Episodes

In 1989, an unknown writer named Amy Tan published a novel entitled The Joy Club, and the career of a major American writer was born. In this episode of The Archive Project, we are reaching deep into the archive to 1991, when we hosted Tan because there’s something very special about hearing from a writer at the very beginning of their career. At the time, The Joy Luck Club had been on the New York Times bestseller list for two full years and the movie of the book was in development, with Tan a...

This episode of The Archive Project is the third in our partnership with Oregon Shakespeare Festival. This week we’ll explore the work and legacy of August Wilson, centered on OSF’s upcoming production of his one-man play, How I Learned What I Learned. August Wilson was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American playwright. His work focuses on the joys and struggles of African Americans in the 20th century. He is perhaps most well-known for the ten-play American Century Cycle; each play focuses on Afric...

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 2021. Each year, Portland-area youth spend the year writing and competing with their peers, and each April about twenty student finalists compete for the title of Portland Slam Champ. Because of the pandemic and school closures last year, we had to re-invent the live event to be a virt...

As part of our celebration of National Poetry Month, this week on The Archive Project we feature excerpts from three Portland Book Festival virtual events, which took place in November 2021. We’ll hear three conversations: First, a conversation with Christopher Rose and Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations, which Oprah.com called “a lionhearted odyssey through the self,” in which the poet “offers us the words to create our own destinies.” Then poet and critic David Biespiel interviews Atsu...

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 sam...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a reading and conversation about the pandemic lockdowns and how people tried to get through them. They contain stories both sad and funny, strange and completely every day. We thought you’d want to hear them as we all begin to reckon with this strange and challenging time. First up is Katherine D. Morgan, who reads her short essay, Wish You Were Here, at the Portland Art Museum as part of the 2020 Portland Book Festival. Then we hear from the h...

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. ...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature the novelist Brit Bennett. Brit Bennett exploded onto the literary stage in 2016 with her novel, The Mothers. In her New York Times review, Mira Jacob praised the novel as a “ferociously moving debut.” Critics also noted Bennett’s talent for creating both propulsive, page-turning plots, and enduring, complex characters that stay with the reader long after the final page. Expectations were accordingly high for her second novel, and Bennett delive...

In this episode, we feature novelist Ash Davidson in conversation with writer and educator, Jacqueline Fitzgerald. The event took place at the Portland Book Festival in November 2021. The novel, Damnation Spring, by Davidson was one of the most anticipated and celebrated books of 2021. It takes place in 1977 in the Pacific Northwest, near the end of the era when the timber industry dominated the region, and a nascent environmental movement is just beginning to take root. A fissure runs through ...

Tickets for the 2022 Everybody Reads event with Mira Jacob, author of the graphic memoir GOOD TALK, on Thursday, March 10 are available now. Click here for more info. In this episode of The Archive Project, we celebrate the twentieth year of Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads program. Each year, the Library chooses one book that they hope everyone in Multnomah County will read and talk about. As part of the program, the Library and their partner organizations host events based on the the...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature the legendary writer, Stephen King, who appeared at the Newmark Theatre for a Literary Arts Special Event in 2006. King first published in 1967 and went on to write some of the most iconic pop culture classics of the last half century, many of which were made into Hollywood films, including The Shining, Misery, and The Green Mile. He wrote over seventy-five books of fiction and nonfiction, not to mention countless screenplays. His work is diffi...

This episode of The Archive Project is the second of three in this season’s series with Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Artistic director Nataki Garrett is back on the mic, this time in conversation with playwright Dominique Morisseau, whose new production Confederates will be on the OSF stage, directed by Garrett, in the fall of 2022. Confederates explores racial and gender bias in American through the parallel stories of two women living over a century apart: an enslaved Black woman turned Union ...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong from Portland Arts & Lectures in January 2022. Hong became nationally famous in the spring of 2020 for her essay collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, a book so searing and powerful it landed her on the cover of Time magazine’s 2021 issue featuring the 100 most influential people in the world. Minor Feelings is a collection of seven essays is both a deeply personal account of Hong becoming—and...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a conversation from the 2021 Portland Book Festival. This live event was moderated onstage by Andrew Proctor, on the theme of “Aftermath,” bringing together the authors of two haunting novels which explore contemporary global events through stories of people in the middle of the crises. Myriam J. A. Chancy’s What Storm, What Thunder follows ten survivors as they navigate the fallout of the catastrophic Haitian earthquake of 2010. Omar El Akkad’...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk and conversation with Daniel James Brown from 2021. Brown is probably best known for his international bestseller The Boys in the Boat, first published in 2013. It tells a narrative history of nine working-class Americans who rowed their way to gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. It’s a story of young men who persevere against immense challenges and long odds. Brown joined us for Portland Arts & Lectures to talk about his next book Faci...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature editor and poet John Freeman and three writers with roots in the Balkans on the theme CHANGE, through the specific lens of language and translation. Freeman spoke with these three writers who possess links to the Bosnia and the Balkans about language and the way language changes through generations, geography, and translation. We’ll join French author and translator Jakuta Alikavazovic; Yugoslav-born writer Lana Bastašić; and Bosnian-American n...

In this episode we feature the iconic writer of nonfiction, Joan Didion, from a special event in 2001. She briefly reads from her then new book Political Fictions, and then talks with David Sarasohn from The Oregonian. Didion’s career began in 1956 when she began writing for Vogue. She wrote more than a dozen books of essays and nonfiction, including the 2005 national bestseller The Year of Magical Thinking, which became a Broadway production. Didion contributed work to virtually major magazine...

In this episode, we bring you writer Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights. We hosted Gay in the culminating event of Multnomah County Library’s 2021 Everybody Reads program—an annual shared reading experience that includes city-wide events for readers of all ages. This year, because of the public health restrictions, we brought Ross Gay to Portland virtually. He gave an incredible lecture and then engaged in a thoughtful, funny, and heartfelt conversation with Oregon-based writer Lidia Yukna...

In this episode of The Archive Project, Robert Bly shares selected poems during his visit to Portland, Oregon in 2006 for Poetry Downtown. Robert Bly is a National Book Award-winning poet who has authored more than 30 collections of poetry. Considered one of the legends of contemporary poetry, Bly is the voice of transcendentalism and meditative mysticism for his generation. Active from 1950 through the present, Bly’s body of work is filled with poetry that is spiritual yet worldly, celebrating ...

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 Natio...

In this episode, we launch a special collaboration with Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Throughout this season of The Archive Project, we will feature a series of conversations about OSF’s work, exploring storytelling in the intersections of playwriting, theatre production and performance, and literature. This episode features a conversation between Nataki Garrett, OSF artistic director, and Scarlett Kim, the associate artistic director of innovation and strategy. They discuss The Cymbeline Projec...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk by Russell Banks from 1999. Banks was the author twenty-one books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He was twice a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, first in 1985 for his seminal work of fiction Continental Drift, and then again in 1998 for Cloudsplitter. The New York Times lauded his “vivid portrayals of working-class Americans grappling with issues of poverty, race, and class” and placed him “among the first ranks of contemporary noveli...

In this episode, we feature a conversation with Stephen Sondheim. Considered “one of the greatest songwriters in the history of musical theater,” Sondheim died at the age of 91 on November 26, 2021. Sondhiem’s storied career includes mentorship by another icon of musical theater from a previous generation, Oscar Hammerstein. The first show for which Sondhiem would write the music and lyrics was Saturday Night in 1954 and from there he would go on to collaborate on some of the most influential m...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Paul Theroux. Theroux is an iconic writer of over fifty books of fiction and nonfiction. Most of his work takes the form of travel writing–a genre he has helped define for the 20th and 21st centuries, as he traveled alone to some of the most remote parts of the world, writing about them with sensitivity, insight, wit, and wonder. He was a global citizen long before such a term existed. It was his 1975 travelogue The Great Railway Bazaar, which ...