron Adams. She is a longtime writer on Pacific Northwest food and drink, and her writing has appeared in Lucky Peach, Food & Wine, the Sun magazine, the Progressive, and the Guardian. She is also a seasoned copywriter, fiction writer, as well as co-organizer of the annual Portland Fermentation Festival.
Hetty Lui McKinnon is a Chinese Australian cook and food writer. A James Beard Foundation finalist, she is the author of four other cookbooks, including the much-loved To Asia, With Love (2021), the award-winning Family: New Vegetarian Comfort Food to Nourish Every Day (2019), Neighbourhood: Hearty Salads and Plant-Based Recipes from Home and Abroad (2017), and Community: Salad Recipes from Arthur Street Kitchen (2014). Hetty is also the editor and publisher of multicultural food journal Peddler and the host of the magazine’s podcast The House Specials. She is a regular recipe contributor to The New York Times, Bon Appetit, Epicurious.com, and ABC Everyday; and her recipes have appeared in Food52, the Guardian, The Washington Post and more. Born and raised in Sydney, she now resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Gregory Gourdet is a celebrated chef, best-selling author, and television personality. He is best known for his award-winning cuisine, bevy of TV appearances, and trendsetting role in the culinary boom of Portland. A native of Queens, NY, Gregory ran the kitchen at Portland’s Departure Restaurant + Lounge for 10 years, leaving in 2019 to focus on opening kann. An avid traveler and lifelong student of food and culture, Gregory has made a name for himself by infusing methods and ingredients from all over the world, balanced together with his own Haitian heritage, and creating signature flavors adored for their seasonality, boldness, complexity, and spice. He was named “Chef of the Year” by both Eater Portland and the Oregon Department of Agriculture, and is a James Beard Award nominee and two-time Bravo Top Chef finalist. In 2021, Gregory released his first cookbook, Everyone’s Table: Global Recipes for Modern Health, the ultimate guide to cooking globally-inspired dishes free of gluten, dairy, soy, legumes, and grains.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature renowned author, Mary Beard. Probably the most famous classicist in the world, Mary Beard is best known for her international bestsellers SPQR, about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, and Women & Power: A Manifesto, a study of ancient and modern attitudes toward female speech. She joined us in the fall of 2023 to talk about her latest book Emperor of Rome, which explores the power of the office of Roman emperor.
Given the huge amount that has already written about the classical world, it’s hard to imagine what there’s left to say. And yet, Beard has found a large and eager reading audience precisely because she takes material that is both familiar and remote, often presented with great formality, and humanizes the people depicted therein, be they emperors or their servants. She breathes life into the ancient world and helps us experience it in all its complexity and contradictions with humor, irony, and love for her subject.
Beard was a professor at Cambridge University for more than 40 years and her talk is a rare treat of getting to hear from someone who has spent a lifetime talking about their work, and making it accessible and relevant, to thousands of students.
Mary Beard is the author of the best-selling The Fires of Vesuvius and the National Book Critics Circle Award–nominated Confronting the Classics and SPQR. A popular blogger and television personality, Beard is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. She lives in England.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we reach back deep into the archive for a lecture by Caryl Phillips from Portland Arts and Lectures in 1999. It’s a fascinating talk about the tragic life of singer and songwriter Marvin Gaye.
Caryl Phillips was born on the Caribbean Island of St. Kitts in 1958 and was raised in Leeds, England. His career began in the 1980s British theater and quickly established him as a new and exciting voice. His first novel The Final Passage, published in 1985, was a breakout success and revealed a writer who would forge a long career writing for the stage, and the page, for the radio and the screen. He also became a celebrated teacher, and a successful editor.
He joined Portland Arts & Lectures at a moment when his career was gaining wider recognition and as he was playing a greater international role advocating for writers, including giving the keynote speech at the PEN International Congress in 1998 in Stockholm.
In this talk, Phillips takes on the life of Marvin Gaye as his subject, including how racism shaped Gaye’s life and musical career, his troubled relationship to masculinity and sexuality, and his sense of identity on both sides of the Atlantic. It is a tragic life, ultimately, and Phillips explores it with a clear sense of how our history is global, and deeply personal.
Note: Many of the subjects discussed in this talk many not be suitable for all listeners.
Caryl Phillips is the award-winning author of eleven novels, four stage plays, and five volumes of nonfiction, in addition to numerous radio plays, scripts, and essays. Identity, migration, and history are among the main themes of his writing, which also stands out for its formal daring.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a conversation with Michael Lewis from the 2023 Portland Book Festival. Lewis is the author of 17 books of nonfiction including Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and Flashboys. His books are about unconventional people doing extraordinary things, usually behind the scenes.
Lewis joined Portland Book Festival to talk about his new book, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon. It’s a book abouset Sam Bankman-Fried and the eventual collapse of his cryptocurrency hedge fund, Alameda Research, and the exchange he also founded, called FTX. At the time of this conversation, Bankman-Fried had just been found guilty of seven Federal charges, all finance-related, and was awaiting sentencing. It was a trial that many consider the biggest and most important in the world of finance in decades, and was one that was watched closely all across the world.
Lewis had unrestricted access to Bankman-Fried, spending over year reporting as he amassed one of the largest fortunes in the world and then lost everything as his businesses collapsed. The result of that reporting in Going Infinite paints a picture of a Bankman-Fried that is very different than how he was portrayed in the press and by government prosecutors. Lewis offers a perspective on Bankman-Fried and many of his closest colleagues that is rooted in understanding their deeper motives, how they were shaped as a generation, and how and why they made the mistakes they made. His conclusion is both startling and important to reckon with for its consequences in our society, regardless of whether you followed the case closely or not.
Lewis is in conversation with Literary Arts’ Executive Director, Andrew Proctor.
Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Undoing Project, and The Fifth Risk. His most recent book is Going Infinite. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his family.
Andrew Proctor has been the director of Literary Arts since 2009. Born and raised in Canada, Proctor, earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Music at Concordia University in Montreal, and later worked in London for the Cultural Attaché to the Canadian High Commission. In the UK, he also earned an MA in English Literature at the University of East Anglia under the supervision of England’s then Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. From 2000-2004 Proctor worked as an editor for HarperCollins in New York City and then as the Membership and Operations Director of the PEN American Center, a global literary and human rights organization focused on the welfare of writers and editors. In total, Proctor has worked in the literary world for over twenty years in the governmental, for profit and nonprofit sectors.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we have an event from the 2023 Portland Book Festival featuring two wonderful poets, whose friendship and fandom shines through in their conversation. Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle and host of The Slowdown poetry podcast and newsletter interviews fellow poet Tracy K. Smith about her latest book, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul.
To Free the Captives is a personal manifesto on memory, family, and history that explores how we in America might come to a new view of our shared past. In their discussion of the book, Jackson and Smith touch on a multitude of subjects personal, political, and even spiritual, and they keep coming back to the importance and impact of language, and the power language has for liberation, but also for captivity and enforcing hierarchy.
Tracy K. Smith is a librettist, translator, and the author of five acclaimed poetry collections, including Life on Mars, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States. She lives in Massachusetts.
Major Jackson is the author of six volumes of poetry. His honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The poetry editor of the Harvard Review and the host of the podcast The Slowdown, Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature nonfiction writer David Grann on the release of his new book, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.
Grann’s literary journalism combines archival research with in-person interviews and on-the-ground investigation, and it’s said that he’s obsessed with stories and how they are told. Grann has said, “Stories and narratives are always the way I try to make sense of the world. I think that’s why we all tell stories. …I think it’s interesting how reality can blend into myth and fiction—and how we tell these stories can shape us as people, and shape us as nations.”
Those themes reverberate in his other work, including as a New Yorker staff writer and in the National Book Award finalist and bestseller Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which was recently made into an Oscar-nominated film of the same name, directed by Martin Scorsese. In fact, Grann has been called “the man Hollywood can’t stop reading.” His first book and two of his New Yorker stories have also been adapted, with at least two more of his projects in the works.
New York Magazine declared Grann “one of preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today,” and he was named the inaugural Barnes & Noble Author of the Year in 2023.
David Grann is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z. Killers of the Flower Moon was a finalist for The National Book Award and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award. He is also the author of The White Darkness and the collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. Grann’s storytelling has garnered several honors, including a George Polk Award. He lives with his wife and children in New York.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature legendary actor, filmmaker, and writer, Tom Hanks. Hanks was joined on stage at the Keller auditorium in May 2023 by fiction and screenwriter Jon Raymond.
What’s great about this conversation is that the through line involves Tom Hanks’s longtime make-up artist Danny Stripeke; because in many ways it reveals why Hanks is such an incredible storyteller and a magnetic personality. In the spring of 2023, Hanks had published his second work of fiction and his first novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece. It isn’t a novel about how to make films, nor one about the celebrities who act in them. It’s about the hundreds of people you never see on screen, but are the ones who actually make the film: the gaffers, and electricians, the producers and directors, the prop crew, and yes the make-up artists.
In this conversation, Hanks talks about his childhood and the long journey of his career, one in which he has been actor, producer, director and writer. With humor and reverence, he retells the stories of the incredible cast of characters he has met along the way, while also talking about the chaos and absurdity of shooting a film and the surprises in the process, both thrilling and sometimes disappointing, that come with the massive, collaborative undertaking of making cinema.
Tom Hanks has won Academy Awards for best actor for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. He has starred in, among many other films, Big, Sleepless in Seattle, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile, Cast Away, Catch Me If You Can, Captain Phillips, Bridge of Spies, Sully, Toy Story, The Post, and It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. He is also the author of a best-selling collection of stories, Uncommon Type.
Jon Raymond is the author of the novels The Half-Life, Rain Dragon, and Freebird, and the story collection Livability, winner of the Oregon Book Award. He has collaborated on six films with the director Kelly Reichardt, including Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves, First Cow, and the forthcoming Showing Up, numerous of which have been based on his fiction. He also received an Emmy Award nomination for his screenwriting on the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce directed by Todd Haynes and starring Kate Winslet. He was the editor of Plazm Magazine, associate and contributing editor at Tin House magazine, and a member of the Board of Directors at Literary Arts. His writing has appeared in Zoetrope, Playboy, Tin House, The Village Voice, Artforum, Bookforum, and other places. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature best-selling, award-winning novelist Ann Patchett, who discusses her latest novel, Tom Lake, with Portland’s own Cheryl Strayed.
Ann Patchett is one of our most beloved contemporary authors. She is the author of two children’s books, four books of nonfiction, and nine novels. The New York Times Book Review has said “expect miracles when you read Ann Patchett’s fiction.” She is masterful at portraying specific moments that shed light on universal truths, and her newest book, Tom Lake, is exemplary. Our narrator is Lara, who is at her husband’s family cherry orchard with their three grown daughters, home because of the pandemic. Lara recounts her time performing at a summer theater company – and keeps to herself some of the details of her steamy summer romance with a future Hollywood heartthrob. In true Patchett fashion, the book is about intimacy, but also about secrets and the nature of the truth; about choices and roads not taken; about how during a global crisis it is okay to be happy that your kids are home. She says of the book that she set out to recreate the sense that, “in a world and a planet that is going to hell, there is still so much beauty and so much joy.”
Ann Patchett is the author of novels, most recently the #1 New York Times bestselling Tom Lake, works of nonfiction, and children’s books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner, the Women’s Prize in the U.K., and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and Time magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. President Biden awarded her the National Humanities Medal in recognition of her contributions to American culture. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the owner of Parnassus Books.
Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times best seller Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which was the first selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 and became an Oscar-nominated film starring Reese Witherspoon; Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, a national best seller now the basis of the WBUR podcast Dear Sugar Radio, co-hosted with Steve Almond; and Torch, her debut novel. Her books have been translated into forty languages, and her essays and other writings have appeared in numerous publications.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Zadie Smith in conversation with New Yorker staff writer Parul Sehgal from the 2023 Portland Arts & Lectures series.
Smith is one of the preeminent fiction writers of our age. She burst onto the stage in the year 2000 with her debut novel, White Teeth. It was a huge bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, and signaled a bold new talent had entered the literary world. Since then, she has published six novels, two collections of stories, and three collections of essays in addition to dozens of book reviews and criticism in some of the most influential publications in the world, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books. She has become an important public intellectual and a voice for a generation that came of age around the turn of the millennium.
What is special about this episode is Smith does relatively few public appearances; the last time she was on our stage was more than twenty years ago. The occasion for joining us this fall was the publication of The Fraud. Her new book, a historical novel, is particularly notable as it is a big departure from her previous work, which has been primarily preoccupied by contemporary life. The conversation you are about to hear is remarkable for Seghal’s breadth of knowledge of Smith’s work, and for how this brings out a broad conversation about the power of novels to humanize and complicate the small ethical dilemmas we have every day and the big existential issue of our time. Smith also talks about how she was inspired to take on her first work of historical fiction, in part, because of the ways in which she feels history can often be too easily simplified or “flattened” by what she calls the “narcissism of the present.”
Zadie Smith is a critically acclaimed fiction writer, essayist, and playwright, whose work includes the novel White Teeth, winner of the Guardian First Book Prize, and On Beauty, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her nonfiction has appeared widely in publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, and her essay collections include Feel Free, winner of The National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002 and has twice been named a Granta 20 Best Young British Novelist. In 2022, she received The Pen/Audible Literary Service Award for her “unparalleled attention to craft and humane ideals,” and helping to “guide future generations of writers and readers to embrace and explore culture across genres and media.” Her sixth novel, The Fraud, will publish in September 2023. She is a tenured professor of creative writing at New York University and lives in London.
Parul Sehgal is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Previously, she was a book critic at the Times, where she also worked as a senior editor and columnist. She has won awards for her criticism from the New York Press Club, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. She teaches in the graduate creative-writing program at New York University.
As part of 2023 Portland Book Festival Cover to Cover, a weeklong event series with bookish events happening all over the Portland area, local bookstore Broadway Books hosted an evening honoring the late Oregon writer Barry Lopez. Broadway declared 2023 the “year of reading Barry Lopez,” and we gathered three writers to share their memories of Barry and what his work meant to them, centered on his posthumous essay collection, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World.
Barry Lopez passed away in December 2020. He was known as a nature writer and was awarded the National Book Award and the Oregon Book Award. For many years he made his home in the woods of Oregon, and longtime listeners will have heard him on this program before as Literary Arts hosted him many times, including the book launch for his final publication, Horizon.
To remember Barry as part of Broadway’s celebration of his work, his widow, Debra Gwartney; celebrated poet and his friend Jane Hirshfield; and his editor and friend John Freeman came together to read from the new essay collection and talk about his life and legacy.
Barry Lopez is the author of Arctic Dreams, for which he received a National Book Award and an Oregon Book Award; Of Wolves and Men, a National Book Award finalist; and eight works of fiction, including Light Action in the Caribbean and Resistance, which also won Oregon Book Awards.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we revisit a lecture from the Multnomah County Library’s 2020 Everybody Reads program featuring Tommy Orange.
The Everybody Reads program an annual shared reading experience that includes city-wide events for readers of all ages. In his lecture, Orange details his experience as a Native American growing up and working in Oakland, California. He didn’t always want to be a writer, and he shares the twisting path that led him to this work. His debut novel, There There, is a winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and named one of the best books of the year by numerous publications. There There—and Orange himself in this lecture—explores a multitude of themes, from identity and ownership to the urban-rural divide.
Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California. His first book, There There, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the 2019 American Book Award. His latest novel, Wandering Stars, was published in February 2024. He lives in Oakland, California.
This episode features a timely, difficult, yet hopeful conversation featuring journalist Eli Saslow.
Saslow lives in Portland and is a writer at large for the New York Times. He travels the country to write in-depth stories about the impact of major national issues on individual lives. He has twice been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting, as well as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and other honors. He is the author of three books: Voices from the Pandemic, Rising Out of Hatred, and Ten Letters.
Much of Saslow’s recent reporting has focused on drug addiction, homelessness, and mental health crises in cities across the country. In this conversation with Oregon Humanities executive director Adam Davis, Saslow digs into how these intersecting challenges show up in Portland and why they are so difficult to address.
This conversation is part of Oregon Humanities Consider This series, an annual series of onstage conversations presented in Portland and around the state.
Eli Saslow is a national reporter for the New York Times. His recent reporting has focused on homelessness, inequality, and opioid addiction in Arizona, California, and Oklahoma. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage for The Washington Post, Eli Saslow reveals the human stories behind the most divisive issues of our time. From racism and poverty to addiction and mass shootings, Saslow’s work uncovers the impact of major national issues on individuals and families.
Saslow won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for a series of stories about food stamps and food insecurity in the United States. Collected into the book American Hunger, his stories were praised as “unsettling and nuanced…forcing readers to grapple with issues of poverty and dependency.” Saslow was also named one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing in 2013, 2016 and 2017. His stories in The Washington Post have been recognized with a George Polk Award, a PEN Literary Award, a James Beard Award, and other honors.
A 2004 graduate of Syracuse University, he now lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and three children.
This episode features Charles Yu at Portland Arts & Lectures on February 29, 2024.
Charles Yu first rose to national prominence in 2007 when his debut collection, Third Class Superhero was recognized by the National Book Foundation’s prestigious “Five under 35” program.
Yu has published three more books of fiction, including Interior Chinatown, which won the National Book Award in 2020. He has forged a diverse writing career that not only includes award winning books, and publishing in places like the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Wired, but also writing for television including shows on HBO and FX. His work is considered profoundly original, both genre-busting, formally experimental, and also accessible and laugh-out-loud funny, earning him comparisons to Douglas Adams and Philip K Dick.
In his talk, Yu does what he does best: With his signature self-deprecating, ironic and playful humor, Yu deconstructs the “lecture” genre and by doing so reveals profound insights into what it means to be human and to try to make meaning out of our lives.
Hailed for his sharp wit and incisive social commentary, Charles Yu is an acclaimed author and screenwriter whose work is as inventive as it is moving. Interior Chinatown, his fourth and most recent novel, is at once a satirical meditation on immigration, assimilation, and Hollywood stereotyping of Asian Americans and a touching portrait of a family.
A National Book Award winner and a “Most Anticipated Book” by Entertainment Weekly, TIME, The Rumpus, and others, Interior Chinatownfollows the story of Willis Wu, who has been cast in the role of “Generic Asian Man” in the ongoing procedural cop show “Black and White,” as he struggles to transcend the rigid and reductive roles available to those who look like him. Both extensively researched and startlingly original, Interior Chinatownis a profound and topical exploration of the weight of stereotypes, racism, and assimilation in American culture.
Charles Yu’s previous novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, was a New York Times Notable Book and a TIMETop 10 Fiction Book of 2010. In his lectures, Yu speaks passionately about a variety of topics, including writing about characters in the margins, representation in Hollywood, and the role of science fiction in his work.
Charles Yu is a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, and he was nominated for two Writers Guild of America Awards for his screenwriting work on the HBO series, Westworld. In addition to writing for Westworld, Yu has been on writing staffs for shows on FX and AMC. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications. Together with TaiwaneseAmerican.org, he established the Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Writing Prizes, in honor of his parents. He lives in Southern California.
This episode features a great event from the 2023 Portland Book Festival on the relationships between humans and animals, and on our ideas about the meaning of animals.
Erica Berry is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, winner of the 2024 Oregon Book Award in creative nonfiction. Erica is based in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, and teaches in Literary Arts Writers in the schools program.
Sabrina Imbler is the author of How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, which was the winner of the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology. Sabrina writes about creatures and the natural world for Defector. Like me, you might have first encountered Sabrina’s work when their New York Times article “When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid from a Clamp, That’s a Moray” went viral in 2021.
As curious and insightful non-scientists writing about the natural world, Sabrina and Erica each fully embrace their subjectivity in their nonfiction, their own personal perspectives. Both writers explore the human tendency to see ourselves in the natural world: We must accept our own animal-ness to know ourselves.
Our moderator is Elena Passarello, whom you might know as the announcer on Live Wire Radio, and who is also “on the animal beat” thanks to her book of essays, Animals Strike Curious Poses, which won the 2018 Oregon Book Award in creative nonfiction.
Biography:
Erica Berry is a writer based in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. She has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, where she was a College of Liberal Arts Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The Yale Review, Outside Magazine, Catapult, The Atlantic, Guernica, and elsewhere. Winner of the Steinberg Essay Prize and the Kurt Brown Prize in Nonfiction, she has received fellowships and funding from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Tin House, the Ucross Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. A former Writer-in-Residence with the National Writers Series in Traverse City, Michigan, she is currently a Writer-in-the-Schools with Literary Arts in Portland. Wolfishis her first book.
Sabrina Imbler is a writer for Defector, a sports and culture site, where they write about creatures and the natural world. Their first full-length book, How Far the Light Reaches, won a 2022 LA Times Book Prize. Their chapbook Dyke (geology) was selected for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature program. Sabrina lives in Brooklyn with their partner, a school of fish, and their cats, Sesame and Melon
Elena Passarello is an actor, essayist, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018, and has been translated into German, Italian, French, and Mandarin. She is the author of the essay collectionsLet Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses, the latter of which won the 2018 Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction and made the Best Books of 2017 lists in the New York Times, Guardian, and Publisher’s Weekly. Passarello teaches creative writing at Oregon State University and appears weekly on the PRX radio variety show Live Wire.
To close out the celebration of National Poetry Month, this episode features poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil at the final event of the 2023-24 season of Portland Arts & Lectures.
Nezhukumatathil is an accomplished poet: Literally every one of her four published poetry collections is prize-winning, and she is the first-ever poetry editor of Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of the Sierra Club.
In 2020, she turned to prose with a book of essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments, which combines personal memoir with reflections on the natural world. World of Wonders was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in non-fiction and was named Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year. It’s one of those books that will change the way that you see the world around you – the animals, the plants, and the human animals. And who could argue against approaching our own lives, and the lives of others, with a little more wonder?
The San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “The nature writing we have been exposed to has been overwhelmingly male and white, which is just one reason that Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s latest essay collection is a breath of fresh air. What makes her work shine is its joyful embrace of difference, revealing that true beauty resides only in diversity.”
The lecture is followed by an audience Q&A moderated by Amanda Bullock, Literary Arts’s Senior Artistic Director.
Nezhukumatathil will publish a new essay collection, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Other Jamborees, on April 30, 2024. 20
We continue to celebrate National Poetry Month with a deep dive into Verselandia!, the annual city-wide high school poetry slam championship. In this week’s episode of The Archive Project, we’ll hear from some of the 2023 competitors, and we’ll follow a few 2024 hopefuls as they compete in their school slams.
Verselandia! was founded by a visionary team of Portland public high school librarians and educators who ran individual poetry slams at their schools. As the competitions grew, Literary Arts became a partner and the producer of the championship event in April 2012. Now, during the last week of April, National Poetry Month, our annual Verselandia! Youth Poetry Slam Championships draws 1,000 people to cheer on youth poets at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
We’ll hear from some of those youth poets over the next hour.
A quick note to listeners: Portions of this episode contain mature themes that may not be suitable for all audiences.
Our guide on the road to Verselandia! is our Archive Project producer and editor, Matthew Workman.
Verselandia! 2024 will take place Thursday, April 25 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in downtown Portland, and we hope you will join us. Get tickets here.
This week, we continue to celebrate National Poetry Month with a conversation from the 2023 Portland Book Festival.
Jane Hirshfield is one of our most important living poets, and last year she released The Asking, a new and selected volume. Hirshfield has published ten volumes of poetry, two now-classic essay collections on the craft of poetry, and she has co-translated four books presenting world poets from the deep past.
Hirshfield is in conversation with her friend and fellow poet, Major Jackson, host of The Slowdown podcast and newsletter, who also released a new and selected, titled Razzle Dazzle, which collects two decades of his work. Hirshfield and Jackson share a send of the global and the personal, and a love of language.
Our moderator is a celebrated poet himself, Matthew Zapruder, whose most recent book is the memoir Story of a Poem.
They talk about the experience of revising the past to create these overviews of their work, and their excitement about the new poems. Hirshfield talks honestly about how emotional it was to revisit her past work and therefore a version of her past self, which Jackson described as a kind of time travel. They also talk about our present moment, and the role of art when there is so much urgency in the world at large—the importance of poetry, of art, to bear witness to that urgency.
Bios:
Writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections and is one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. Hirshfield’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s also the author of two now-classic collections of essays on the craft of poetry, and edited and co-translated four books presenting world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield’s work, which has been translated into seventeen languages, appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019.
Major Jackson is the author of six volumes of poetry. His honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The poetry editor of the Harvard Review and the host of the podcast The Slowdown, Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently I Love Hearing Your Dreams, forthcoming from Scribner in September 2024, as well as two books of prose: Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine, and was the Editor of Best American Poetry 2022. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.
April is National Poetry Month, and we are celebrating with a collection of some of our favorite poetry moments over the years at Literary Arts. We will hear from a Portland high school student, the United States poet laureate, an Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient, a Nobel Prize winner, and more.
Ada Limón, U.S. poet laureate, speaks at Portland Arts & Lectures in April 2023 about how important reading poetry has been to her in connecting to herself and to the natural world, and how she came to poetry as young girl.
Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney shares one of his early poems and the story behind it at Portland Arts & Lectures, two decades before Ada Limón, in 2002. And Danica Leung, who was a junior at Lincoln High School at the time, reads her poem at Verselandia 2021.
Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient Genevive DeGuzman moderates a conversation from Portland Book Festival 2022 featuring Shelley Wong, author of As She Appears, and Tayi Tibble, author of Poukahangatus, talking about ancestry, identity, and pop culture references in their work.
In 2022, Literary Arts hosted an event with the Alano Club of Portland and their Artists in Recovery series. At that event, poet Hanif Abdurraqib shared work from his then-forthcoming, but now just-published, new book There’s Always This Year. And Li-Young Lee appeared at Portland Arts & Lectures in 2008, and shared his poem, “Virtues of the Boring Husband.”
Biography:
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His most recent book, A Little Devil in America, was the winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burns Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Award. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize and nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us was named a book of the year by NPR, Esquire, BuzzFeed, O: The Oprah Magazine, Pitchfork, Chicago Tribune, among others. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist, and longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune for Your Disaster, won the Lenore Marshall Prize. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Genevieve DeGuzman writes poetry and fiction. She has been a recipient of fellowships and grants from Oregon Arts Commission, PEN America, Literary Arts, Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency, Vermont Studio Center, and Can Serrat, among others. Most recently, Genevieve was awarded the 2022 Oregon Literary Fellowship and was featured in the Cultural Landscape Series portraiture project for Oregon ArtsWatch. As a poet, Genevieve won the Atticus Review contest selected by Roberto Carlos Garcia and earned nominations for the Best New Poets anthology. Her work appears in Folio, Iron Horse Literary Review, Nimrod, RHINO, phoebe, Strange Horizons, and has been featured in the Poetry Moves program for C-TRAN. Born in the Philippines, raised in Southern California, she now lives in Portland, OR.
Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney was raised in County Derry, and later lived for many years in Dublin. He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, and edited several widely used anthologies. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the “most important Irish poet since Yeats.” Heaney taught at Harvard University (1985-2006) and served as the Oxford Professor of Poetry (1989-1994). He died in 2013.
Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His family settled in the United States in 1964. He is the author of Rose (1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award; The City in Which I Love You (1990), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; The Winged Seed (1995); Book of My Nights (2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; and Behind My Eyes(2008). Lee has been the recipient of the Lannan Literary Award; the Whiting Writers’ Award; the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award; the I. B. Lavan Award; three Pushcart Prizes; grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1998, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from State University of New York at Brockport. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, with his wife, Donna, and their two sons.
Danica Leung graduated from Lincoln High School in 2022. She performed her poem at Verselandia! 2021.
Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her most recent book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. As the Poet Laureate, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world.
Tayi Tibble (Te Whānau ā Apanui/Ngāti Porou) was born in 1995 and lives in Wellington, New Zealand. In 2017, she completed a master’s degree in creative writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, where she was the recipient of the Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing. Her second book of poetry, Rangikura, was published in the United States in 2024. Her first book of poetry is Poukahangatus.
Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (YesYes Books, May 2022), winner of the 2019 Pamet River Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award, and the chapbook RARE BIRDS (Diode Editions, 2017). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review,Best American Poetry 2021, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center. She is an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and lives in San Francisco.
We’re reaching back into the archive to 2009 to bring you a powerful talk by Karen Armstrong, originally broadcast in 2016.
Armstrong has written 30 books on faith and the major religions, studying what Islam, Judaism and Christianity have in common, and how these faiths shaped world history and drive current events. A former nun, Armstrong wrote her first book, Through the Narrow Gate, about her seven years in a convent, and then later, The Spiral Staircase, about her subsequent spiritual awakening.
She first rose to prominence with her book A History of God in 1993 and later landed on the bestseller list with her book Islam: A Short History, which was published in 2000, one year before the 9/11 attacks.
Armstrong came to Portland in 2009 to talk about her book The Case for God. She makes a deeply felt argument for faith not based in absolutes, which she argues leads to violence, but in compassion and acceptance, and for a view of God, regardless of the religion, that accepts our limits of our own knowledge. Rooted in history, and a lifetime of learning, and drawing on religions from all over the world, this is a fascinating talk that was urgent in 2009, and remains urgent today.
Biography:
A former Catholic nun who left the convent to study literature, Karen Armstrong is an authority on world faiths, religious fundamentalism, and monotheism. Her poignant and captivating talks, spark worldwide debate and healthy discussion. Armstrong’s bestselling books include The Battle for God, The Spiral Staircase, The Great Transformation, and The Bible: A Biography. Publishers Weekly called her book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, “Provocative and supremely readable…[Armstrong] sweeps through religious history around the globe and over 4,000 years to explain the yoking of religion and violence and to elucidate the ways in which religion has also been used to counter violence.” She was a key advisor on Bill Moyers’ landmark PBS series on religion, has addressed members of the U.S. Congress, and was one of three scholars to speak at the UN’s first ever session on religion. The Sunday Times calls her “a bridge between religions.”
This episode of The Archive Project features a conversation between 2020 Oregon Book Award winners Kesha Ajose Fisher and Ashley Toliver, with Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani. Much of their conversation focuses on craft—writing from the space of the unknown, writing as self-discovery, the role of time in the creative process—but they also discuss what it is like to cultivate a diligent writing practice while juggling motherhood, family, and all the other human demands during these especially trying times. These three are among some of the most exciting writers at work today, and their conversation provides insight and depth into how a creative piece of work makes its way into a reader’s hands.
“To me, writing is an act of listening. Most of the time what I hear I don’t understand, but I write it anyway.” – Ashley Toliver
Biography:
Kesha Ajose Fisher was born in Chicago and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. She now lives in Oregon with her family. Kesha’s debut collection of fictional stories, No God Like the Mother, focuses on the lives and realities of women who have been tasked with holding up the sky, all while the world whispers “you’re doing it wrong”. Fisher has won the 2020 Oregon Book Award for Fiction and The Phoenix Literary Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award for Short Fiction in both 2011 and 2012. Her writing has been published in several online and print collections, and in such publications as Multicultural Familia Magazine, the Alchemy Literary Magazine, and twice in Beyond Black & White Magazine. She works in social services, is a vocal advocate for immigrants and refugees, and she champions equality and education while opposing the poverty that plagues humanity.
Ashley Toliver is the author of Ideal Machine (Poor Claudia, 2014) and Spectra(Coffee House Press, 2018). A poetry editor at Moss., her work has been supported by fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. She received her MFA from Brown University in 2013.
Anis Mojgani is the current Poet Laureate of Oregon. A two-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, he has been awarded residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, AIR Serenbe, The Bloedel Nature Reserve, The Sou’wester, and the Oregon Literary Arts Writers-In-The-Schools program. The author of five books of poetry, he has done commissioned work for the Getty Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum, given multiple TEDx talks, and April 2021 will see the premiere of his first opera libretto, Sanctuaries. Anis’ work has appeared on HBO, National Public Radio, and as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series; and in the pages of such journals as Rattle, Platypus, Winter Tangerine, Forklift Ohio, and Bat City Review. Originally from New Orleans, Anis currently lives in Portland Oregon.
In this episode, we bring you a talk from Ruth Ozeki. It was the culminating event of the 2023 Everybody Reads program.
Every year, the Multnomah County Library chooses one book they hope the whole city will read. Between January and April, the Library, and their partner organizations, host events based around the themes of the book, and they distribute thousands of free copies—thanks to the Library Foundation—to readers of all ages from across the county. At Literary Arts, our role is to bring the author to town for a talk in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
The 2023 Everybody Reads program featured Ruth Ozeki and her novel A Tale for the Time Being.
Ozeki is the author of four novels, several of which have been international bestsellers. She is also a filmmaker, a teacher, and, astonishingly, also an ordain Zen Buddhist Priest. In many ways, all of these facets of her professional and spiritual life can be found shaping and influencing A Tale for the Time Being.
Ozkei’s talk is both fascinating and refreshing for her candor about how hard the work of writing fiction can be— a process for her that is, by her own account, frustrating, time consuming, mysterious, and deeply rewarding. The story of how A Tale for the Time Being was completed— and it almost wasn’t— is a ten-year journey interrupted and upended by personal and world events, and sustained by the voice of Nao, the main character, that kept talking to Ozeki the whole time.
“Here’s a tip for emerging writers […] when a character deigns to speak to you, you must stop whatever it is you are doing and write down what they are saying, otherwise they will go an find another writer to talk to.”
Get you copy of A Tale for the Time Being from Bookshop.org
Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the award-winning author of three novels, My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, and A Tale for the Time Being, which was a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and has been published in over thirty countries. The Los Angeles Times called the novel “exquisite,” the Washington Post called it a “dazzling tapestry of metaphor and meaning,” and the Oprah Magazine declared it “masterfully woven.” Her latest novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness. Her nonfiction work includes a memoir, The Face: A Time Code, and the documentary film, Halving the Bones. She is affiliated with the Everyday Zen Foundation and teaches creative writing at Smith College, where she is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities.
The 2024 Everybody Reads book is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. For information about how to engage with the program, visit the Multnomah County Library’s web site. Gabrielle Zevin will be in Portland on Thursday, April 4 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall for the culminating event of the 2024 Everybody Reads Program. For information about tickets, visit literary-arts.org.
This week we have a conversation featuring Naomi Alderman, who joined us for Portland Book Festival in November 2023 for the very first event for her new novel, The Future. Alderman is the author of the mega best-seller, Barack Obama-endorsed, Margaret Atwood-mentored novel The Power. She talks with interviewer Omar El Akkad about the pressure she felt writing this follow-up, about a handful of friends who plot a daring heist to save the world from the tech billionaires who are threatening it. Bookpage called it “A daring, sexy, thrilling novel that may be the most wryly funny book about the end of civilization you’ll ever read.”
The conversation explores different modes of storytelling, from novel writing, of course, and Alderman also shares her experience working on the TV adaptation of The Power and having to approach her own story in a different way once more people became involved. Alderman is also a successful video game designer, and she and El Akkad make a great case about the storytelling in video games.
“Hillary Mantel said, “A novel brings the news.” I love that thought. I’m very interested in novels that speak to what’s happening now.”
Naomi Alderman is the bestselling author of The Power, which was the winner of the 2017 Baileys’ Women’s Prize for Fiction. It was longlisted for the 2017 Orwell Prize and chosen as one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, Entertainment Weekly and the San Francisco Chronicle. The Power topped Barack Obama’s list of his favorite books from 2017 and has been translated into more than thirty languages. Naomi grew up in London and attended Oxford University and UEA. Her latest book, The Future, was released in November 2023.
Omar El Akkad is an author and a journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work earned Canada’s National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. His latest novel is What Strange Paradise, which won the 2022 Ken Kesey Award for Fiction
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature legendary actor, filmmaker, and writer, Tom Hanks. Hanks was joined on stage at the Keller auditorium in May 2023 by fiction and screenwriter Jon Raymond.
What’s great about this conversation is that the through line involves Tom Hanks’s longtime make-up artist Danny Stripeke; because in many ways it reveals why Hanks is such an incredible storyteller and a magnetic personality. In the spring of 2023, Hanks had published his second work of fiction and his first novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece. It isn’t a novel about how to make films, nor one about the celebrities who act in them. It’s about the hundreds of people you never see on screen, but are the ones who actually make the film: the gaffers, and electricians, the producers and directors, the prop crew, and yes the make-up artists.
In this conversation, Hanks talks about his childhood and the long journey of his career, one in which he has been actor, producer, director and writer. With humor and reverence, he retells the stories of the incredible cast of characters he has met along the way, while also talking about the chaos and absurdity of shooting a film and the surprises in the process, both thrilling and sometimes disappointing, that come with the massive, collaborative undertaking of making cinema.
Tom Hanks has won Academy Awards for best actor for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. He has starred in, among many other films, Big, Sleepless in Seattle, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile, Cast Away, Catch Me If You Can, Captain Phillips, Bridge of Spies, Sully, Toy Story, The Post, and It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. He is also the author of a best-selling collection of stories, Uncommon Type.
Jon Raymond is the author of the novels The Half-Life, Rain Dragon, and Freebird, and the story collection Livability, winner of the Oregon Book Award. He has collaborated on six films with the director Kelly Reichardt, including Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves, First Cow, and the forthcoming Showing Up, numerous of which have been based on his fiction. He also received an Emmy Award nomination for his screenwriting on the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce directed by Todd Haynes and starring Kate Winslet. He was the editor of Plazm Magazine, associate and contributing editor at Tin House magazine, and a member of the Board of Directors at Literary Arts. His writing has appeared in Zoetrope, Playboy, Tin House, The Village Voice, Artforum, Bookforum, and other places. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
This episode is a conversation from the 2023 Portland Book Festival on food, cooking, family, traditions, and storytelling. And like some of the best meals, it just happens to be … vegetarian.
Portland’s superstar chef Gregory Gourdet, chef/owner at kann, which was awarded “Best New Restaurant 2023” from multiple outlets, including the James Beard Awards, is also the author of a wonderful cookbook, Everyone’s Table. Gourdet led a conversation between fellow Portland chef and restauranteur Aaron Adams of Fermenter, which last year published a Fermenter cookbook co-authored by Portland’s own Liz Crain (Dumplings Equal Love) about vegan fermentation.
Joining our Portlanders is recipe developer Hetty Lui McKinnon, frequent contributor to New York Times Cooking and author of To Asia, with Love and, most recently, the cookbook Tenderheart. Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, McKinnon is now based in Brooklyn, New York.
So why are we talking about cookbooks on a literary show? Food is storytelling, and this conversation reveals the rich stories in our recipes, in what we cook and what we eat. Food connects us to our ancestry and personal food traditions, and can open our world to new tastes, much like we can find both reflections of ourselves in stories and doors to new worlds. Food tells a story, and the group talks about how our food connects us not only to the past but to our present community, and even to the future, in creating new traditions.
Aaron Adams: Forever curious about all things culinary, Aaron started venturing into fermentation when seeking to expand his repertoire after switching to a vegan diet. Years later, you can find house fermented and cultured foods, from tempeh and koji to sauerkraut and kombucha, finding center focus at his restaurants. Wanting to share his fermentation knowledge in an easy-to-understand way, Aaron worked to create his first book, Fermenter: DIY Fermentation for Vegan Fare. Come say “Hi” to Chef Aaron while he’s working service at Workshop or Fermenter when you’re in Portland, Oregon.
Liz Crain is the author of Food Lover’s Guide to Portland and Dumplings Equal Love, and coauthor of the cookbooks Toro Bravo and Hello! My Name Is Tasty, as well as Grow Your Own: Understanding, Cultivating, and Enjoying Cannabis. Her latest cookbook is Fermenter: DIY Fermentation for Vegan Fare coauthored with chef Aaron Adams. She is a longtime writer on Pacific Northwest food and drink, and her writing has appeared in Lucky Peach, Food & Wine, the Sun magazine, the Progressive, and the Guardian. She is also a seasoned copywriter, fiction writer, as well as co-organizer of the annual Portland Fermentation Festival.
Hetty Lui McKinnon is a Chinese Australian cook and food writer. A James Beard Foundation finalist, she is the author of four other cookbooks, including the much-loved To Asia, With Love (2021), the award-winning Family: New Vegetarian Comfort Food to Nourish Every Day (2019), Neighbourhood: Hearty Salads and Plant-Based Recipes from Home and Abroad (2017), and Community: Salad Recipes from Arthur Street Kitchen (2014). Hetty is also the editor and publisher of multicultural food journal Peddler and the host of the magazine’s podcast The House Specials. She is a regular recipe contributor to The New York Times, Bon Appetit, Epicurious.com, and ABC Everyday; and her recipes have appeared in Food52, the Guardian, The Washington Post and more. Born and raised in Sydney, she now resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Gregory Gourdet is a celebrated chef, best-selling author, and television personality. He is best known for his award-winning cuisine, bevy of TV appearances, and trendsetting role in the culinary boom of Portland. A native of Queens, NY, Gregory ran the kitchen at Portland’s Departure Restaurant + Lounge for 10 years, leaving in 2019 to focus on opening kann. An avid traveler and lifelong student of food and culture, Gregory has made a name for himself by infusing methods and ingredients from all over the world, balanced together with his own Haitian heritage, and creating signature flavors adored for their seasonality, boldness, complexity, and spice. He was named “Chef of the Year” by both Eater Portland and the Oregon Department of Agriculture, and is a James Beard Award nominee and two-time Bravo Top Chef finalist. In 2021, Gregory released his first cookbook, Everyone’s Table: Global Recipes for Modern Health, the ultimate guide to cooking globally-inspired dishes free of gluten, dairy, soy, legumes, and grains.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature nonfiction writer David Grann on the release of his new book, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.
Grann’s literary journalism combines archival research with in-person interviews and on-the-ground investigation, and it’s said that he’s obsessed with stories and how they are told. Grann has said, “Stories and narratives are always the way I try to make sense of the world. I think that’s why we all tell stories. …I think it’s interesting how reality can blend into myth and fiction—and how we tell these stories can shape us as people, and shape us as nations.”
Those themes reverberate in his other work, including as a New Yorker staff writer and in the National Book Award finalist and bestseller Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which was recently made into an Oscar-nominated film of the same name, directed by Martin Scorsese. In fact, Grann has been called “the man Hollywood can’t stop reading.” His first book and two of his New Yorker stories have also been adapted, with at least two more of his projects in the works.
New York Magazine declared Grann “one of preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today,” and he was named the inaugural Barnes & Noble Author of the Year in 2023.
Find your copy of THE WAGER and KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON through Literary Arts on Bookshop.org.
David Grann is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and THE LOST CITY OF Z. KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON was a finalist for The National Book Award and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award. He is also the author of THE WHITE DARKNESS and the collection THE DEVIL AND SHERLOCK HOLMES. Grann’s storytelling has garnered several honors, including a George Polk Award. He lives with his wife and children in New York.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we have an event from the 2023 Portland Book Festival featuring two wonderful poets, whose friendship and fandom shines through in their conversation. Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle and host of The Slowdown poetry podcast and newsletter interviews fellow poet Tracy K. Smith about her latest book, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul.
To Free the Captives is a personal manifesto on memory, family, and history that explores how we in America might come to a new view of our shared past. In their discussion of the book, Jackson and Smith touch on a multitude of subjects personal, political, and even spiritual, and they keep coming back to the importance and impact of language, and the power language has for liberation, but also for captivity and enforcing hierarchy.
Find your copy of TO FREE THE CAPTIVES and RAZZLE DAZZLEthrough the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Tracy K. Smith is a librettist, translator, and the author of five acclaimed poetry collections, including Life on Mars, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States. She lives in Massachusetts.
Major Jackson is the author of six volumes of poetry. His honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The poetry editor of the Harvard Review and the host of the podcast The Slowdown, Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we reach back deep into the archive for a lecture by Caryl Phillips from Portland Arts and Lectures in 1999. It’s a fascinating talk about the tragic life of singer and songwriter Marvin Gaye.
Caryl Phillips was born on the Caribbean Island of St. Kitts in 1958 and was raised in Leeds, England. His career began in the 1980s British theater and quickly established him as a new and exciting voice. His first novel The Final Passage, published in 1985, was a breakout success and revealed a writer who would forge a long career writing for the stage, page, radio, and screen. He also became a celebrated teacher and a successful editor.
He joined Portland Arts & Lectures at a moment when his career was gaining wider recognition and as he was playing a greater international role advocating for writers, including giving the keynote speech at the PEN International Congress in 1998 in Stockholm.
In this talk, Phillips takes on the life of Marvin Gaye as his subject, including how racism shaped Gaye’s life and musical career, his troubled relationship to masculinity and sexuality, and his sense of identity on both sides of the Atlantic. It is a tragic life, ultimately, and Phillips explores it with a clear sense of how our history is global and deeply personal.
Note: Many of the subjects discussed in this talk many not be suitable for all listeners.
Find your copies of Caryl Phillips’ booksthrough the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Caryl Phillips is the award-winning author of eleven novels, four stage plays, and five volumes of nonfiction, in addition to numerous radio plays, scripts, and essays. Identity, migration, and history are among the main themes of his writing, which also stands out for its formal daring.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature best-selling, award-winning novelist Ann Patchett, who discusses her latest novel, Tom Lake, with Portland’s own Cheryl Strayed.
Ann Patchett is one of our most beloved contemporary authors. She is the author of two children’s books, four books of nonfiction, and nine novels. The New York Times Book Review has said “expect miracles when you read Ann Patchett’s fiction.” She is masterful at portraying specific moments that shed light on universal truths, and her newest book, Tom Lake, is exemplary. Our narrator is Lara, who is at her husband’s family cherry orchard with their three grown daughters, home because of the pandemic. Lara recounts her time performing at a summer theater company – and keeps to herself some of the details of her steamy summer romance with a future Hollywood heartthrob. In true Patchett fashion, the book is about intimacy, but also about secrets and the nature of the truth; about choices and roads not taken; about how during a global crisis it is okay to be happy that your kids are home. She says of the book that she set out to recreate the sense that, “in a world and a planet that is going to hell, there is still so much beauty and so much joy.”
It is always a joy to hear from Ann Patchett, and the warm, writerly connection between her and Cheryl Strayed makes this conversation particularly memorable.
Find your copies of Ann Patchett & Cheryl Strayed’s booksthrough the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Ann Patchett is the author of novels, most recently the #1 New York Times bestselling Tom Lake, works of nonfiction, and children’s books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner, the Women’s Prize in the U.K., and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and Time magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. President Biden awarded her the National Humanities Medal in recognition of her contributions to American culture. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the owner of Parnassus Books.
Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times best seller Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which was the first selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 and became an Oscar-nominated film starring Reese Witherspoon;Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, a national best seller now the basis of the WBUR podcast Dear Sugar Radio, co-hosted with Steve Almond; and Torch, her debut novel. Her books have been translated into forty languages, and her essays and other writings have appeared in numerous publications.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation with author Tommy Orange from the 2023 Portland Book Festival. Viet Than Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his debut novel The Sympathizer, which sold more than one million copies worldwide, catapulted him to national fame. Since then, Nguyen has gone on to publish two more books of fiction, and a work of nonfiction, Nothing Ever dies.
He joined us for the Festival on the occasion of the publication of his debut memoir A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. He was joined on stage by novelist Tommy Orange, who wrote the celebrated novel There, There. The two dive into a discussion about Nguyen’s new book, which is formally inventive and unusual in the sense it’s a mix of history, personal memoir, and a biography of his parents–telling an intergenerational story of a family’s forced migration from Vietnam to the United States and the deeply personal impacts this journey. With a wry and ironic sense of humor, Nguyen offers us a tender view into his family’s history; the truth, ironies, and lies behind the so-called American Dream; and how he has come to understand his role as a writer at this specific moment in American life.
Find your copies of Viet Thanh Nguyen & Tommy Orange’s booksthrough the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Committed, which continues the story of The Sympathizer, awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, alongside seven other prizes. He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees; the nonfiction books Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award, and his memoir A Man of Two Faces. He is also the editor of an anthology of refugee writing The Displaced. He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles.
Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California. His first book, There There, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the 2019 American Book Award. He lives in Oakland, California.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we explore storytelling and the intersections between literature and music with our friends at the Oregon Symphony and 45th Parallel Universe.
First, we have a conversation led by Oregon Symphony creative chair Gabriel Kahane. As part of the 2023 Portland Book Festival, Kahane spoke with one of his frequent collaborators, the poet Matthew Zapruder. The conversation centers on Zapruder’s new memoir, Story of a Poem, a beautiful book that is, indeed, the story of writing a poem, but also a very personal exploration of Zapruder’s own reactions to his son’s diagnosis with autism and his own evolution as a son, husband, and father against the backdrop of life in the Anthropocene.
We also have a conversation between the New Yorker critic and author of The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross, with musicians Ron Blessinger, Sergio Carreno, Bora Yoon, James Shields, and Lisa Lipton of the 45th Parallel group. They explore a fascinating range of subjects throughout their conversation, including the impact of language like “classical” and the freedoms and restrictions of genre. Similarly, how the baggage of the canon can be a barrier for some people, but that what’s important ultimately about any art is your personal response.
One thing that Alex Ross said stood out as applicable to all art: He said that music is indefinite in its meaning. Meaning is rooted both in the time that the piece was created, but also when it is experienced. Which means art—be it music, literature, or storytelling—is a unique form of time travel.
On January 26, 2024, don’t miss! The Reser & 45th Parallel Present: Listen to This: An Evening with Alex Ross*. Acclaimed author and music writer Alex Ross joins the virtuosos of 45th Parallel for an evening of words and music, a unique concert experience that will entertain, edify, enlighten, and exhilarate. Alex will read from his books and essays, providing compelling context to the music that 45th Parallel then performs. This is a co-production with the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts and will be recorded for broadcast on All Classical Portland. Learn more here*.
Find your copy of these featured booksthrough the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Alex Ross has been the music critic at The New Yorker since 1996. He writes about classical music, covering the field from the Metropolitan Opera to the contemporary avant-garde, and has also contributed essays on literature, history, the visual arts, film, and ecology. His first book, “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century,” a cultural history of music since 1900, won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His second book, the essay collection “Listen to This,” won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. His latest book is “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music,” an account of Wagner’s vast cultural impact. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
45th Parallel Universe is a collective of musicians who come together to celebrate great chamber music with intimate artistic experiences. Passion for great music is what defines us and Portland is our stage. Since 2009, 45th Parallel has happily demolished distinctions between old and new chamber music, bluegrass and jazz, fiddle and folk. By bringing fragmented audiences together, 45th Parallel reflects Portland’s surging creative communities in fresh and imaginative ways.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Father’s Day (Copper Canyon, 2019), as well as Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine, and was the Editor of Best American Poetry 2022. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.
A singer-songwriter, pianist, and composer, Gabriel Kahane works at the blurred edges of journalism, ethnography, storytelling, and music. He is currently the Creative Chair of the Oregon Symphony, which commissioned his 2018 oratorio, emergency shelter intake form. Over the last decade, Gabriel has worked in an array of diverse musical spaces. Memorable projects have included tours with Andrew Bird and Punch Brothers; recordings with Sufjan Stevens, Phoebe Bridgers, and Blake Mills; and an arrangement of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” written for Paul Simon’s Farewell Tour in 2018. As a composer, he has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and Carnegie Hall. Gabriel is also a regular guest on American Public Media’s Live From Here with Chris Thile.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature renowned author, Mary Beard. Probably the most famous classicist in the world, Mary Beard is best known for her international bestsellers SPQR, about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, and Women & Power: A Manifesto, a study of ancient and modern attitudes toward female speech. She joined us in the fall of 2023 to talk about her latest book Emperor of Rome, which explores the power of the office of Roman emperor.
Given the huge amount that has already written about the classical world, it’s hard to imagine what there’s left to say. And yet, Beard has found a large and eager reading audience precisely because she takes material that is both familiar and remote, often presented with great formality, and humanizes the people depicted therein, be they emperors or their servants. She breathes life into the ancient world and helps us experience it in all its complexity and contradictions with humor, irony, and love for her subject.
Beard was a professor at Cambridge University for more than 40 years and her talk is a rare treat of getting to hear from someone who has spent a lifetime talking about their work, and making it accessible and relevant, to thousands of students.
Find your copy of Emperor of Romethrough the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Mary Beard is the author of the best-selling The Fires of Vesuvius and the National Book Critics Circle Award–nominated Confronting the Classics and SPQR. A popular blogger and television personality, Beard is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. She lives in England.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk by Amor Towles from a Literary Arts special event on February 1, 2023.
Towles is the author of three novels including the huge, international bestseller, A Gentleman in Moscow. He joined us to talk about his latest work The Lincoln Highway, also a bestselling novel, which began for Towles a full twenty years before its publication with a simple initial image: A warden driving a young man home for a juvenile detention center. From this jumping off point, Towles dives into describing his writing process and how he brings to life the large cast of characters that populate his books, and the complex plots that are so satisfying. There are few writers who talk with such clarity about their own process.
Towles also takes time to dwell in the historic context of the novel, the American mid-century, by talking about the extraordinary life of Carl Fisher, an entrepreneur who, among many other accomplishments, developed the first transcontinental highway (called The Lincoln Highway). Towles showed some slides during the talk so you’ll hear the audience react to some visuals, but you won’t miss anything as he does a wonderful job talking through the images. After his talk, Towles and sat down for an extend conversation.
Find your copy of The Lincoln Highway throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Amor Towles is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Rules of Civility. His novels have collectively sold millions of copies and have been translated into more than thirty languages. Towles lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Leslie Marmon Silko in conversation with Molly Gloss from a special event in 2010, at Portland State University’s Lincoln Hall.
While Leslie Marmon Silko had begun to publish poems and short stories in the 1960s, it was her iconic and ground-breaking novel, Ceremony, published in 1978, that established her as one our greatest living writers. Since then, Silko has gone on to publish widely and across genres with a distinct voice, deeply rooted in the landscapes and culture of the American Southwest.
She joined us in 2010 as part of the launch of her first book of nonfiction, The Turquoise Ledge, which was a highly anticipated release in part because it was her first book in more than a decade. The Turquoise Ledge has been called a “highly original self-portrait” and is written in fragments that blends nature writing, memoir, history, parables and legends. When asked by an interviewer about the book’s fluid structure and movement between memory and reality, Silko said, “Linear time is itself a fiction which I find tedious and simpleminded.” And as she says in this conversation, linear time can also be very dangerous.
Silko is in conversation with writer Molly Gloss, a celebrated writer of many novels, including the acclaimed The Hearts of Horses, and the winner many prestigious prizes including the Oregon Book Award.
Find your copies of Leslie Marmon Silko’s books throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Leslie Marmon Silko was born in New Mexico in 1948 to a family whose ancestry includes Mexican, Laguna Indian, and European forebears. She is the author of ten books of fiction, poetry, and memoir, including Ceremony, Storyteller, Almanac of the Dead, Gardens in the Dunes, and The Turquoise Ledge. Considered by many as one of the most important contemporary Native American writers, Silko’s honors include a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” fellowship, the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for significant contribution to American literature, and the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime achievement by a writer whose work focuses on the American West. She has been named a Living Cultural Treasure by the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities Council, and has also received the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award.
Molly Gloss is a fourth-generation Oregonian who now lives in Portland on the west side of the Tualatin Hills. She is the author of five novels: The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, Wild Life, The Hearts of Horses, and Falling from Horses, and one collection of stories, Unforseen. Her awards include the Oregon Book Award, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the PEN West Fiction Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and a Whiting Writers Award; and her short story, “Lambing Season” was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Her work often concerns the landscape, literature, mythology, and life of the American West.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul from a visit he made to Portland, Oregon in 1991.
The storied career of Naipaul spans more than a half century. In his lifetime, he was compared to Conrad, Dickens, and Tolstoy. Born in Trinidad to an Indo-Trinidadian family, he lived a peripatetic life, travelling the world constantly, though ultimately based in England. He often stirred controversy with strong opinions, and was sometimes accused of being an apologist for colonialism who yet, to quote his obituary in The New York Times, “exempted neither colonizer nor colonized from his scrutiny.” He scoffed at multiculturalism, yet celebrate diverse societies. His temper was famous. He declared novels a 19th century relic, and yet continued to write them. He infuriated and delighted critics and readers. What more can we ask of our writers and public intellectuals but for the compelling and intelligent stories that spark our own discussions?
Naipaul came to Portland on the occasion of the publication of India: A Million Mutinies Now. The book was the third installment of travelogues about his ancestral India, at time when the nation was in the midst of a massive transformation. The tribology was important for being part of a new and pioneering category of nonfiction that documented the lives of “regular” people in a style more like a novel, a style we are now so familiar with. In writing about India and its people Naipaul is both outside and insider and this is what gives him a unique perspective. And in this episode, he gives us an intimate look at the lives of both the wealthy upper caste, and also their servants. The stories take us from palaces to slums, to the homes of the burgeoning middle class, and his writing is attentive to the details, and sympathetic to his subjects.
Find your copy of India: A Million Mutinies Now throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. His novels include A House for Mr. Biswas, The Mimic Men, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. In 1971, he was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, The Masque of Africa, and a trio of books about India: An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now. In 1990, Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He lived with his wife Nadira and cat Augustus in Wiltshire, and died in 2018.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we take you behind the scenes at the 2023 Portland Book Festival, which we hosted in downtown Portland on November 4, 2023. The festival featured over 100 writers in more than 50 events throughout the day.
One of the best things about book festivals is the magic of having that particular group of authors all together at the same place at the same time. It might be the only time some of them are at the same event. This makes for great on-stage conversations and connections, but it also means that authors get to connect with each other off stage – in the green room, at the post-fest party, and even going to each other’s events.
Thinking about that magic and that opportunity, we asked six of the festival authors to recommend a book by another author in the festival. The ask resulted in some wonderful cross genre action: A young adult novelist recommends a science journalist and essayist; an adult novelist shares her love for a poet; and a cultural essayist shouts out a memoir; and more.
We’ll hear from:
Luis Alberto Urrea, author of the novel GOOD NIGHT, IRENE
Jennifer Baker, author of the young adult novel FORGIVE ME NOT
Naomi Alderman, author of the novels THE FUTURE and THE POWER
Mitchell S. Jackson, author of FLY: THE BIG BOOK OF BASKETBALL FASHION
Neal Thompson, a festival moderator, author of THE FIRST KENNEDYS and of the Blood & Whiskey newsletter
And Edan Lepucki, author of the novel TIME’S MOUTH
Given the holiday season, we thought you might get some gift-giving inspiration from their recommendations. And you will get a peek behind the scenes at the festival, where authors geek out about their fellow authors.
Each author will share their recommendation and why they chose it, and we’ll hear a bit from the author of book they are recommending. The Archive Project editor and producer Matthew Workman narrates our journey, taking us from the author green room out to the festival stages and finally to the author party – your only chance to join this exclusive festival event.
Find copies of all the recommended books (as well as all the 2023 Portland Book Festival Books)through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
On this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Barbara Kingsolver in conversation with Jess Walter. Barbara Kingsovler is the author of seventeen books, including nonfiction, short stories, poetry, and novels. Her novels include modern classics like The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna. Kingsolver is known for socially engaged writing that embraces the psychological and emotional. As she has said, “A good book should be trouble and delight the reader.” And few do that as well as Kingsolver.
Her latest novel is Demon Copperhead, set in rural Appalachia, where Kingsolver was raised and lives today. In the book, she remaps Charles Dickens’ Victorian classic David Copperfield onto her real-life community, to illuminate the poverty, broken social and education systems, the influence of industrial agriculture, and the targeting of Appalachians by Big Pharma, and the consequent pervasive and destructive opioid epidemic.
Like Dickens, she tells the story of a resilient kid caught in the crosshairs. The novel is, in the words of The Times UK, “Like Dickens directed by the Coen brothers.” Indeed, despite the subject matter, this novel is a delight to read from the first line, thanks to Kingsolver’s inventiveness and Demon’s distinctive voice. Many critics praise it as her best book yet.
Find your copy of Demon Copperhead throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts, as well as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.
Jess Walter is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of the Poets, the National Book Award finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, the winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we’re reaching back into the archive to 2020, to a virtual conversation with Colson Whitehead from Portland Arts & Lectures. It was, in fact, our very first virtual event of the pandemic and while we are so glad to be back live, it is fascinating to hear again from that time period. We’ve chosen to broadcast this conversation now because Whitehead has just published a new novel called Crook Manifesto.
There are few writers who are both as versatile and accomplished as Colson Whitehead. His subjects have ranged from elevator inspectors, to middle-class Black American suburbia, to the World Series of Poker; he has written noir, a zombie thriller, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel, and historical fiction. At the same time, he has won dozens of awards and accolades, most recently culminating in two Pulitzer Prizes—one for The Underground Railroad, and the other for the novel The Nickel Boys.
Whitehead’s significant contributions to literature come about not only because of his mastery of the craft, but also because he has range—he deploys pop culture, history, and a variety of literary techniques. And by doing so, he gives his stories new life, helping readers see sometimes familiar subjects in a new light. His interview here with Mitchell S. Jackson explores Whitehead’s writing craft, inspirations, and thoughts on current events in America.
Find your copy of The Nickel Boys throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad, which in 2016 won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, as well as The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. He is also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. He lives in New York City.
Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. Jackson is the critically acclaimed author of The Residue Years, Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family, Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion,and John of Watts (to be published soon). His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Time, Esquire, and Marie Claire, as well as in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Jackson’s nonfiction book Survival Math was published in 2019 and named a best book of the year by fifteen publications, including NPR, Time, The Paris Review, The Root, Kirkus Reviews, and Buzzfeed. Jackson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, covers race and culture as the first Black columnist in the history of Esquire, and serves as the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor in the English Department of Arizona State University.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a conversation with Michael Lewis from the 2023 Portland Book Festival. Lewis is the author of 17 books of nonfiction including Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and Flashboys. His books are about unconventional people doing extraordinary things, usually behind the scenes.
Lewis joined Portland Book Festival to talk about his new book, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon. It’s a book about Sam Bankman-Fried and the eventual collapse of his cryptocurrency hedge fund, Alameda Research, and the exchange he also founded, called FTX. At the time of this conversation, Bankman-Fried had just been found guilty of seven Federal charges, all finance-related, and was awaiting sentencing. It was a trial that many consider the biggest and most important in the world of finance in decades, and was one that was watched closely all across the world.
Lewis had unrestricted access to Bankman-Fried, spending over year reporting as he amassed one of the largest fortunes in the world and then lost everything as his businesses collapsed. The result of that reporting in Going Infinite paints a picture of a Bankman-Fried that is very different than how he was portrayed in the press and by government prosecutors. Lewis offers a perspective on Bankman-Fried and many of his closest colleagues that is rooted in understanding their deeper motives, how they were shaped as a generation, and how and why they made the mistakes they made. His conclusion is both startling and important to reckon with for its consequences in our society, regardless of whether you followed the case closely or not.
Lewis is in conversation with Literary Arts’ Executive Director, Andrew Proctor.
Find your copy of Going Infinite throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Undoing Project, and The Fifth Risk. His most recent book is Going Infinite. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his family.
Andrew Proctor has been the director of Literary Arts since 2009. Born and raised in Canada, Proctor, earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Music at Concordia University in Montreal, and later worked in London for the Cultural Attaché to the Canadian High Commission. In the UK, he also earned an MA in English Literature at the University of East Anglia under the supervision of England’s then Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. From 2000-2004 Proctor worked as an editor for HarperCollins in New York City and then as the Membership and Operations Director of the PEN American Center, a global literary and human rights organization focused on the welfare of writers and editors. In total, Proctor has worked in the literary world for over twenty years in the governmental, for profit and nonprofit sectors.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Zadie Smith in conversation with New Yorker staff writer Parul Sehgal.
Smith is one of the preeminent fiction writers of our age. She burst onto the stage in the year 2000 with her debut novel, White Teeth. It was a huge bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, and signaled a bold new talent had entered the literary world. Since then, she has published six novels, two collections of stories, and three collections of essays in addition to dozens of book reviews and criticism in some of the most influential publications in the world, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books. She has become an important public intellectual and a voice for a generation that came of age around the turn of the millennium.
What is special about this episode is Smith does relatively few public appearances; the last time she was on our stage was more than twenty years ago. The occasion for joining us this fall was the publication of The Fraud. Her new book, a historical novel, is particularly notable as it is a big departure from her previous work, which has been primarily preoccupied by contemporary life. The conversation you are about to hear is remarkable for Seghal’s breadth of knowledge of Smith’s work, and for how this brings out a broad conversation about the power of novels to humanize and complicate the small ethical dilemmas we have every day and the big existential issue of our time. Smith also talks about how she was inspired to take on her first work of historical fiction, in part, because of the ways in which she feels history can often be too easily simplified or “flattened” by what she calls the “narcissism of the present.”
Find your copy of The Fraud throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Zadie Smith is a critically acclaimed fiction writer, essayist, and playwright, whose work includes the novel White Teeth, winner of the Guardian First Book Prize, and On Beauty, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her nonfiction has appeared widely in publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, and her essay collections include Feel Free, winner of The National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002 and has twice been named a Granta 20 Best Young British Novelist. In 2022, she received The Pen/Audible Literary Service Award for her “unparalleled attention to craft and humane ideals,” and helping to “guide future generations of writers and readers to embrace and explore culture across genres and media.” Her sixth novel, The Fraud, will publish in September 2023. She is a tenured professor of creative writing at New York University and lives in London.
Parul Sehgal is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Previously, she was a book critic at the Times, where she also worked as a senior editor and columnist. She has won awards for her criticism from the New York Press Club, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. She teaches in the graduate creative-writing program at New York University.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we share a conversation about something you probably never think about, unless you think about it all of the time: disabled parenting. We’ll hear from Eliza Hull, a contemporary musician, disability advocate, and writer based in regional Victoria, Australia, and the editor of a new anthology, We’ve Got This: Essays By Disabled Parents, which features stories from parents who identify as Deaf, disabled, neurodiverse, or chronically ill. Eliza is joined by one of the anthology contributors, Rebekah Taussig, a writer, educator, and consultant with a PhD in nonfiction and disability studies based in Kansas City. Rebekah shares her story on her Instagram and in her book Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body.
We were so interested in this conversation for many of the same reasons that Eliza put this anthology together: There seem to be a decent number of resources for the parents of disabled children, but really none for disabled parents. And it seems because a lot of people don’t even conceive of the possibility of a disabled parent, but disabled people ARE parents and have as much right to parent as anyone else – and they are good at it.
Eliza and Rebekah are joined by moderator Annie Carl, who owns and runs The Neverending Bookshop in Edmonds, Washington.
Find your copy of We’ve Got This throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Eliza Hull is a musical artist, writer, journalist, and disability advocate based in Victoria, Australia. Her podcast series on parenting with a disability, We’ve Got This, was one of Radio National’s and ABC Life’s most successful series of all time.
Rebecca Taussig, PH.D. is a Kansas City writer and teacher with her doctorate in Creative Nonfiction and Disability Studies. She has led workshops and presentations at the University of Michigan, University of Kansas, and Davidson College on disability representation, identity, and community. She also runs the Instagram platform @sitting_pretty where she crafts “mini-memoirs” to contribute nuance to the collective narratives being told about disability in our culture. She lives with two cranky orange cats and one angsty-tender human.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature one of the highlights of the 2022 Portland Book Festival. It’s a conversation between two of our most accomplished fiction writers, George Saunders and Jess Walter. Their conversation is by turns hilarious, caustic, tender, and profound. Our interviewer for the event was OPB’s own Geoff Norcross, who does his usual masterful job moderating.
Find your copy of Saunders and Walter’s books throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
George Saunders is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eleven books, including A Swim in a Pond in the Rain; Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the Way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the inaugural Folio Award; The Braindead Megaphone; and the critically acclaimed collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. His most recent book is Liberation Day. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
Jess Walter is the author of ten books, most recently the short story collection The Angel of Rome. His other nine include the national bestseller The Cold Millions and the #1 New York Times bestseller, Beautiful Ruins; The Zero, the finalist for the National Book Award; and Citizen Vince, winner of the Edgar Award. His work has been published in 35 languages and his short fiction has appeared three times in Best American Short Stories.
Geoff Norcross is the Morning Edition host at Oregon Public Broadcasting. Before coming to Oregon, he was the program director at the NPR-affiliate KNAU in Flagstaff, Arizona. A 25-year radio veteran, Geoff has been on air in New York, Florida, Missouri, Illinois, and West Virginia. He joined OPB in 2008. Geoff has received awards from the Public Radio News Directors Inc. for best interview, the Edward R. Murrow Award for best feature reporting, and the Florida Associated Press Award for the best newscast. Geoff graduated from Bradley University with a degree in communications. Geoff lives in Portland with his wife. When he’s not on the air, you can find him rowing on the Willamette River or running and biking around the southwest hills. If you get up early enough, you might catch him hiking the nearby mountains.
This week’s episode of The Archive Project features a conversation from the 2022 Portland Book Festival. Portland-born writer Mitchell S. Jackson interviewed Leila Mottley about her debut novel, Nightcrawling.
Jackson is the author of the novel The Residue Years and the nonfiction book Survival Math. He is the winner of a Whiting Award and he received the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for his piece on Ahmaud Arbery. Leila Mottley is the former youth poet laureate of Oakland, California. Nightcrawling is her first book, and she was just nineteen years old when it was published last year.
We paired Mitchell with Leila because despite their generational differences—there are thirty years between them and they are, of course, at very different points in their careers—they’ve both written novels about the beauty and the darkness that exist side-by-side in their complicated hometowns: Portland and Oakland, respectively. Leila says in the conversation about Oakland, “There is no where I feel more at home and nowhere I feel less safe,” and that those two feelings can exist at once.
A quick note for listeners: Parts of this conversation touch on mature themes of police brutality and sexual assault that may not be suitable for all listeners.
Find your copy of Leila & Mitchell’s books throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Leila Mottley is the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and Oprah Daily. She was born and raised in Oakland, where she continues to live. Nightcrawling is her first novel.
Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years received wide critical praise. Jackson is the winner of a Whiting Award. His novel also won The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for The Center for Fiction Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN / Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. His honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Lannan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, PEN America, TED, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Center for Fiction. His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Time Magazine, and Esquire Magazine, as well as in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere. His nonfiction book Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family was published in the spring of 2019 and named a best book of the year by fifteen publications, including NPR, Time Magazine, The Paris Review, The Root, Kirkus Reviews, and Buzzfeed. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at the University of Chicago.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we bring you an event from the 2022 Portland Book Festival, which took place on Saturday, November 5, 2022. The hour is split into two halves of thematically related conversations. Up first, OPB’s Tiffany Camhi interviews writer Melissa Febos about her essay collection, Girlhood; in the second half of the show, OPB’s Jenn Chavez speaks with music critic and New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu about his memoir, Stay True.
We paired Melissa and Hua for this festival event because their books share themes of adolescence and coming of age, of exploring identity through art-making and finding your voice, and of searching for and finding your people, finding belonging and a community. Melissa and Hua each speak about how processing the large and small events and emotions of their lives through writing has been a way they understand their lives and a way to find meaning.
They also both talk about how writing about events or traumas in their past, including revisiting writing from their younger selves, has helped them realize how their relationship to that event or trauma changes over time. I think that you hear in these conversations that for Melissa and Hua, writing about their experiences created a new compassion for their younger, messier, angrier, selves.
Find your copy of Melissa & Hua’s books through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Melissa Febos is the bestselling author of four books, including Girlhood—LAMBDA Award finalist and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. Her fifth book, The Dry Season, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf. Her awards and fellowships include those from the Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The British Library, The Black Mountain Institute, MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has recently appeared in The Paris Review, The Sun, The New York Times Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Best American Essays, Vogue, and New York Review of Books. Febos is an associate professor at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.
Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and an associate professor of English at Vassar College. Hsu serves on the executive board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He was formerly a fellow at the New American foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his family.
Tiffany Camhi is a multimedia journalist focusing on arts, culture and environment reporting. You can hear her throughout the state of Oregon on OPB. She spent six years at KQED Public Radio in the San Francisco Bay Area as a host, producer, reporter and all-around audio gopher. Tiffany is an alumni of the City University of New York, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. When Tiffany’s not on the radio you can usually find her riding a motorcycle…or trying to figure out a way to talk about motorcycles on the radio.
Jenn Chávez is a radio host, announcer and producer with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Jenn has been making radio in Portland for over a decade. Prior to joining OPB in 2017, she hosted and produced the local news radio show “The Five Quadrants of Portland” on XRAY-FM, reporting on issues impacting underrepresented communities. She has a BA in literature and writing from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She spent her younger days as a film-nerdy video store clerk, and remains a source of unsolicited movie recommendations.
This week’s episode of The Archive Project features Reza Aslan discussing his new book, An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville. Aslan was interviewed by Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor at the 2022 Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America, which took place on Saturday, November 5 in downtown Portland.
Iran has been in the news this fall for a new wave of protests in reaction to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the morality police for not wearing her hijab “properly” and died while in police custody. The protests have been remarkably widespread, and the government response severe. Aslan asserts this current movement is a fourth Iranian revolution, after 1979, 1953, and the 1906 constitutional revolution his book focuses on.
In An American Martyr in Persia, Aslan describes the events of that 1906 revolution through the story of Howard Baskerville, the son of a preacher and a student of Woodrow Wilson, who found himself in Tabriz, Iran in 1907, working as a Presbyterian minister and teacher. What happened next is well-known to Iranians but almost totally unknown to Americans.
“People ask me, ‘What can we do to help the people of Iran?’ Well, when you ask the people of Iran, ‘What do you need?’ they say, ‘Pay attention, that’s what we need.’ We have the ability to say, ‘We hear you. We’re paying attention. We’re going to shine a light on this for as long as it takes.’ That is far, far more powerful and valuable than you think it is.”
Find your copy of An American Martyr in Persia through the Literary Arts page on Bookshop.org.
Reza Aslan is an acclaimed writer and scholar of religions. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Zealot, No God but God, and editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
Andrew Proctor has been the director of Literary Arts since 2009. Born and raised in Canada, Proctor, earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Music at Concordia University in Montreal, and later worked in London for the Cultural Attaché to the Canadian High Commission. In the UK, he also earned an MA in English Literature at the University of East Anglia under the supervision of England’s then Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. From 2000-2004 Proctor worked as an editor for HarperCollins in New York City and then as the Membership and Operations Director of the PEN American Center, a global literary and human rights organization focused on the welfare of writers and editors. In total, Proctor has worked in the literary world for over twenty years in the governmental, for profit and nonprofit sectors.
We’re thrilled to welcome Barbara Kingsolver back to Portland on Tuesday, October 17 at the Keller Auditorium. She’ll share her newest novel, DEMON COPPERHEAD, and be joined in conversation with author Jess Walter. More info here.This episode of The Archive Project features Barbara Kingsolver in an interview with Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor, as part of the 2012-13 season of Portland Arts & Lectures. The occasion for Kingsolver’s visit was the publication of a long-awaited novel, Flight Behavior. Kingsolver is perhaps best known for her novel The Poisonwood Bible which many critics and readers consider a masterpiece.
In this interview, Kingsolver discusses her most recent book, but also looks back at previous book and her craft over the span of her career, and how it relates to the political or social issues that are her themes. Kingsolver is a writer who embraces so called “political art” and who rejects the idea that it, by definition, it is a lesser form. This “divorce”, as she calls it in this conversation, between art and the issues, is artificial and distinctly American. And it’s a divorce that can leave American artists dangerously on the sidelines of some of the most important political and social arguments of the day.
Find your copy of Barbara Kingsolver’s books throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts, as well as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.
On this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a conversation between Kiese Laymon and Imbolo Mbue on storytelling, environmental racism, and activism, recorded at the 2023 AWP Conference in Seattle, Washington.
Set in a fictional African village being polluted by an oil company, Imbolo Mbue’s latest novel, How Beautiful We Were, confronts environmental devastation, corporate colonialism and activism. Kiese Laymon, author of the memoir Heavy, has multigenerational roots in Mississippi have led him to consider climate justice and the ways that extractive agriculture, corporate interests, and the legacy of slavery impact communities of color in the US.
Find your copy Kiese and Imbolo’s books throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the Libby Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. Laymon is the author of Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times critics. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. Laymon is at work on the books, Good God, and City Summer, Country Summer, and a number of other film and television projects. He is the founder of “The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative,” a program based out of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, aimed at aiding young people in Jackson get more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing on their on their own terms, in their own communities. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.
Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. The novel has been adapted into an opera and a stage play, and optioned for a miniseries. Her second novel, How Beautiful We Were, about a fictional African village’s fight against an against American oil company, was named by the New York Times as “One of the 10 Best Books” of 2021. Her works have been translated into eighteen languages and published in dozens of countries. A native of Limbe, Cameroon, and a graduate of Rutgers and Columbia Universities, Mbue lives in New York.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature some of the incredible slam poets who performed as part of Verselandia!—the annual, city-wide youth poetry slam championship event, presented by Literary Arts—in 2022.
Each year, youth spend months writing and competing in slams on high school campuses across the city. Then, each April, about twenty student finalists compete for the title of city-wide Portland slam champ.
What is important about this episode is that these young poets are thrilling to hear. They will give you the chills, make you laugh, and perhaps bring tears to your eyes. And what’s more, 2022 was the first time we’d been able to present the competition live since 2019, and it was an especially emotional evening. So, at this moment when it feels our society is cleaved with deep divisions—race, geography, economics and age—it is so important to take the time to really listen to young voices, who are, after all the future. These young writers come from all walks of life in Portland, and have incredible stories to tell.
Content note: Some of these poems contain explicit language and mature content, which may not be suitable for all audiences.Anis Mojgani is Oregon’s current Poet Laureate and the author of five books of poetry. His work has appeared on HBO, NPR, and in journals Bat City Review, Rattle, Buzzfeed Reader, Thrush, and Forklift Ohio, amongst others. A two time National Poetry Slam Champion and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, Anis has done commissioned work for the Getty Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Portland Timbers, and has been awarded artist residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, AIR Serenbe, and the Bloedel Nature Reserve. Originally from New Orleans, Anis currently lives in Portland, OR, where he serves on the Board of Directors for Literary Arts. His latest collection is In the Pockets of Small Gods.
Join us in welcoming Ann Patchett back to Portland on Tuesday, October 17 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. She’ll share her newest novel, TOM LAKE, and will be in conversation with writer Cheryl Strayed. Find more info and tickets here. In this episode of The Archive Project, we hear from beloved, best-selling novelist, essayist, and bookstore owner Ann Patchett. The talk in this episode is from her appearance at Portland Arts & Lectures in 2013. Patchett joined us on the publication of a collection of essays titled This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage.
This talk is powerful because, while her devotion to craft and exceptional talent is clear from her many award-winning novels, we learn that her writing life is also one filled with false starts, detours, happy accidents, and acts of generosity. It is also consumed, at least in the first part of her career, with the practical need to make a living, and the compromises and survival techniques required to do so. And so, she tells the story of her life as a writer with a wry sense of humor, sharp insight, and refreshingly practical attitude.
“Well, what it turned out the story of my happy marriage was, was the never ending history of divorce in my family. Everyone in my family for as far as the eye can see, in any direction, has been divorced. And when I sat down to write about marriage, it was really fascinating to realize that everything I know about marriage comes from divorce, and that divorce is the bedrock of my marriage.” —Ann Patchett
Find your copy of Ann Patchett’s books through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Ann Patchett is the author of novels, works of nonfiction, and children’s books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the PEN/Faulkner, the Women’s Prize in the U.K., and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. TIME magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. President Biden awarded her the National Humanities Medal in recognition of her contributions to American culture. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the owner of Parnassus Books.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we are celebrating the kickoff of National Poetry Month with a special event, recorded in front of a live audience at Literary Arts event space in downtown Portland on September 17, 2022. This event was part of a partnership with the Alano Club of Portland and their Artists in Recovery series, about the intersections of mental health and substance use recovery, creativity, and building community. Learn more at PortlandAlano.org.
Alano Club director of development and community engagement Kasey Anderson emceed an evening with writers Leslie Jamison, Kaveh Akbar, and Hanif Abdurraqib, who shared recent and brand-new work with the audience, a multi-genre mix of prose and poetry. As they share their own work, talk about each other’s work and their relationship to Alano Club, it’s clear from the fact that they felt comfortable enough to share brand-new writing that these three writers deeply admire and respect each other.
Many of our episodes feature writers in conversation, but this week we have a trio of readings for you. First, we’ll hear from Kasey Anderson, of the Alano Club, and our first writer of the evening is Leslie Jamison, award-winning essayist and author of The Empathy Exams, reads from her memoir The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, as well a new work-in-progress.
Then Kaveh Akbar reads from his most recent book of poetry, Pilgrim Bell, and a novel-in-progress.
We also hear from poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib, author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America, his most recent poetry collection is A Fortune for Your Disaster. Abdurraqib reads from his poetry and a nonfiction project to close out the event.
A quick note: This conversation touches on mature themes of subsctance abuse and recovery that may not be suitable for all listeners.
Find your copy of Hanif, Kaveh, and Leslie’s books through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His most recent book, A Little Devil in America, was the winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burns Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Award. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much , was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize and nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us was named a book of the year by NPR, Esquire, BuzzFeed, O: The Oprah Magazine, Pitchfork, Chicago Tribune, among others. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist, and longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune for Your Disaster, won the Lenore Marshall Prize. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Kaveh Akbar is the author of Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, and has received honors such as a Levis Reading Prize and multiple Pushcart Prizes. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in low-residency programs at Warren Wilson and Randolph Colleges.
Leslie Jamison is the author of The Empathy Exams. Her essays have appeared in the Believer, Harper’s, Oxford American, A Public Space, Tin House, and The Best American Essays. She is a regular columnist for the New York Times Book Review and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we’re reaching back more than 30 years into the archive to feature the prolific novelist Jane Smiley from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in 1991. This period was an inflection point in her career. At that time, she had established herself as an important and respected American writer, but had yet to find a large audience—to this day, many believe The Greenlanders, published just three years before this talk in 1988, to be a significantly underappreciated novel. Just six months after this talk, Smiley would published her breakout novel A Thousand Acres and would win the 1992 Pulitzer Prize which catapulted her to literary fame.
The title of the talk is, provocatively, “Can Mother’s Think?” The irony here, of course, is that Smiley is both a brilliant artist and a mother. But as a young writer she could not find literature that rendered the experience of motherhood with the depth, nuance, and power she felt it deserved. She discusses the paternal nature of the books that dominate the so-called canon, the relationship of feminism to motherhood, and challenges the notion of unconditional love, a notion that she believes contributed to the dearth of complex mothers in literature. She also talks about a crop of new writers emerging at the time who were changing the very definition of literature by writing about motherhood in new and profound ways.
Find your copy of Jane Smiley’s books through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and the Last Hundred Years Trilogy: Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age. She is the author as well of several works of nonfiction and books for young adults. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has also received the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. She lives in Northern California.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature journalist Patrick Radden Keefe from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in February 2023. Keefe is the author of five books of nonfiction, most recently Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Rebels, and Crooks, a collection of essays from his work as a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. NPR called Rogues “a wonderful book, not only because Keefe’s prose is masterful, but because he has a preternatural gift for reading people. He recognizes that we’re all unreliable narrators of our own lives, and writes about his subjects with a keen sense of understanding.”
He is also the author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Mystery in Northern Ireland, as well as Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.
In this talk, Keefe speaks to his writing process of what his editor termed “investigative melodrama.” He is drawn in by fascinating real-life characters like Arthur Sackler of Empire of Pain and Dolours Price of Say Nothing as way to explore, as he says, “the arbitrary lines we draw between what’s legal and illegal, what society sanctions and celebrates and what it condemns and punishes.”
We’re including the full event intro and Q&A in this extended version of this episode, since many subscribers couldn’t make it to the concert hall due to the extraordinary weather–Portland experienced an unexpected and historic, record-setting snowstorm the evening of the event.
As a special feature, we start the episode with a short reading from Oregon-based writer, Stephan Nance. Nance was awarded the Edna L. Holmes Fellowship in Young Readers from Literary Arts in 2023. Their reading is a selection from their Young Adult novel-in-progress, A Bird in the Heart, which they describe as a “very birdy young adult novel set in Eastern Oregon”.
Find your copy of Patrick Radden Keefe’s books through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the decade by Entertainment Weekly. His previous books are The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Lauren Groff from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in early 2023 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Groff is the author of six books of fiction, the last three of which, Fates and Furies, Florida, and Matrix were all national bestsellers and all finalists for the National Book Award.
One of the many delights in reading Groff’s books is the dramatic shift in time, place, and focus from title to title. She is not an artist writing the same book over and over. From a multi-century saga of a town and its secrets, to a boy at a hippie commune in upstate New York, to look at a modern Greek tragedy, to the wild country that is the state of Florida, and life in a medieval nunnery during the twelfth century–every time you pick up one of her books you are transported. It’s thrilling as a reader, and it speaks to Groff’s immense talent that there are thematic through-lines moving across such a diverse body of work.
In her talk, Groff reveals the deeper undercurrents of her work and her unusual process of writing. While she professes to be “profoundly secular,” the core of her talk revolves around God, poetry, love and sexuality. She weaves in discussion of the biblical Song of Solomon, to her own biography and her spiritual journey, and the universal themes found in the work of John Manley Hopkins. She manages to do all this with an incredible sense of humor and a light touch which feels, like her fiction, somehow slightly magical.
Find your copy of Matrix through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Lauren Groff is the New York Times bestselling author of four novels and two short story collections. Her 2021 novel Matrix, which Esquire described as “Incandescent… a radiant work of imagination and accomplishment,” was a National Book Award finalist and was selected by President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year. Her works have won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, and France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne. Groff is a three-time finalist for the National Book Award and twice for the Kirkus Prize, and has been shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. She lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband and two sons.
This week on The Archive Project, we bring you a lecture from the 2003/2004 season of Portland Arts & Lectures, featuring renowned memoirist and short story writer Tobias Wolff. Best known for his memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, Wolff has also published award-winning fiction, mostly short stories, and in this lecture is discussing his 2003 novel, Old School, which was a finalist for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
In his lecture, Wolff explores the balance and conflict between writing memoir and writing fiction, that push and pull between autobiography and imagination, or as he says, “the pressure of the personal life on the imagined life that we write.” It’s a humorous lecture with an inviting mix of personal anecdotes and some more professorial analysis of influences like Leo Tolstoy and Flannery O’Connor–and ideal something-for-everyone kind of talk.
Wolff went on to publish Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories in 2008, and in 2014, Wolff was awarded the Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement from Oregon State University, and in 2015 President Barack Obama presented him with the National Medal of the Arts for his contributions as an author and educator.
“A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.” – Old School
Find your copy of Tobias Wolff’s books through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Tobias Wolff lives in Northern California and teaches at Stanford University. He has received the Rea Award for excellence in the short story, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a discussion on late writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s legacy of pacifism and environmentalism. Our moderator is Theo Downes-Le Guin, Ursula’s son and literary executor. Theo is in conversation with Oregon-based writers Juhea Kim, author of the novel Beasts of a Little Land, a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Michelle Ruiz Keil, author most recently of the young adult novel Summer in the City of Roses, which was a finalist for the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.
In her speech at the 2014 National Book Awards, accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Ursula said: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.”
Juhea Kim and Michelle Ruiz Keil are two of those voices that we need now. In this conversation, Juhea and Michelle discuss how they came—and returned—to Le Guin’s work, her influence on their writing, and how they are carrying her legacy forward, including the responsibility of the artist as a humanitarian.
This conversation was recorded in front of a live audience at Literary Arts on July 15, 2022.
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin
Find your copy of these books through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was a celebrated author whose body of work includes 23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA’s Grand Master, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.
Michelle Ruiz Keil is an author, playwright, and tarot reader with an eye for the enchanted and way with animals. She is the author of the critically acclaimed young adult novels All of Us With Wings and Summer In The City of Roses. Her writing for adults can be found most recently in Bitch, Cosmonauts Avenue, and the anthology Dispatches From Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin. She is a 2021 Tin House Scholar and the recipient of residencies from Hedgebrook, The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and the Bloedel Reserve. Born in San Francisco, Michelle has lived in Portland, Oregon for many years where she curates the fairytale reading series All Kinds of Fur and lives with her family in a cottage where the forest meets the city.
Juhea Kim is a writer, artist, and advocate based in Portland, Oregon. Her bestselling debut novel Beasts of a Little Land was named a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a Best Book of 2021 by Harper’s Bazaar, Real Simple, Ms., and Portland Monthly. Her writing has been published in Granta, Slice, The Massachusetts Review, Zyzzyva, Guernica, Catapult, Times Literary Supplement, The Independent, Sierra Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the founder and editor ofPeaceful Dumpling, an online magazine at the intersection of sustainable lifestyle and ecological literature. She has received fellowship support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, and Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She earned her BA in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we reach back to the year 2000 to highlight one of the best conversations about writing found in our archives: A special event with Amy Bloom and Michael Cunningham.
Amy Bloom had just published a collection of stories entitled, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, and Cunningham had published one his most important and bestselling novels, The Hours, just two years earlier. The Hours went on to become a movie that received nine Academy Award nominations and just last year was made into an opera that was performed in Philadelphia and New York, among other cities.
These two old friends are among the best fiction writers at work in this county. At the time of this conversation they were both at the height of their powers, making their talk both intimate and profound. There’s not an ounce of pretension or snobbery between them; they express nothing but humility and respect for the difficulties of writing fiction. In fact, the opening question of the conversation challenges the very the reason their work even exists when Cunningham and Bloom struggle to answer: Why write? They seem to forget that there is an audience of more than 2,000 watching them, as they discuss their art and what it means to them, and what the art form might mean in the larger world.
Find your copies of Amy Bloom & Michael Cunningham’s books through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Amy Bloom is the author of four novels: White Houses, Lucky Us, Away, and Love Invents Us; and three collections of short stories: Where the God Of Love Hangs Out, Come to Me (finalist for the National Book Award), and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). Her first book of nonfiction, Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops and Hermaphrodites with Attitudes, is a staple of university sociology and biology courses. Her most recent book is the widely acclaimed New York Times bestselling memoir, In Love. She has written for magazines such as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Elle, The Atlantic, Slate, and Salon, and her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She is the Director of the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University.
Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, and The Snow Queen, as well as the collection A Wild Swan and Other Tales, and the nonfiction book Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories. The Hours was a New York Times bestseller, and the winner of both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Raised in Los Angeles, Michael Cunningham lives in New York City, and is a senior lecturer at Yale University.
Jon Raymond and Dao Strom discuss multidisciplinary writing and artistry with Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani at Pickathon music festival.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Scottish novelist Douglas Stuart, winner of the Booker Prize for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain. He speaks about his new novel, Young Mungo, with Portland-based author and Oregon Book Award winner Omar El Akkad. They discuss the desire and longing at the heart of the story of the love between two working class young men from different religious backgrounds in Glasgow. A highlight is Stuart’s description of how his previous career in the textile industry relates to his work as a writer.
The conversation between Douglas Stuart and Omar El Akkad was recorded in front of a live audience at Powell’s City of Books in Portland on May 5th, 2022. For a complete lineup of Powell’s upcoming in-person and virtual author event programming, please visit them at powells.com/events.
We’ll join Douglas and Omar at the beginning of the event, with a moving introduction from Powell’s employee Nick Yandell.
Douglas Stuart is a Scottish-American author. His New York Times-bestselling debut novel Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker Prize and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was the winner of two British Book Awards, including Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, Kirkus Prize, as well as several other literary awards. Stuart’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker and Literary Hub.
Omar El Akkad is an author and a journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work earned Canada’s National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.
On this episode of The Archive Project, we feature multi-genre bestselling poet and author of thirty-eight books, Kwame Alexander, who discusses his memoir Why Fathers Cry at Night with James Beard award-winning chef of Portland’s Kann, and author of the cookbook Everybody’s Table, Gregory Gourdet. Their conversation was recorded at Powell’s Books in downtown Portland.
Alexander is best-known for his children’s books, including The Door of No Return and The Crossover, which was recently made into a TV series. Last month he published a memoir, Why Fathers Cry at Night: A Memoir in Love Poems, Letters, Recipes, and Remembrances. Alexander said that he started the book as love poems for his daughters, not knowing it would become the memoir and a mix of poetry, prose, recipes, and more as he explored his past and his present.
The conversation is remarkably open and honest, as Alexander shares stories ranging from learning to cook his mother’s fried chicken—an especially challenging project while living in buttermilk-less London—in order to connect not only with his late mother but with his daughter; growing up with a strict, book-loving father and how that affected his relationship to books and literature; and actively working to become a better father, partner, and friend by pushing himself to be more vulnerable with the people in his life. Although the word “father” is in the title, the book and the conversation touch on all kinds of friend and family relationships, beyond father-child.
Find your copy Kwame and Gregory’s books through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Kwame Alexander is the New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty books, including his Newbery Medal-winning novel The Crossover and The Undefeated, winner of the Caldecott Medal and Newbery Honor. He is the founding editor of Versify, which aims to change the world one word at a time.
Gregory Gourdet is a celebrated chef, best-selling author, and television personality. He is best known for his award-winning cuisine, bevy of TV appearances, and trendsetting role in the culinary boom of Portland. Gregory ran the kitchen at Portland’s Departure Restaurant + Lounge for 10 years, leaving in 2019 to focus on opening Kann. He was named “Chef of the Year” by both Eater Portland and the Oregon Department of Agriculture, and is a James Beard Award nominee and two-time Bravo Top Chef finalist. In 2021, Gregory released his first cookbook, Everyone’s Table: Global Recipes for Modern Health, which was a national bestseller and won the James Beard Award for Best General Cookbook.
In this episode, we feature a conversation between Louise Erdrich and Portland-based writer Trevino Brings Plenty from the 2021 Portland Book Festival. Louise Erdrich joined us virtually from Minneapolis for an event in front of a live audience at the Newmark Theater. She is on our most celebrated and writers alive. Her novels include The Night Watchman, which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, The Round House, which won the National Book Award for Fiction, Love Medicine, and LaRose received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. She joined us on the occasion of the publication of her most recent novel, The Sentence.
Find your copy of Erdrich and Brings Plenty’s books through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. Love Medicine and LaRose received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. Her most recent book, The Night Watchman, won the Pulitzer Prize. A ghost lives in her creaky old house.
Trevino L. Brings Plenty is a poet and musician who lives, works, and writes in Portland, OR. Trevino is an American and Native American; a Lakota Indian born on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, South Dakota, USA. Some of his work explores the American Indian identity in American culture and how it has through genealogical history affected indigenous peoples in the 21st century. He writes of urban Indian life; it’s his subject. His works include Wakpá Wanáǧi, Ghost River (2015); Real Indian Junk Jewelry (2012); and Shedding Skins: Four Sioux Poets (2008).
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah speaks about his native Zanzibar and how his upbringing has shaped his writing career.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a Portland Book Festival event with two prominent young adult novelists whose work appeals to readers of any age.
Ellen Hagan’s novel in verse, Don’t Call Me a Hurricane, explores the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy on a New Jersey shore community through the perspective of Eliza, who is fighting to protect her home from development while navigating the lingering trauma of the storm and the climate crisis—plus the additional crisis of having a crush on her should-be enemy, a rich summer tourist.
In Meet Me In Mumbai, Sabina Khan interweaves the stories of Ayesha, who finds herself eighteen years old, far from her home in India, in love for the first time… while pregnant and facing a huge decision. Seventeen years later, Ayesha’s daughter Mira, is searching for information about her history when she finds a box of letters from her birth mother. Mira yearns for more connection to her Indian heritage, but must decide if she’s ready to learn the whole truth about her past.
Both novels feature young characters making big decisions and grappling with the consequences their own choices—as well as the aftermath of the world they are born into—as they find their way. The past is present in both storylines, in ways that ring true for readers of all ages.
Our panel moderator is Portland writer and editor Megan Savage.
Find your copy Ellen and Sabina’s books throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Ellen Hagan is a writer, performer, and educator. She is the author of Reckless, Glorious, Girl and the co-author with Renée Watson of Watch Us Rise. Her poetry collections include Blooming Fiascoes, Hemisphere, and Crowned. Her work can be found in ESPN Magazine, She Walks in Beauty, and Southern Sin. Ellen is the Director of the Poetry & Theatre Departments at the DreamYard Project and directs their International Poetry Exchange Program with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. She co-leads the Alice Hoffman Young Writer’s Retreat at Adelphi University. Raised in Kentucky, she now lives in New York City with her family.
Sabina Khan is the author of the YA novels Meet Me in Mumbai, Zara Hossain is Here, and The Love & Lies of Rukhsana Ali. She is an educational consultant and a karaoke enthusiast. After living in Germany, Bangladesh, Macao, Illinois and Texas, she has finally settled down in beautiful British Columbia, Canada, with her husband, two daughters and the best puppy in the world.
Megan Savage is a multi-genre writer who has taught courses including Creative Writing, Editing & Publishing, and Children’s Literature at Portland Community College since 2008. At PCC, she serves on the Steering Committee for the new Carolyn Moore Writing Residency. She holds an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing and an M.A. in English from Indiana University where she was Fiction Editor of Indiana Review. Her own writing is influenced by themes and images from children’s literature, fairy tales, and folklore, and can be found in such places as the Routledge anthology, Pandemic of Perspectives: Creative Re-Imagining, the More Devotedly podcast, FE: A Fonograf Editions Magazine, and Hunger Mountain #25: Art Saves.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk by Amor Towles from a Literary Arts special event on February 1, 2023.
Towles is the author of three novels including the huge, international bestseller, A Gentleman in Moscow. He joined us to talk about his latest work The Lincoln Highway, also a bestselling novel, which began for Towles a full twenty years before its publication with a simple initial image: A warden driving a young man home for a juvenile detention center. From this jumping off point, Towles dives into describing his writing process and how he brings to life the large cast of characters that populate his books, and the complex plots that are so satisfying. There are few writers who talk with such clarity about their own process.
Towles also takes time to dwell in the historic context of the novel, the American mid-century, by talking about the extraordinary life of Carl Fisher, an entrepreneur who, among many other accomplishments, developed the first transcontinental highway (called The Lincoln Highway). Towles showed some slides during the talk so you’ll hear the audience react to some visuals, but you won’t miss anything as he does a wonderful job talking through the images. After his talk, Towles and sat down for an extend conversation.
Find your copy of The Lincoln Highway throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Amor Towles is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Rules of Civility. His novels have collectively sold millions of copies and have been translated into more than thirty languages. Towles lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk from Edwidge Danticat from Portland Arts & Lectures on May 12, 2022.
Danticat became nationally recognized with her debut novel published in 1994 Breath, Eyes, Memory which was an Oprah Book Club selection and national bestseller. Since then, she has gone on to publish more than a dozen books in multiple genres—novels, short fiction, memoir, literary criticism, young adult, and children’s books—many which were bestsellers including the Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, and Claire of the Sea of Light.
In her talk, Danticat gives an intimate picture of her life, from her childhood in Haiti to her immigration as a young adult to Brooklyn. The talk is structured around her mother’s diagnosis and treatment of cancer. It explores Danticat’s life growing up in an extended family in two countries and the beauty and struggles this life brought her. She offers us a portrait of Haitian culture that reveals it beauty, joy and strength rather than centering the tragedies that nation has suffered as is so often the case. In all, this an inspirational talk about intergenerational and international families, migration, and holding multiple cultures within oneself. It gives a deeper understanding of Danticat as a writer, and sheds important light on a culture often misunderstood here in the United States.
Find your copy Danticat’s books throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including The Art of Death, a National Book Critics Circle finalist; Claire of the Sea Light, a New York Times Notable Book; Brother, I’m Dying, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist; The Dew Breaker, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the inaugural Story Prize; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah’s Book Club selection; and Krik? Krak!, also a National Book Award finalist. A 2018 Neustadt International Prize for Literature winner and the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” grant, she has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere.
On this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a conversation between Kiese Laymon and Imbolo Mbue on storytelling, environmental racism, and activism, recorded at the 2023 AWP Conference in Seattle, Washington.
Set in a fictional African village being polluted by an oil company, Imbolo Mbue’s latest novel, How Beautiful We Were, confronts environmental devastation, corporate colonialism and activism. Kiese Laymon, author of the memoir Heavy, has multigenerational roots in Mississippi have led him to consider climate justice and the ways that extractive agriculture, corporate interests, and the legacy of slavery impact communities of color in the US.
Find your copy Kiese and Imbolo’s books throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the Libby Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. Laymon is the author of Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times critics. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. Laymon is at work on the books, Good God, and City Summer, Country Summer, and a number of other film and television projects. He is the founder of “The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative,” a program based out of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, aimed at aiding young people in Jackson get more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing on their on their own terms, in their own communities. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.
Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. The novel has been adapted into an opera and a stage play, and optioned for a miniseries. Her second novel, How Beautiful We Were, about a fictional African village’s fight against an against American oil company, was named by the New York Times as “One of the 10 Best Books” of 2021. Her works have been translated into eighteen languages and published in dozens of countries. A native of Limbe, Cameroon, and a graduate of Rutgers and Columbia Universities, Mbue lives in New York.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Ada Limón from the closing night of the 2022-23 Portland Arts & Lectures series.
Limón is the author of six books of poetry and a finalist for numerous prizes for her work. In 2022, Limon published a collection of new poems The Hurting Kind and was also named the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, at the age of 46. Of this recognition Limón said, “Again and again, I have been witness to poetry’s immense power to reconnect us to the world, to allow us to heal, to love, to grieve, to remind us of the full spectrum of human emotion… I am humbled by this opportunity to work in the service of poetry and to amplify poetry’s ability to restore our humanity and our relationship to the world around us.”
In her talk, Limón takes us back to her lonely childhood in Sonoma, California where she first connects with nature, begins to discover the power of what she calls “paying attention,” and first falls in love with language. Throughout her talk, and throughout her work, Limón calls on us to slow down and really look at the world, and our lives, as a way to make sense of them. To actually take a moment to breathe. She demonstrates over and over again how poetry, with its attention to details, its structure of line breaks, calls the world’s details into greater focus, providing as she says, no answers but that rather provides an “unclaimed space for human fullness.” In making her case for poetry, Limón is unpretentious, accessible, funny, dark, insightful and ironic.
“Read poetry, and you will feel as if the doors of the world are opening.”
Find your copy Limón’s books throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was the host of the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes and teaches remotely. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is out now from Milkweed Editions. She is the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States.
On this episode of The Archive Project, we have a conversation recorded exclusively for our show. We are featuring Portland Youth Philharmonic, the nation’s oldest youth orchestra, and we’ve brought together a conductor, a composer, a poet, and a vocalist to discuss their cross-disciplinary collaboration on a poetry-inspired piece titled Because I Will Not Despair.
The piece is based on the poetry of Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient and Oregon Book Award finalist Alicia Jo Rabins. Composer Jessica Meyer has adapted Rabins’s poetry to music, and vocalist Anna Song and the In Mulieribus vocal choir will join Portland Youth Philharmonic’s chamber orchestra, conducted by David Hattner to perform this new piece in Portland on May 5, 2023.
It’s especially interesting to hear these four collaborators–Alicia, Jessica, Anna, and David–discuss work that is ongoing, as the piece is still being shaped. We also hear how different it is for a composer or a conductor to put their work into the world, versus a poet. Rabins phrases it well, saying: “As artists, we are part of one massive human conversation, and we put as much as we can into the piece or the performance, and the people interacting with it are what make that a complete process, whether that’s the audience or the reader or another artist you’re collaborating with.”
Most music requires collaboration and interpretation, and hearing how inspiring it is for the musical artists on this piece to work with, in their words, a “living” poet and poetry and text makes this conversation a pleasurable listen.
Find Alicia Jo Rabins’ poetry throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
David Hattner is the Musical Director of the highly acclaimed Portland Youth Philharmonic (Oregon), the nation’s oldest youth orchestra. The fifth music director in its distinguished 93-year history, he is the first to be born in the United States. Known for his encyclopedic knowledge of American repertoire, Hattner’s programming is relevant, thoughtful, and “especially attractive.” (The Chicago Tribune). Hattner received rave reviews following his debut with PYP in November 2008: “The Portland Youth Philharmonic roared like a Maserati on Saturday in its first concert under music director David Hattner. The route was challenging, the execution distinguished and the ride delightful,” wrote David Stabler for The Oregonian.
With playing that is “fierce and lyrical” and works that are “other-worldly” (The Strad) and “evocative” (New York Times), Jessica Meyer is an award-winning composer and violist whose passionate musicianship radiates accessibility and emotional clarity. Recent premieres include works for the St. Lawrence String Quartet as the composer in residence at Spoleto Festival USA, musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra, Bangor Symphony as the winner of the 2nd Annual Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Composer’s Award, and the Argus Quartet as a winner of Chamber Music America’s Commissioning Program Award. Her first Symphonic Band piece recently had its NY premiere in Carnegie Hall by the President’s Own Marine Band, and her orchestral works have been performed by the Phoenix, North Carolina, Charlotte, and Vermont Symphonies, and all around the country as part of Carnegie Hall’s nationwide Link Up Program. This season brings the premiere of “GAEA”, a concerto for herself and orchestra, as well as works for the Dorian Wind Quintet and Hub New Music.
Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician, performer and feminist Jewish educator. She is the author of two books of poetry, Divinity School and Fruit Geode, and a recent collection of personal essays. Rabins is the creator and performer of Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about women in Torah, as well as the independent feature film, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. She lives in Portland and was a 2021 Literary Arts Fellow in poetry.
Anna Song is the Director of Choral Activities at Willamette University and directs Chamber Choir and Voce, in addition to teaching courses in musicianship and aural skills. She is the co-founding artistic director of In Mulieribus, a professional women’s vocal ensemble that specializes in works written before 1750 and new music for women’s voices. Under her direction, the ensemble has presented a highly acclaimed annual concert series in Portland since 2007, released recordings that have garnered praise from the American Record Guide and Early Music America, and is regularly broadcast on regionally and nationally syndicated Classical music radio programs.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Charles Simic from a Poetry Downtown event in 2007. Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1938, and some of his earliest memories are of German bombs falling on the city. Later the Russian army would arrive. In 1954, Simic was brought to the United States by his family and, at the age fifteen, he began to learn English.
It’s remarkable that nearly half a century later, Simic would be named Poet Laureate of the United States, the same year of this recording. Over the course of his career, Simic has won nearly every prize for poetry, including the Pulitzer, and has published essays, edited anthologies and translated poetry from French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian.
In this recording, Simic reads from work that spans his career, from his violent and also tender childhood, to his early life in Chicago and New York, and then later about New Hampshire where he taught for decades. One reviewer’s comments seem to sum up the experience of reading and hearing his work: “There are few poets writing in America today who share his lavish appetite for the bizarre, his inexhaustible repertoire of indelible characters and gestures… Simic is perhaps our most disquieting muse.”
And in the contrasts among his poems, as he leapfrogs around the decades, a strange resonance can be found with our world today, both here in the US and abroad, at this very strange and particular moment.
Charles Simic died on January 9, 2023 at the age of 84.
Find your copy Simic’s books throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Charles Simic, poet, essayist, and translator, was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. Since 1967, he published twenty books of his own poetry, in addition to a memoir; the essay collection The Life of Images; and numerous books of translations for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. Simic was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and in 2007 was chosen as poet laureate of the United States. He was emeritus professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught since 1973, and was distinguished visiting writer at New York University. Simic passed away in January 2023 at the age of 84.
Paulann Petersen‘s collections of poetry include The Wild Awake (2002), Blood-Silk (2004), A Bride of Narrow Escape (2005), Kindle (2008), and The Voluptuary (2010). Her work has appeared widely in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Calyx, Poetry Northwest, and Poetry. A former Wallace Stegner fellow and recipient of two Carolyn Kizer Awards, Petersen has also received the Stewart Holbrook Award for Outstanding Contributions to Oregon’s Literary Life. She is on the board of the Friends of William Stafford, and helps organize events and celebrations of the poet across the country. In 2010, she was elected the state of Oregon’s sixth Poet Laureate.
Don’t miss the 2023 Verselandia! competition at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Thursday, April 27 at 7:00 p.m. More information & tickets at literary-arts.org.In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature some of the incredible slam poets who performed as part of Verselandia!—the annual, city-wide youth poetry slam championship event, presented by Literary Arts—in 2022.
Each year, youth spend months writing and competing in slams on high school campuses across the city. Then, each April, about twenty student finalists compete for the title of city-wide Portland slam champ.
What is important about this episode is that these young poets are thrilling to hear. They will give you the chills, make you laugh, and perhaps bring tears to your eyes. And what’s more, 2022 was the first time we’d been able to present the competition live since 2019, and it was an especially emotional evening. So, at this moment when it feels our society is cleaved with deep divisions—race, geography, economics and age—it is so important to take the time to really listen to young voices, who are, after all the future. These young writers come from all walks of life in Portland, and have incredible stories to tell.
The 2023 Verselandia! competition returns to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Thursday, April 27 at 7:00 p.m. For more information and tickets visit our website literary-arts.org.
Content note: Some of these poems contain explicit language and mature content, which may not be suitable for all audiences.
Anis Mojgani is Oregon’s current Poet Laureate and the author of five books of poetry. His work has appeared on HBO, NPR, and in journals Bat City Review, Rattle, Buzzfeed Reader, Thrush, and Forklift Ohio, amongst others. A two time National Poetry Slam Champion and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, Anis has done commissioned work for the Getty Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Portland Timbers, and has been awarded artist residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, AIR Serenbe, and the Bloedel Nature Reserve. Originally from New Orleans, Anis currently lives in Portland, OR, where he serves on the Board of Directors for Literary Arts. His latest collection is In the Pockets of Small Gods.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we are celebrating the kickoff of National Poetry Month with a special event, recorded in front of a live audience at Literary Arts event space in downtown Portland on September 17, 2022. This event was part of a partnership with the Alano Club of Portland and their Artists in Recovery series, about the intersections of mental health and substance use recovery, creativity, and building community. Learn more at PortlandAlano.org.
Alano Club director of development and community engagement Kasey Anderson emceed an evening with writers Leslie Jamison, Kaveh Akbar, and Hanif Abdurraqib, who shared recent and brand-new work with the audience, a multi-genre mix of prose and poetry. As they share their own work, talk about each other’s work and their relationship to Alano Club, it’s clear from the fact that they felt comfortable enough to share brand-new writing that these three writers deeply admire and respect each other.
Many of our episodes feature writers in conversation, but this week we have a trio of readings for you. First, we’ll hear from Kasey Anderson, of the Alano Club, and our first writer of the evening is Leslie Jamison, award-winning essayist and author of The Empathy Exams, reads from her memoir The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, as well a new work-in-progress.
Then Kaveh Akbar reads from his most recent book of poetry, Pilgrim Bell, and a novel-in-progress.
We also hear from poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib, author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America, his most recent poetry collection is A Fortune for Your Disaster. Abdurraqib reads from his poetry and a nonfiction project to close out the event.
A quick note: This conversation touches on mature themes of subsctance abuse and recovery that may not be suitable for all listeners.
Find your copy of Hanif, Kaveh, and Leslie’s books throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His most recent book, A Little Devil in America, was the winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burns Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Award. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much , was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize and nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us was named a book of the year by NPR, Esquire, BuzzFeed, O: The Oprah Magazine, Pitchfork, Chicago Tribune, among others. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist, and longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune for Your Disaster, won the Lenore Marshall Prize. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Kaveh Akbar is the author of Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, and has received honors such as a Levis Reading Prize and multiple Pushcart Prizes. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in low-residency programs at Warren Wilson and Randolph Colleges.
Leslie Jamison is the author of The Empathy Exams. Her essays have appeared in the Believer, Harper’s, Oxford American, A Public Space, Tin House, and The Best American Essays. She is a regular columnist for the New York Times Book Review and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we’re reaching back more than 30 years into the archive to feature the prolific novelist Jane Smiley from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in 1991. This period was an inflection point in her career. At that time, she had established herself as an important and respected American writer, but had yet to find a large audience—to this day, many believe The Greenlanders, published just three years before this talk in 1988, to be a significantly underappreciated novel. Just six months after this talk, Smiley would published her breakout novel A Thousand Acres and would win the 1992 Pulitzer Prize which catapulted her to literary fame.
The title of the talk is, provocatively, “Can Mother’s Think?” The irony here, of course, is that Smiley is both a brilliant artist and a mother. But as a young writer she could not find literature that rendered the experience of motherhood with the depth, nuance, and power she felt it deserved. She discusses the paternal nature of the books that dominate the so-called canon, the relationship of feminism to motherhood, and challenges the notion of unconditional love, a notion that she believes contributed to the dearth of complex mothers in literature. She also talks about a crop of new writers emerging at the time who were changing the very definition of literature by writing about motherhood in new and profound ways.
Find your copy of Jane Smiley’s books throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and the Last Hundred Years Trilogy: Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age. She is the author as well of several works of nonfiction and books for young adults. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has also received the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. She lives in Northern California.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature journalist Patrick Radden Keefe from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in February 2023. Keefe is the author of five books of nonfiction, most recently Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Rebels, and Crooks, a collection of essays from his work as a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. NPR called Rogues “a wonderful book, not only because Keefe’s prose is masterful, but because he has a preternatural gift for reading people. He recognizes that we’re all unreliable narrators of our own lives, and writes about his subjects with a keen sense of understanding.”
He is also the author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Mystery in Northern Ireland, as well as Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.
In this talk, Keefe speaks to his writing process of what his editor termed “investigative melodrama.” He is drawn in by fascinating real-life characters like Arthur Sackler of Empire of Pain and Dolours Price of Say Nothing as way to explore, as he says, “the arbitrary lines we draw between what’s legal and illegal, what society sanctions and celebrates and what it condemns and punishes.”
We’re including the full event intro and Q&A in this extended version of this episode, since many subscribers couldn’t make it to the concert hall due to the extraordinary weather–Portland experienced an unexpected and historic, record-setting snowstorm the evening of the event.
As a special feature, we start the episode with a short reading from Oregon-based writer, Stephan Nance. Nance was awarded the Edna L. Holmes Fellowship in Young Readers from Literary Arts in 2023. Their reading is a selection from their Young Adult novel-in-progress, A Bird in the Heart, which they describe as a “very birdy young adult novel set in Eastern Oregon”.
Find your copy of Patrick Radden Keefe’s books throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the decade by Entertainment Weekly. His previous books are The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we share a conversation from the 2022 Portland Book Festival. Actress Selma Blair discusses her debut memoir, Mean Baby, with Esmé Weijun Wang, author of the novel The Border of Paradise and the best-selling essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias.
March is National Disability Awareness Month. Much of Selma’s memoir describes her life with a litany of symptoms that were diagnosed as the autoimmune disorder multiple sclerosis, or MS, in 2018 when Blair was in her forties. She has since emerged as an advocate for disability awareness and inclusion. Blair told Variety that, after her diagnosis, “I started thinking more about the power of storytelling and why representation in media matters. If I had seen and heard from people who were like me, maybe I wouldn’t have felt so alone. Perhaps if I’d had more diverse representation to look up to, I would have learned about my diagnosis earlier on.”
Selma and Esmé talk about the importance and comfort of seeing other people’s stories, from social media to books and movies. As Selma says, “It’s the little stories that are actually the big stories that shape your life.” In telling her own story in her book, Mean Baby, Selma also reaches a new self-understanding through the process of writing and sharing. It’s a wonderful conversation, full of insight, honesty, and humor. A note that you’ll hear Wang and Blair reference Scout, who is Blair’s service dog, who joined them on stage.
Selma Blair, on growing up: “I was always by myself–really a loner–and books were my friends.”
Find your copy of Saunders and Walter’s books throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Selma Blair is an actress best known for her roles in Legally Blonde, Cruel Intentions, The Sweetest Thing, and Hellboy. Her memoir, released in 2022, is Mean Baby. Blair was named a Time Person of the Year in 2017 as one of their Silence Breakers, and she was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for her narration of The Diary of Anne Frank. She is the subject of the documentary Introducing, Selma Blair, which reveals Blair’s intimate and raw journey with multiple sclerosis. Blair lives with her son in Los Angeles.
Esmé Weijun Wang is a novelist and essayist. She is the author of the New York Times-bestselling essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019), and a debut novel, The Border of Paradise. She was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” on its decennial list in 2017 and won the Whiting Award for nonfiction in 2018. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she is the founder of The Unexpected Shape™ Writing Academy for ambitious writers living with limitations.
The 2023 Everybody Reads title is A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. Join us at the Keller Auditorium on Thursday, March 16 for an evening with Ruth Ozeki. More info and tickets here.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we bring you a talk from Mira Jacob, which was the culminating event of the 2022 Everybody Read’s program.
Every year, the Multnomah County Library chooses one book they hope the whole city of Portland will read. Between January and April, the Library and their partner organizations, host events based around the themes of the book. And they distribute thousands of free copies—thanks to The Library Foundation—to readers of all ages from across the county. Here at Literary Arts, our role is to bring the featured author to town for a talk in front of a live audience.
This year, the Library selected Mira Jacob’s graphic memoir Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations.
In 2017, Jacob started posting comics to Instagram, featuring conversations with her young son. He had a lot of questions, many of them about Michael Jackson, and she did her best to answer them honestly. That project became Good Talk. The book is about her immediate and extended family, and it’s about coming of age and living in America as a woman, as a person of color, and as an artist. It asks more questions than it answers. Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere, said, “By turns hilarious and heart-rending, it’s exactly the book America needs at this moment.”
The talk you are about to hear is remarkable not only for its depth of insight, but also for its range. Jacob is by turns tender, hilarious, sarcastic and sincere. Jacob talks about the deeply personal creative journey to creating Good Talk, and also explores the national context in which it was created—the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson or the political rise of Donald Trump, for example—and how they challenged her understanding of herself, her family, and the narrative about America she’s heard her whole life.
“The thing I love about us is that we are the animals that will [talk to each other] again and again and again with this brazen hope that this time we will be understood. And sometimes we really are understood. Sometimes we really do hear each other. Sometimes it really is a good talk.”
Find your copy of Good Talk throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Mira Jacob is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, and the graphic memoir Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations. Her recent work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Vogue, Glamour, Tin House, Electric Literature and Literary Hub. She lives in Brooklyn.
“[Art is] something that no one has asked you for, and yet you feel compelled to create it.”
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature one of the highlights of the 2022 Portland Book Festival. It’s a conversation between two of our most accomplished fiction writers, George Saunders and Jess Walter. Their conversation is by turns hilarious, caustic, tender, and profound. Our interviewer for the event was OPB’s own Geoff Norcross, who does his usual masterful job moderating.
Find your copy of Saunders and Walter’s books throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.George Saunders is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eleven books, including A Swim in a Pond in the Rain; Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the Way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the inaugural Folio Award; The Braindead Megaphone; and the critically acclaimed collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. His most recent book is Liberation Day. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
Jess Walter is the author of ten books, most recently the short story collection The Angel of Rome. His other nine include the national bestseller The Cold Millions and the #1 New York Times bestseller, Beautiful Ruins; The Zero, the finalist for the National Book Award; and Citizen Vince, winner of the Edgar Award. His work has been published in 35 languages and his short fiction has appeared three times in Best American Short Stories.
Geoff Norcross is the Morning Edition host at Oregon Public Broadcasting. Before coming to Oregon, he was the program director at the NPR-affiliate KNAU in Flagstaff, Arizona. A 25-year radio veteran, Geoff has been on air in New York, Florida, Missouri, Illinois, and West Virginia. He joined OPB in 2008. Geoff has received awards from the Public Radio News Directors Inc. for best interview, the Edward R. Murrow Award for best feature reporting, and the Florida Associated Press Award for the best newscast. Geoff graduated from Bradley University with a degree in communications. Geoff lives in Portland with his wife. When he’s not on the air, you can find him rowing on the Willamette River or running and biking around the southwest hills. If you get up early enough, you might catch him hiking the nearby mountains.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Lauren Groff from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in early 2023 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Groff is the author of six books of fiction, the last three of which, Fates and Furies, Florida, and Matrix were all national bestsellers and all finalists for the National Book Award.
One of the many delights in reading Groff’s books is the dramatic shift in time, place, and focus from title to title. She is not an artist writing the same book over and over. From a multi-century saga of a town and its secrets, to a boy at a hippie commune in upstate New York, to look at a modern Greek tragedy, to the wild country that is the state of Florida, and life in a medieval nunnery during the twelfth century–every time you pick up one of her books you are transported. It’s thrilling as a reader, and it speaks to Groff’s immense talent that there are thematic through-lines moving across such a diverse body of work.
In her talk, Groff reveals the deeper undercurrents of her work and her unusual process of writing. While she professes to be “profoundly secular,” the core of her talk revolves around God, poetry, love and sexuality. She weaves in discussion of the biblical Song of Solomon, to her own biography and her spiritual journey, and the universal themes found in the work of John Manley Hopkins. She manages to do all this with an incredible sense of humor and a light touch which feels, like her fiction, somehow slightly magical.
Find your copy of Matrix throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.
Lauren Groff is the New York Times bestselling author of four novels and two short story collections. Her 2021 novel Matrix, which Esquire described as “Incandescent… a radiant work of imagination and accomplishment,” was a National Book Award finalist and was selected by President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year. Her works have won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, and France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne. Groff is a three-time finalist for the National Book Award and twice for the Kirkus Prize, and has been shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. She lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband and two sons.
This week’s episode of The Archive Project features a conversation from the 2022 Portland Book Festival. Portland-born writer Mitchell S. Jackson interviewed Leila Mottley about her debut novel, Nightcrawling.
Jackson is the author of the novel The Residue Years and the nonfiction book Survival Math. He is the winner of a Whiting Award and he received the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for his piece on Ahmaud Arbery. Leila Mottley is the former youth poet laureate of Oakland, California. Nightcrawling is her first book, and she was just nineteen years old when it was published last year.
We paired Mitchell with Leila because despite their generational differences—there are thirty years between them and they are, of course, at very different points in their careers—they’ve both written novels about the beauty and the darkness that exist side-by-side in their complicated hometowns: Portland and Oakland, respectively. Leila says in the conversation about Oakland, “There is no where I feel more at home and nowhere I feel less safe,” and that those two feelings can exist at once.
A quick note for listeners: Parts of this conversation touch on mature themes of police brutality and sexual assault that may not be suitable for all listeners.
Find your copy of Leila & Mitchell’s books throughthe LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.Leila Mottley is the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and Oprah Daily. She was born and raised in Oakland, where she continues to live. Nightcrawling is her first novel.
Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years received wide critical praise. Jackson is the winner of a Whiting Award. His novel also won The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for The Center for Fiction Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN / Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. His honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Lannan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, PEN America, TED, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Center for Fiction. His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Time Magazine, and Esquire Magazine, as well as in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere. His nonfiction book Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family was published in the spring of 2019 and named a best book of the year by fifteen publications, including NPR, Time Magazine, The Paris Review, The Root, Kirkus Reviews, and Buzzfeed. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at the University of Chicago.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we bring you an event from the 2022 Portland Book Festival, which took place on Saturday, November 5, 2022. The hour is split into two halves of thematically related conversations. Up first, OPB’s Tiffany Camhi interviews writer Melissa Febos about her essay collection, Girlhood; in the second half of the show, OPB’s Jenn Chavez speaks with music critic and New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu about his memoir, Stay True.
We paired Melissa and Hua for this festival event because their books share themes of adolescence and coming of age, of exploring identity through art-making and finding your voice, and of searching for and finding your people, finding belonging and a community. Melissa and Hua each speak about how processing the large and small events and emotions of their lives through writing has been a way they understand their lives and a way to find meaning.
They also both talk about how writing about events or traumas in their past, including revisiting writing from their younger selves, has helped them realize how their relationship to that event or trauma changes over time. I think that you hear in these conversations that for Melissa and Hua, writing about their experiences created a new compassion for their younger, messier, angrier, selves.
Find your copy of Melissa & Hua’s books through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.Melissa Febos is the bestselling author of four books, including Girlhood—LAMBDA Award finalist and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. Her fifth book, The Dry Season, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf. Her awards and fellowships include those from the Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The British Library, The Black Mountain Institute, MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has recently appeared in The Paris Review, The Sun, The New York Times Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Best American Essays, Vogue, and New York Review of Books. Febos is an associate professor at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.
Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and an associate professor of English at Vassar College. Hsu serves on the executive board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He was formerly a fellow at the New American foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his family.
Tiffany Camhi is a multimedia journalist focusing on arts, culture and environment reporting. You can hear her throughout the state of Oregon on OPB. She spent six years at KQED Public Radio in the San Francisco Bay Area as a host, producer, reporter and all-around audio gopher. Tiffany is an alumni of the City University of New York, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. When Tiffany’s not on the radio you can usually find her riding a motorcycle…or trying to figure out a way to talk about motorcycles on the radio.
Jenn Chávez is a radio host, announcer and producer with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Jenn has been making radio in Portland for over a decade. Prior to joining OPB in 2017, she hosted and produced the local news radio show “The Five Quadrants of Portland” on XRAY-FM, reporting on issues impacting underrepresented communities. She has a BA in literature and writing from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She spent her younger days as a film-nerdy video store clerk, and remains a source of unsolicited movie recommendations.
This week on The Archive Project, we bring you a lecture from the 2003/2004 season of Portland Arts & Lectures, featuring renowned memoirist and short story writer Tobias Wolff. Best known for his memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, Wolff has also published award-winning fiction, mostly short stories, and in this lecture is discussing his 2003 novel, Old School, which was a finalist for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
In his lecture, Wolff explores the balance and conflict between writing memoir and writing fiction, that push and pull between autobiography and imagination, or as he says, “the pressure of the personal life on the imagined life that we write.” It’s a humorous lecture with an inviting mix of personal anecdotes and some more professorial analysis of influences like Leo Tolstoy and Flannery O’Connor–and ideal something-for-everyone kind of talk.
Wolff went on to publish Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories in 2008, and in 2014, Wolff was awarded the Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement from Oregon State University, and in 2015 President Barack Obama presented him with the National Medal of the Arts for his contributions as an author and educator.
“A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.” – Old School
Find your copy of Tobias Wolff’s books through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.Tobias Wolff lives in Northern California and teaches at Stanford University. He has received the Rea Award for excellence in the short story, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a discussion on late writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s legacy of pacifism and environmentalism. Our moderator is Theo Downes-Le Guin, Ursula’s son and literary executor. Theo is in conversation with Oregon-based writers Juhea Kim, author of the novel Beasts of a Little Land, a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Michelle Ruiz Keil, author most recently of the young adult novel Summer in the City of Roses, which was a finalist for the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.
In her speech at the 2014 National Book Awards, accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Ursula said: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.”
Juhea Kim and Michelle Ruiz Keil are two of those voices that we need now. In this conversation, Juhea and Michelle discuss how they came—and returned—to Le Guin’s work, her influence on their writing, and how they are carrying her legacy forward, including the responsibility of the artist as a humanitarian.
This conversation was recorded in front of a live audience at Literary Arts on July 15, 2022.
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was a celebrated author whose body of work includes 23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA’s Grand Master, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.
Michelle Ruiz Keil is an author, playwright, and tarot reader with an eye for the enchanted and way with animals. She is the author of the critically acclaimed young adult novels All of Us With Wings and Summer In The City of Roses. Her writing for adults can be found most recently in Bitch, Cosmonauts Avenue, and the anthology Dispatches From Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin. She is a 2021 Tin House Scholar and the recipient of residencies from Hedgebrook, The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and the Bloedel Reserve. Born in San Francisco, Michelle has lived in Portland, Oregon for many years where she curates the fairytale reading series All Kinds of Fur and lives with her family in a cottage where the forest meets the city.
Juhea Kim is a writer, artist, and advocate based in Portland, Oregon. Her bestselling debut novel Beasts of a Little Land was named a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a Best Book of 2021 by Harper’s Bazaar, Real Simple, Ms., and Portland Monthly. Her writing has been published in Granta, Slice, The Massachusetts Review, Zyzzyva, Guernica, Catapult, Times Literary Supplement, The Independent, Sierra Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the founder and editor ofPeaceful Dumpling, an online magazine at the intersection of sustainable lifestyle and ecological literature. She has received fellowship support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, and Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She earned her BA in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we reach back to the year 2000 to highlight one of the best conversations about writing found in our archives: A special event with Amy Bloom and Michael Cunningham.
Amy Bloom had just published a collection of stories entitled, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, and Cunningham had published one his most important and bestselling novels, The Hours, just two years earlier. The Hours went on to become a movie that received nine Academy Award nominations and just last year was made into an opera that was performed in Philadelphia and New York, among other cities.
These two old friends are among the best fiction writers at work in this county. At the time of this conversation they were both at the height of their powers, making their talk both intimate and profound. There’s not an ounce of pretension or snobbery between them; they express nothing but humility and respect for the difficulties of writing fiction. In fact, the opening question of the conversation challenges the very the reason their work even exists when Cunningham and Bloom struggle to answer: Why write? They seem to forget that there is an audience of more than 2,000 watching them, as they discuss their art and what it means to them, and what the art form might mean in the larger world.
Amy Bloom is the author of four novels: White Houses, Lucky Us, Away, and Love Invents Us; and three collections of short stories: Where the God Of Love Hangs Out, Come to Me (finalist for the National Book Award), and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). Her first book of nonfiction, Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops and Hermaphrodites with Attitudes, is a staple of university sociology and biology courses. Her most recent book is the widely acclaimed New York Times bestselling memoir, In Love. She has written for magazines such as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Elle, The Atlantic, Slate, and Salon, and her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She is the Director of the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University.
Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, and The Snow Queen, as well as the collection A Wild Swan and Other Tales, and the nonfiction book Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories. The Hours was a New York Times bestseller, and the winner of both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Raised in Los Angeles, Michael Cunningham lives in New York City, and is a senior lecturer at Yale University.
This episode of The Archive Project features notable funny woman, Elaine May, in a talk from 1997. Elaine May may be one of the most important Broadway and Hollywood stars you’ve never heard of. In 2019, The New York Times wrote a long appreciation of her in which they referred to her ability to “fuse verbal and physical comedy” as possibly singular, and called her a “criminally underappreciated filmmaker.”
May began her career on stage doing improvised comedy with Mike Nichols in the early 1950s, helped found a comedy troupe that found the iconic Second City Improv in Chicago, became wildly famous on Broadway in the 60s, made four important films in the 70s, contributed countless films as a writer, and has had over ten plays produced as a playwright, many on Broadway.
She is considered by many a comedic genius who was not been taken seriously enough, and that may purely be because she is a woman. In 2013, President Barak Obama awarded her a National Medal of Arts, and I have to think this award was an attempt to correct the record of her career.
“Depth is easy. Comedy is hard.”
Elaine May is an American comedian, screenwriter, director, and actress. She made her initial impact in the 1950s from her improvisational comedy routines with Mike Nichols, performing as Nichols and May. After her duo with Nichols ended, May subsequently developed a career as a director and screenwriter, best known for A New Leaf (1971), The Bird Cage (1996), Primary Colors (1998), and Small Time Crooks (2000). In 2013, President Barak Obama awarded her a National Medal of Arts, and in 2019, at the age of 86, New York’s Film Forum payed tribute to her.
“It’s so hard to say what comedy is because it’s only when you laugh. …You can immediately prove comedy because if nobody laughs, it isn’t funny.”
In this episode, we feature an event from the 2020 Portland Book Festival, moderated by author and editor, John Freeman. The event title keyed off of Freeman’s anthology of the same name: Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World. Freeman sat down with authors Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Kawai Strong Washburn to talk about writing and the environment, and the conversation naturally turns to language and its relationship to history, connection, identity and the natural world. How and why do we write about a natural world in crisis? What are the ethics of doing so? What lesson can we draw on from biodiversity for our own cultures?
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an acclaimed poet and author of the illustrated essay collection World of Wonders. It’s a book about the natural world and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us. Kawai Strong Washburn’s debut novel Sharks in the Time of Saviors is about the supernatural events that force a family to reckon with the meaning of heritage and the cost of survival.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author World of Wonders, an illustrated essay collection, as well as of four books of poetry, most recently, Oceanic, winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Other awards for her writing include fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Mississippi Arts Council, and MacDowell. Her writing appears in Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, ESPN, and Tin House. She serves as poetry faculty for the Writing Workshops in Greece and is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.
Kawai Strong Washburn was born and raised on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. His work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other outlets. He was a 2015 Tin House Summer Scholar and 2015 Bread Loaf work-study scholar. Today, he lives with his wife and daughters in Minneapolis. Sharks in the Time of Saviors is his first novel.
John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary annual published by Grove Press, and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. He has written several books of nonfiction including, How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as three collections of poems, Maps , The Park, and the forthcoming Wind, Trees. Between 2014 and 2020, he edited a series of anthologies on inequality, concluding with Tales of Two Planets, which focuses on the climate crisis and global inequality. His latest books are The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story and, with Tracy K. Smith, There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love, in which poets, novelists and essayists create a space to respond to catastrophes and racialized violence of 2020. Freeman’s work has been translated into more than 20 languages and appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Zyzzyva. He lives in London.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a conversation from Pickathon 2022. Literary Arts partnered with the Pickathon music festival to program on-stage author readings, and for a live recording of The Archive Project at the Lucky Barn stage. At The Archive Project live, Oregon poet laureate Anis Mojgani led a wide-ranging conversation with Portland-based multidisciplinary writers and artists Dao Strom, author most recently of the music and poetry project Traveler’s Ode/Instrument; and Jon Raymond, author of the recent novel Denial and screenwriter of First Cow and many more projects.
The trio talks about what their processes are like as artists with multiple and often hybrid modes of creativity, how they started as artists and how their genres have changed over the years as they move between music, visual art, filmmaking, fiction, poetry, written versus spoken literary work, and more. It’s interesting to hear how they think about the different pros and cons, as an artist, of more solitary versus collaborative work depending on the kind of art they are making. It’s a wonderfully curious, inquisitive, and open conversation about art and art-making, and we’re grateful to our friends at Pickathon for providing a platform for literary arts at this year’s festival.
Find your copy of Jon, Dao, and Anis’s books through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.Jon Raymond is the author of the novels The Half-Life, Rain Dragon, and Freebird, and the story collection Livability, winner of the Oregon Book Award. He has collaborated on six films with the director Kelly Reichardt, including Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves, First Cow, and the forthcoming Showing Up, numerous of which have been based on his fiction. He also received an Emmy Award nomination for his screenwriting on the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce directed by Todd Haynes and starring Kate Winslet. He was the editor of Plazm Magazine, associate and contributing editor at Tin House magazine, and a member of the Board of Directors at Literary Arts. His writing has appeared in Zoetrope, Playboy, Tin House, The Village Voice, Artforum, Bookforum, and other places. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. Using practices of polyvocality, fragmentation, and (re)assemblage, Strom writes arrangements of poetry, music, image, song and sound, to be experienced as performance, installation, multimedia, recordings, and inside the spaces of a book. Strom is the author of a bilingual poetry/art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, (Hanoi: AJAR, 2018), a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, with song-cycle, East/West, and two books of fiction. She is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital Award and a 2020 Oregon Literary Arts Career Fellowship. She has received support from RACC, Precipice Fund, Oregon Arts Commission, NEA, and others.
Anis Mojgani is Oregon’s current Poet Laureate and the author of five books of poetry. His work has appeared on HBO, NPR, and in journals Bat City Review, Rattle, Buzzfeed Reader, Thrush, and Forklift Ohio, amongst others. A two time National Poetry Slam Champion and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, Anis has done commissioned work for the Getty Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Portland Timbers, and has been awarded artist residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, AIR Serenbe, and the Bloedel Nature Reserve. Originally from New Orleans, Anis currently lives in Portland, OR, where he serves on the Board of Directors for Literary Arts. His latest collection is In the Pockets of Small Gods.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Scottish novelist Douglas Stuart, winner of the Booker Prize for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain. He speaks about his new novel, Young Mungo, with Portland-based author and Oregon Book Award winner Omar El Akkad. They discuss the desire and longing at the heart of the story of the love between two working class young men from different religious backgrounds in Glasgow. A highlight is Stuart’s description of how his previous career in the textile industry relates to his work as a writer.
The conversation between Douglas Stuart and Omar El Akkad was recorded in front of a live audience at Powell’s City of Books in Portland on May 5th, 2022. For a complete lineup of Powell’s upcoming in-person and virtual author event programming, please visit them at powells.com/events.
We’ll join Douglas and Omar at the beginning of the event, with a moving introduction from Powell’s employee Nick Yandell.
Douglas Stuart is a Scottish-American author. His New York Times-bestselling debut novel Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker Prize and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was the winner of two British Book Awards, including Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, Kirkus Prize, as well as several other literary awards. Stuart’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker and Literary Hub.
Omar El Akkad is an author and a journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work earned Canada’s National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.
This week’s episode of The Archive Project features Reza Aslan discussing his new book, An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville. Aslan was interviewed by Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor at the 2022 Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America, which took place on Saturday, November 5 in downtown Portland.
Iran has been in the news this fall for a new wave of protests in reaction to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the morality police for not wearing her hijab “properly” and died while in police custody. The protests have been remarkably widespread, and the government response severe. Aslan asserts this current movement is a fourth Iranian revolution, after 1979, 1953, and the 1906 constitutional revolution his book focuses on.
In An American Martyr in Persia, Aslan describes the events of that 1906 revolution through the story of Howard Baskerville, the son of a preacher and a student of Woodrow Wilson, who found himself in Tabriz, Iran in 1907, working as a Presbyterian minister and teacher. What happened next is well-known to Iranians but almost totally unknown to Americans.
“People ask me, ‘What can we do to help the people of Iran?’ Well, when you ask the people of Iran, ‘What do you need?’ they say, ‘Pay attention, that’s what we need.’ We have the ability to say, ‘We hear you. We’re paying attention. We’re going to shine a light on this for as long as it takes.’ That is far, far more powerful and valuable than you think it is.”
Find your copy of An American Martyr in Persia through the Literary Arts page on Bookshop.org.Reza Aslan is an acclaimed writer and scholar of religions. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Zealot, No God but God, and editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
Andrew Proctor has been the director of Literary Arts since 2009. Born and raised in Canada, Proctor, earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Music at Concordia University in Montreal, and later worked in London for the Cultural Attaché to the Canadian High Commission. In the UK, he also earned an MA in English Literature at the University of East Anglia under the supervision of England’s then Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. From 2000-2004 Proctor worked as an editor for HarperCollins in New York City and then as the Membership and Operations Director of the PEN American Center, a global literary and human rights organization focused on the welfare of writers and editors. In total, Proctor has worked in the literary world for over twenty years in the governmental, for profit and nonprofit sectors.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Leslie Marmon Silko in conversation with Molly Gloss from a special event in 2010, at Portland State University’s Lincoln Hall.
While Leslie Marmon Silko had begun to publish poems and short stories in the 1960s, it was her iconic and ground-breaking novel, Ceremony, published in 1978, that established her as one our greatest living writers. Since then, Silko has gone on to publish widely and across genres with a distinct voice, deeply rooted in the landscapes and culture of the American Southwest.
She joined us in 2010 as part of the launch of her first book of nonfiction, The Turquoise Ledge, which was a highly anticipated release in part because it was her first book in more than a decade. The Turquoise Ledge has been called a “highly original self-portrait” and is written in fragments that blends nature writing, memoir, history, parables and legends. When asked by an interviewer about the book’s fluid structure and movement between memory and reality, Silko said, “Linear time is itself a fiction which I find tedious and simpleminded.” And as she says in this conversation, linear time can also be very dangerous.
Silko is in conversation with writer Molly Gloss, a celebrated writer of many novels, including the acclaimed The Hearts of Horses, and the winner many prestigious prizes including the Oregon Book Award.
Leslie Marmon Silko was born in New Mexico in 1948 to a family whose ancestry includes Mexican, Laguna Indian, and European forebears. She is the author of ten books of fiction, poetry, and memoir, including Ceremony, Storyteller, Almanac of the Dead, Gardens in the Dunes, and The Turquoise Ledge. Considered by many as one of the most important contemporary Native American writers, Silko’s honors include a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” fellowship, the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for significant contribution to American literature, and the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime achievement by a writer whose work focuses on the American West. She has been named a Living Cultural Treasure by the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities Council, and has also received the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award.
Molly Gloss is a fourth-generation Oregonian who now lives in Portland on the west side of the Tualatin Hills. She is the author of five novels: The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, Wild Life, The Hearts of Horses, and Falling from Horses, and one collection of stories, Unforseen. Her awards include the Oregon Book Award, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the PEN West Fiction Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and a Whiting Writers Award; and her short story, “Lambing Season” was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Her work often concerns the landscape, literature, mythology, and life of the American West.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Abdulzarak Gurnah from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in September 2022. He joined us as part of the American launch of his most recent novel Afterlives. He had just won the Nobel prize for literature, after a long and distinguished career as a novelist in Britain, thought he was relatively unknown here in the United States.
In his talk, Gurnah describes the rich layers of cultural influence that formed his native Zanzibar, now known as Tanzania, as an international trading hub through the centuries, and his formative decision to move to England as a young man, a decision that would shape his life and his writing.
Afterlives is a novel set in on the west coast of Africa during World War I that centers the lives of Africans, not their European colonizers, and their struggles to survive the war and then make sense of their lives in its immediate aftermath.
Encountering the work of a writer for the first time can be thrilling. For most readers here in the United States, the Nobel Prize brought to light not only a writer few of us knew, but one that has been writing profound novels about colonialism and migration for decades. Gurnah’s work is both beautiful and important, giving important and fresh perspective on the recent past, and today.
Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in Zanzibar in 1948 and teaches at the University of Kent. He is the author of six novels, including Paradise, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, and By the Sea, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah speaks about his native Zanzibar and how his upbringing has shaped his writing career.
Feminist themes at the 2021 #PDXBookFest with Julia Cooke exploring the history of Pan Am, and Lauren Groff sharing her revisionist history novel Matrix.
Naomi Duguid discusses The Miracle of Salt with Liz Crain in this conversation recorded as a part of 2022 #PDXBookFest.
Writer Karen Russell chats with Oregon Symphony’s Gabriel Kahane in this conversation for 2022 #PDXBookFest.
Karen Eva Carr and Bonnie Tsui discuss swimming and their latest books in this #PDXBookFest conversation with OPB’s Paul Marshall.
Three poetry conversations from the 2021 Portland Book Festival, featuring Donika Kelly, Atsuro Riley, and Devon Walker-Figueroa.
Gary Shteyngart discusses his recent novel Our Country Friends at Portland Book Festival; opening with an essay reading from Katherine D. Morgan.
Myriam J. A. Chancy and Omar El Akkad discuss their latest novels, which explore the aftermath of devastating contemporary global events.
John Freeman talks works in translation with French author Jakuta Alikavazovic, Yugoslav-born writer Lana Bastašić, and novelists & memoirist Aleksandar Hemon.
Revisit excerpts from the 2021 #PDXBookFest, with writers including Brandon Taylor, Aminder Dhaliwal, and Rita Dove.
Novelist Amy Tan talks about her life and early writing career, including writing The Joy Luck Club, in this lecture from 1991.
A conversation with Oregon Shakespeare Festival exploring the process of creating The Cymbeline Project, their innovative take on the classic work.
Novelist Brit Bennett talks about the inspiration for and process of writing her second book, The Vanishing Half.
Behind the scenes conversation and featured author highlights to celebrate 20 years of Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads program.
A conversation about adaptation and the creative process with composer Missy Mazzoli, writer Karen Russell, & Oregon Symphony’s Gabriel Kahane.
In this event from 2006, legendary writer Stephen King shares stories from his life and iconic writing career.
A conversation with Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s artistic director Nataki Garrett and playwright Dominique Morisseau about Confederates.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic shares poems from his accomplished career, at this 2007 Poetry Downtown event in Portland.
Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong discusses family, identity, America, and her collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning.
Highlights from the 2021 Verselandia! youth slam poetry competition, featuring live performances from Portland-area students.
A feast of a conversation about two new Chinese American cookbooks, cuisine, heritage, and the history of Chinatowns.
Russell Banks talks about the relationship between authors and Hollywood, including the adaptation of his own novels for the screen.
Evren Odcikin discusses the making and production of unseen with playwright Mona Mansour, as it is staged at Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Daniel James Brown discusses Facing the Mountain, which explores a slice of America’s WWII history, in this talk and conversation with Tom Ikeda.
Louise Erdrich talks with Trevino Brings Plenty about her latest novel, The Sentence, at the 2021 Portland Book Festival.
In this talk from 1994, writer Paul Theroux talks about the role of travel writing and how it differs from journalism.
A discussion with Oregon Shakespeare Festival about playwright August Wilson's lasting legacy and his one-man play How I Learned What I Learned.
Feminist themes at the 2021 #PDXBookFest with Julia Cooke exploring the history of Pan Am, and Lauren Groff sharing her revisionist history novel Matrix.
A conversation about adaptation and the creative process with composer Missy Mazzoli, writer Karen Russell, & Oregon Symphony’s Gabriel Kahane.
A feast of a conversation about two new Chinese American cookbooks, cuisine, heritage, and the history of Chinatowns.
Novelist Richard Powers gets personal with this lecture that recalls how his life experiences have shaped him as a writer.
Novelist Amy Tan talks about her life and early writing career, including writing The Joy Luck Club, in this lecture from 1991.
A discussion with Oregon Shakespeare Festival about playwright August Wilson's lasting legacy and his one-man play How I Learned What I Learned.
Highlights from the 2021 Verselandia! youth slam poetry competition, featuring live performances from Portland-area students.
Three poetry conversations from the 2021 Portland Book Festival, featuring Donika Kelly, Atsuro Riley, and Devon Walker-Figueroa.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic shares poems from his accomplished career, at this 2007 Poetry Downtown event in Portland.
Gary Shteyngart discusses his recent novel Our Country Friends at Portland Book Festival; opening with an essay reading from Katherine D. Morgan.
Mira Jacob, the featured author for Everybody Reads 2022, speaks about family, race, art, America, and her graphic memoir Good Talk.
Novelist Brit Bennett talks about the inspiration for and process of writing her second book, The Vanishing Half.
Novelist Ash Davidson discusses her debut novel, Damnation Spring, with Jacqueline Fitzgerald at the 2021 Portland Book Festival.
Behind the scenes conversation and featured author highlights to celebrate 20 years of Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads program.
In this event from 2006, legendary writer Stephen King shares stories from his life and iconic writing career.
A conversation with Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s artistic director Nataki Garrett and playwright Dominique Morisseau about Confederates.
Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong discusses family, identity, America, and her collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning.
Myriam J. A. Chancy and Omar El Akkad discuss their latest novels, which explore the aftermath of devastating contemporary global events.
Daniel James Brown discusses Facing the Mountain, which explores a slice of America’s WWII history, in this talk and conversation with Tom Ikeda.
John Freeman talks works in translation with French author Jakuta Alikavazovic, Yugoslav-born writer Lana Bastašić, and novelists & memoirist Aleksandar Hemon.
Joan Didion shares from Political Fictions, which focuses on her experience observing and participating in the American political process.
Ross Gay shares his non-linear journey to becoming a poet, and the inspiration behind his essay collection The Book of Delights.
Robert Bly—groundbreaking poet, editor, and translator—shares his poetry in this recording from 2006.
Louise Erdrich talks with Trevino Brings Plenty about her latest novel, The Sentence, at the 2021 Portland Book Festival.
A conversation with Oregon Shakespeare Festival exploring the process of creating The Cymbeline Project, their innovative take on the classic work.
Russell Banks talks about the relationship between authors and Hollywood, including the adaptation of his own novels for the screen.
Frank Rich interviews Stephen Sondheim about the evolution of his career, touching on the stories behind his best-known works and their adaptations.
In this talk from 1994, writer Paul Theroux talks about the role of travel writing and how it differs from journalism.
Listen to excerpts from the 2021 #PDXBookFest, with writers including Brandon Taylor, Aminder Dhaliwal, and Rita Dove.
Grace Bonney discusses creativity, empowerment, and aging in this conversation with women featured in her latest book, Collective Wisdom.
Kaveh Akbar, Melissa Febos, and Megan Stielstra catch up and reprise their 2017 Portland Book Festival panel for this conversation with moderator Marisa Siegel.
Novelists A.K. Blakemore and Rivka Galchen discuss their latest works with OPB's Crystal Ligori.
John Freeman talks works in translation with French author Jakuta Alikavazovic, Yugoslav-born writer Lana Bastašić, and novelists & memoirist Aleksandar Hemon.
In this episode, we feature an event from the 2021 Portland Book Festival, moderated by author and editor, John Freeman. The event title keyed off of Freeman’s anthology of the same name: Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World. Freeman sat down with authors Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Kawai Strong Washburn to talk about writing and the environment, and the conversation naturally turns to language and its relationship to history, connection, identity and the natural world. How and why do we write about a natural world in crisis? What are the ethics of doing so? What lesson can we draw on from biodiversity for our own cultures?
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an acclaimed poet and author of the illustrated essay collection World of Wonders. It’s a book about the natural world and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us. Kawai Strong Washburn’s debut novel Sharks in the Time of Saviors is about the supernatural events that force a family to reckon with the meaning of heritage and the cost of survival.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author World of Wonders, an illustrated essay collection, as well as of four books of poetry, most recently, Oceanic, winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Other awards for her writing include fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Mississippi Arts Council, and MacDowell. Her writing appears in Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, ESPN, and Tin House. She serves as poetry faculty for the Writing Workshops in Greece and is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.
Kawai Strong Washburn was born and raised on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. His work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other outlets. He was a 2015 Tin House Summer Scholar and 2015 Bread Loaf work-study scholar. Today, he lives with his wife and daughters in Minneapolis. Sharks in the Time of Saviors is his first novel.
John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary annual published by Grove Press, and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. He has written several books of nonfiction including, How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as three collections of poems, Maps , The Park, and the forthcoming Wind, Trees. Between 2014 and 2020, he edited a series of anthologies on inequality, concluding with Tales of Two Planets, which focuses on the climate crisis and global inequality. His latest books are The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story and, with Tracy K. Smith, There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love, in which poets, novelists and essayists create a space to respond to catastrophes and racialized violence of 2020. Freeman’s work has been translated into more than 20 languages and appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Zyzzyva. He lives in London.
In this episode, we feature two conversations from the 2020 Portland Book Festival that both wrestle with the question of how we look after each other when mental and physical health have been compromised. What do we owe each other, and when do we walk away?
In the first segment of the show we feature Robert Kolker who joined us to talk about his new work of nonfiction Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of An American Family. The book is the heartrending story of a midcentury American family, the Galvins, with twelve children, six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia. It is a story of immense trauma and also genuine hope. Kolker is in conversation with journalist Eli Saslow.
In the second segment of the show we feature Dr. Michele Harper who is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir The Beauty in Breaking, about her experiences as a female, African American emergency room physician and her own journey to self-healing. Dr. Harper is in conversation with author Ruth Dickey, who has just this month (March 2021) been appointed the Director of the National Book Foundation.
Ruth E. Dickey is the Director of the National Book Foundation. Dickey has spent 25 years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art. The recipient of a Mayor’s Arts Award from Washington DC, and an individual artist grant from the DC Commission and Arts and Humanities, Ruth’s poems and essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won three Larry Neal Writing Awards. She is the author of the chapbook, Paper Houses, Sky Ceilings (Pudding House Press 2006), and her work has appeared widely, including in Alimentum, The Baltimore Review, Cincinnati Review, Ocean State Review, The Potomac Review, and Sonora Review. Ruth holds an MFA in poetry from UNC-Greensboro, and a BS in Foreign Service and an MA in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University, and was a 2017 fellow with the National Arts Strategies Chief Executive Program.
Michele Harper has worked as an emergency room physician for more than a decade at various institutions, including as chief resident at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx and in the emergency department at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Philadelphia. She is a graduate of Harvard University and the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. The Beauty in Breaking is her first book.
Robert Kolker is the author of Hidden Valley Road, an instant #1 New York Times nonfiction best-seller and official selection of Oprah’s Book Club. His previous book, Lost Girls, was also a New York Times best-seller and one of the Times‘s 100 Notable Books of 2013, as well as one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Top Ten Books of the Year, one of Time’s best true crime books ever, and one of Slate’s best nonfiction books of the last 25 years. Kolker’s journalism has appeared in New York Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wired, GQ, O Magazine, and The Marshall Project. He is a National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of the 2011 Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
Eli Saslow is a Washington Post staff writer and author of Ten Letters: The Stories Americans Tell Their President and Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2014 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2013, 2016 and 2017. He lives in Oregon with his wife and children.
In this episode, we feature a conversation between novelists Rumaan Alam and Jonathan Lethem from the 2020 Portland Book Festival.
There is a rich tradition of the apocalyptic novel. As Alam and Lethem touch on, the urgency in this tradition allows writers to explore what really matters to their characters, and asks what we will keep and what we will forget when push comes to shove. The scope of these works range from, as Lethem says, “wide screen” narratives of entire societies being transformed, to the more intimate stories of how individuals, relationships, and families are shaped by these tragedies. The latter is the primary preoccupation of both these writers in their most recent novels.
In Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, which was a finalist for the Nation Book Award, a blackout on the Eastern seaboard forces two families together in an isolated rural house, cut off from the outside world. In award-winning author Jonathan Lethem’s The Arrest, two siblings find themselves in a world where most of what we take for granted—cars, computers, airplanes—have quit working and their lives are further upended by a man with a nuclear-powered super car.
Rumaan Alam is the author of Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and Leave the World Behind. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Elle, New York Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, The Rumpus, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. He studied at Oberlin College, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of twelve novels, including The Feral Detective, The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Arrest is his twelfth novel. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.
Portland Book Festival will present virtual programming, brought to you by Bank of America, the week of November 8–12, 2021, and in-person events on Saturday, November 13, 2021. Get your passes now!
In this episode, we feature a conversation with Brit Bennett and Bryan Washington, moderated by Jennifer Baker, at the Portland Book Festival in November 2020.
In the New York Times best-selling The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett weaves together multiple strands and generations of a family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990’s. It’s a story that considers the lasting influence of the past as it shares her character’s decisions, desires, and expectations. In Bryan Washington’s Memorial, Mike and Benson are young men whose world is turned inside out as they find themselves living apart and forced to discover their own truths.
Jennifer Baker guides the conversation both into questions of craft—such as how and why these writers created novels with multiple narrators and just how much of their books are discovered in the writing—and she into the central themes of both these books: race, love, family, inheritance, choice, consequence, and how the dynamics of relationships are shaped by them.
“That was the sort of book that I wanted to write: Where characters are free to make mistakes, but also free to attempt to come back together to one another. It comes back to the idea for me that every character should have the capacity to love.” – Bryan Washington
Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction. In 2014, she received the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller. Her second novel The Vanishing Half was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.
Bryan Washington is a National Book Award 5 Under 35 honoree, and winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His first book, the story collection Lot, was a finalist for the NBCC’s John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Lot was a New York Times Notable Book, one of Dwight Garner’s top ten books of the year, and on best-of-the-year lists from Time, NPR, Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed, and many more. Washington’s debut novel is Memorial. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, BuzzFeed, Vulture, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appétit, GQ, The Awl, and Catapult. He lives in Houston.
Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, creator/host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, and contributing editor to Electric Literature. Jennifer is also the editor of the all PoC-short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life. Her fiction, nonfiction, and criticism has appeared in various print and online publications.
Portland Book Festival will present virtual programming, brought to you by Bank of America, the week of November 8–12, 2021, and in-person events on Saturday, November 13, 2021. Get your passes now!
In this episode, we feature Isabel Wilkerson, interviewed by Viet Thanh Nguyen, from the 2020 Portland Book Festival. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Isabel Wilkerson the National Humanities Medal for “her masterful combination of intimate human narratives with broader societal trends” and for “championing an unsung history.” This was for her first book The Warmth of Other Suns, which chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: The decades-long migration of Black citizens who fled the south for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. It went on to spend months on The New York Times Best Sellers list and has been hailed as a modern classic.
Wilkerson joined us at the Portland Book Festival to talk about her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. It is an astonishing re-framing of American history and our founding myths that is vital to understanding what is happening in the country today – socially and politically. Wilkerson is in conversation with writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer.
“We can’t fix what we don’t know. We can’t fix what we cannot name. We can’t repair what we have not yet fully understood. We can’t heal what we haven’t diagnosed.”
“‘Caste’ as an idea, as a phenomenon, is thousands upon thousands of years old. It pre-dates the idea of ‘race’. And any hierarchy that’s set up could choose any number of metrics in order to apportion, to divide, and to rank people. In this country, this fairly new concept known as ‘race,’ which only goes back four or five hundred years, was the metric that was used in order to identify, characterize, apportion, and assign people to a fixed place in what was ultimately going to become the United States. We live with the after-effects of that to the current day.”
“These are longstanding assumptions, stereotypes, and power relationships that transcend any one election, any one campaign, any one politician. This hierarchy, this caste system… is part of the foundation of what we have inherited as Americans. It’s about the enduring legacy that we’ve inherited, and the ways it manifests itself. Many of the things we might be seeing [today] are merely manifestations of the inheritance that has not been dealt with up until now.”
“People who are from the historically subjugated group in this country—who have to bear the brunt of this caste system on a daily basis—are not the group that the [United States] should be leaning on now. The people who were born to the subjugated group already bear the brunt and have born the burden for far too long. It is up to others in this country to do the work.”
Isabel Wilkerson’s first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lynton History Prize, the Heartland Award and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. It was named one of the 10 best books of the year by The New York Times, USA Today, O: The Oprah Magazine, The New Yorker, The Washington Post and many others. In 2019, Time Magazine named The Warmth of Other Suns to its list of the 10 best nonfiction books of the decade. Wilkerson is the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism and the first African-American to win for individual reporting. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal for “her masterful combination of intimate human narratives with broader societal trends” and for “championing an unsung history.” Her most recent book is Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He has written the novels The Refugees and The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as five other awards. He is also the author of the nonfiction books The Displaced, Nothing Ever Dies, and Race and Resistance. He has also released the children’s book Chicken of the Sea, co-written with his son, Ellison Nguyen. The Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, he lives in Los Angeles.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk and conversation with novelist Yaa Gyasi. In 2016, Gyasi’s first novel, Homegoing, was published and immediately became a New York Times’ bestseller, was awarded numerous prizes, and was praised by Zadie Smith as “spectacular,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates as “an inspiration,” and widely hailed as one of the best books of that year. This spring, Gyasi joined us for Portland Arts & Lectures to talk about her second book, Transcendent Kingdom, published in 2020. Like Homegoing, the book explores the constant presence of the past. But, where that book spanned centuries and continents, Transcendent Kingdom unfolds on a more granular, intimate scale.
In many ways, this talk is less about writing than it is the power of reading, an act that is so powerful that people died so that others might experience it, so powerful that it can force the reader to contend with the humanity of someone they do not know and will never meet, from another place or time. We learn of the profound impact of Toni Morrison on Gyasi, her journey to becoming a writer, and how she grapples in her fiction with what she calls the “afterlife of slavery,” asking the question, “Is slavery even over?”
In the second half of the episode, she is joined by Andrew Proctor for a conversation about both her books, and the influences that shaped them.
“My work is largely concerned with the ways that the ancestors walk with us; the ways history, familial and societal, continues to show up in our lives.”
Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She holds a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held a Dean’s Graduate Research Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn.
Andrew Proctor has been the director of Literary Arts since 2009. Born and raised in Canada, Proctor, earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Music at Concordia University in Montreal, and later worked in London for the Cultural Attaché to the Canadian High Commission. In the UK, he also earned an MA in English Literature at the University of East Anglia under the supervision of England’s then Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. From 2000-2004 Proctor worked as an editor for HarperCollins in New York City and then as the Membership and Operations Director of the PEN American Center, a global literary and human rights organization focused on the welfare of writers and editors. In total, Proctor has worked in the literary world for over twenty years in the governmental, for profit, and nonprofit sectors.
In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature poet Joy Harjo. Harjo became the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States when she was appointed in 2019, and is currently serving her third term in that post.
She joined us as part of Portland Arts & Lectures from her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma. During her Laureateship, she edited two landmark anthologies: When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, and Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry. Harjo uses these two projects as a basis to structure her talk, which takes us deep into the history of Native American poetry, from periods when it was an oral tradition, to the first appearance of written poetry in the seventeenth century, all the way to the current day. These anthologies gather together work from hundreds of languages, nations and tribes to present to the reader the breadth and depth of a tradition that continues to flourish, but that was left out, erased, or otherwise made invisible by editors, publishers, and academics over the centuries. Harjo’s work re-surfacing these poems and poets is vital to our understanding of ourselves as a nation because, as Harjo says, a nation is defined by its literature.
In the second half of this episode, Harjo will be in conversation with Oregon’s Poet Laurate and Literary Arts Board Member, Anis Mojgani. Mojgani is an international poetry slam champion, and the author of five books of poetry, most recently In the Pockets of Small Gods. His first children’s book is forthcoming from Chronicle Books, and his poem “Closer” was included in the recently published anthology, African American Poetry, edited by Kevin Young.
“Words are living beings.”
“Those of us who read and listen to poetry want our ears and perception bent for unique insight, and want to see how the impossible becomes momentarily possible in the arrangement of language and meaning.”
Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently An American Sunrise, and one previous memoir, Crazy Brave. She edited the anthologies When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through and Living Nations, Living Words. Named poet laureate of the United States in 2019, she lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she is a Tulsa Artist Fellow.
Anis Mojgani is Oregon’s current Poet Laureate and the author of five books of poetry. His work has appeared on HBO, NPR, and in journals Bat City Review, Rattle, Buzzfeed Reader, Thrush, and Forklift Ohio, amongst others. A two time National Poetry Slam Champion and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, Anis has done commissioned work for the Getty Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Portland Timbers, and has been awarded artist residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, AIR Serenbe, and the Bloedel Nature Reserve. Originally from New Orleans, Anis currently lives in Portland, OR, where he serves on the Board of Directors for Literary Arts.
“I’m holding the door open and saying ‘Look at all these poets.’ We have so many poets, and this is the time that we go to the poets. This is the time we need the poets and poetry, because the poets are the truth tellers.”
In this episode, we feature Alison Bechdel in conversation with Oregon’s own Cheryl Strayed. Strayed talks with Bechdel about her newest book The Secret to Superhuman Strength. The graphic memoir is ostensibly about Bechdel’s lifelong pursuit of exercise in one form or another. But like so much of Bechdel’s work, the book is not necessarily about what it’s about. Bechdel’s obsession with exercise is driven by her desire to be physically strong and resilient, but it is also a tool to clear her mind and fuel her creativity, and it is rebuke of the misogyny she was surrounded by her whole life.
Their conversation also takes us down fascinating side trips including a tour of literary history from English Romantics, to the American Transcendentalists right though the Beat Poets of the 1950s–all radical in their time, who perused enlightenment in the outdoors, and who, though separated by hundreds of years, are also dealing with remarkably similar ideas. Strayed and Bechdel are also both candid and humble in this conversation which concludes with a discussion about creativity and anxiety, and their struggles to produce new work under the spotlight of their incredible successes.
This event was originally presented by WestxMidwest, a collaboration between Black Mountain Institute, Literary Arts, The Loft’s Wordplay and the Wisconsin Book Festival.
“That’s what I love about memoir: This puzzle of trying to find a story in the randomness of our lives.”
Alison Bechdel is the author of the bestselling memoir FUN HOME: A Family Tragicomic, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, New York Times, People, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, and San Francisco Chronicle, among others. For 25 years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life—queer and otherwise—considered “one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period.” Bechdel was guest editor of Best American Comics 2011 and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney’s, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and the New York Times Book Review.
Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times–bestselling memoir Wild, the New York Times–bestsellers Tiny Beautiful Things and Brave Enough, and the novel Torch. Strayed is the host of the New York Times hit podcast “Sugar Calling” and also “Dear Sugars,” which she co-hosted with Steve Almond. Her essays have been published in the Best American Essays, the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Salon, the Sun, Tin House, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. Strayed holds an MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Maxine Hong Kingston was born in Stockton, California. Her debut book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among the Ghosts, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976 and gained her worldwide attention. Her follow-up book, China Men, won the 1981 National Book Award, and Kingston has said she considers these books two halves of a whole. In all, she has published over a half dozen books of nonfiction, poetry, and fiction and won many additional awards including the National Humanities Medal in 2014.
Kingston delivered this lecture in January 1992, just two months after her home had burned down in the Oakland firestorm and three months after her father had died. She had been working for months on a new novel which was entirely lost in that fire. She recounts this harrowing day, and in doing so talks about the role of destruction in creativity, and of re-discovering the book she would ultimately complete and publish, entitled The Fifth Book of Peace, an homage to the Books of Peace that appeared in China hundreds of years ago that were deliberately burned because of how threatening they were to the reigning powers.
All of these subjects and themes seemed to us here at Literary Arts as particularly relevant right now here in the Pacific Northwest — and they seemed so to our listeners as well. This lecture was selected in a poll of our audience as the “listeners’ choice” from our deep backlist of episodes.
“If a woman is going to write a book of peace, it is given her to know devastation.”
Maxine Hong Kingston is the author of The Woman Warrior, China Men,and The Fifth Book of Peace, among other works. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award. She worked for many years as a senior lecturer in creative writing at UC Berkeley. Kingston lives in Oakland, California.
“Turning the bend, I looked up and saw that my house was gone. It was not that I recognized the place that it had stood or any familiar piece of it or its neighbors, but that the landscape was everywhere utterly changed. I had come to the ash moon of a planet that passes through the sun.”
“Ideas have an invisible existence that protects them, pervious to fire and bombs. If the fire had killed me, do my ideas live without me thinking and breathing?
In this episode of The Archive Project, we bring you poet and dramatist Cornelius Eady, from a Poetry Downtown event in 2002. Cornelius Eady published his first book of poetry, Kartunes, in 1980, at the age of 26. He went on to publish seven more books of poetry over the next 20 years, winning numerous prizes and being nominated as a finalist for a National Book Award. In the 1990s and early 2000’s, Eady also wrote for the stage, collaborating in several projects that resulted in several more national awards and the distinction of being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
In 1996, Eady co-founded, with Toi Derricote, Cave Canem: A nonprofit organization serving Black poets to remedy “the under-representation and isolation of African-American poets in the literary landscape”. This organization has played a crucial role in fostering several generations of black poets over the course of nearly thirty years. In 1996, for this work as convener, educator, and mentor, the National Book Foundation gave him an Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.
In this episode, Eady reads and discusses selections from different works, and from different parts of his career. But despite the varied selections, his reading presents a devastating arc. He moves from stories and poems centered in the innocence of childhood, to work that portrays and meditates on violent racist acts–physical, emotional, legal–and how those acts affect, and that they mean for, his characters and those they love.
“Today we learn about poetry…The word just has that sound about it—like vegetables—that makes us want to shove our hands in our pockets and pout. It’s a grown up word, a suck-the-fun-from-the-room word—like behave. Every kid whines as if the lips of a dreaded aunt were upon them.”
Cornelius Eady is the author of eight books of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather (Putnam 2008). His second book, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, won the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1985. In 2001, Brutal Imagination was a finalist for the National Book Award. His work in theater includes the libretto for an opera, “Running Man,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999. His play “Brutal Imagination” won Newsday’s Oppenheimer award in 2002. Eady has been a teacher for more than 20 years and is now a professor at Notre Dame University.
“Both churches have an organ, but while the white church whispers, the black church growls. It pulls well-dressed women up into a sweat and men in mohair to lose their jackets and silk ties…The church rocks with a noise we have never heard before. Why are they acting like this? Something in their dancing makes us worry if this is something that we should be seeing, if someone is going to break in and catch us. This JESUS! they scream for is not the one our mother has been sending us away to visit.”
“One day my mother pointed up at the sky. I saw a sparrow being snatched up by a hawk. ‘Someday,’ she said, ‘you’re going to grow up to be just like him.’ She was speaking of the hawk, but I was thinking about the sparrow.”
In this episode, we feature a talk and reading by Irish poet and Nobel Laureate, the late Seamus Heaney from Portland Arts & Lectures in 2002. Heaney opens with poems from his very first collection and then takes us on a journey through more than four decades of his work that touches on everything from the sounds and smells of his mother baking bread in the 1940s, to his deep knowledge of poetry and its influence on his work, to meditations on the role of the artist in moments of political or national crisis – this last subject is, of course, for Heaney, Ireland’s “The Troubles,” the sectarian violence that erupted in 1965 and lasted more than 30 years in Ireland and the United Kingdom. It was a time when he says, “Everybody knew somebody who had been shot, or blown up, no matter which side you were on.” Heaney is famous for his depictions rural Ireland that can feel ancient and deeply modern all at once, and this is what gives his work power and relevance today.
Heaney begins this talk with his connection to Oregon’s own William Stafford, whose work he was introduced to in his first year of university by a professor who had spent time at Reed College. Heaney says, “So from the beginning, Portland, poetry, and promise have all been linked together.”
Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney was raised in County Derry, and later lived for many years in Dublin. He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, and edited several widely used anthologies. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the “most important Irish poet since Yeats.” Heaney taught at Harvard University (1985-2006) and served as the Oxford Professor of Poetry (1989-1994). He died in 2013.
Heather McGhee discusses racial justice and her book The Sum of Us with Anand Giridharadas.
In this talk from 1997, writer and academic Orville Schell recounts Tibet’s history, including its fraught relationships with China and the West.
Naturalist, historian, illustrator, and writer Helen Macdonald shares stories and insights on a range of topics linked to the natural world.
Highlights from the 2019 Verselandia! youth slam poetry competition, including live performances and interviews with Portland students.