Episodes

This episode of The Archive Project features a special discussion between contributors to the new anthology, New Poets of Native Nations, with Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Laura Da’, Layli Long Soldier, and editor Heid E. Erdrich. New Poets of Native Nations gathers poets of diverse ages, styles, languages, and tribal affiliations to present the extraordinary range and power of new Native poetry. Editor Heid E. Erdrich has selected twenty-one poets whose first books were published after the year 20...

When Abbi Jacobson announced to friends and acquaintances that she planned to drive across the country alone, she was met with lots of questions and opinions: Why wasn’t she going with friends? Wouldn’t it be incredibly lonely? The North route is better! Was it safe for a woman? The Southern route is the way to go! You should bring mace! And a common one: Why? But Abbi had always found comfort in solitude, and needed space to step back and hit the reset button. As she spent time in each city and...

This episode of The Archive Project features great American author Philip Roth reading from his 1991 memoir Patrimony: A True Story. Patrimony is a true story about the relationship between a father and a son. In this masterful and tender memoir, Philip Roth watches as his 86-year-old father, famous for his vigor, his charm, and his skill as a raconteur—lovingly called ‘the Bard of Newark’—battles with the brain tumor that will kill him. Roth, full of love, anxiety and dread, accompanies his fat...

American food is the story of mash-ups. Immigrants arrive, cultures collide, and out of the push-pull come exciting new dishes and flavors. But for Edward Lee, who, like Anthony Bourdain or Gabrielle Hamilton, is as much a writer as he is a chef, that first surprising bite is just the beginning. What about the people behind the food? What about the traditions, the innovations, the memories? A natural-born storyteller, Lee decided to hit the road and spent two years uncovering fascinating narrat...

This humorous and personal conversation between renowned actor Tom Hanks and Parul Sehgal, book critic for the New York Times, was from the Portland Book Festival in 2018. The Portland Book Festival 2019 line up has just been announced. The Festival will take place on November 9 in downtown Portland. For more information about the author line up, schedule, and tickets visit: literary-arts.org About the book: A small-town newspaper columnist with old-fashioned views of the modern world. A World W...

In this episode, civil rights leader DeRay Mckesson engages the Portland community in a timely conversation on culture, social justice, and politics. Drawing from his own experiences as an organizer, educator, and public official, Mckesson explores the issues of the day and discusses the subtle structures and inherent biases that impact our communities. The conversation examines the core themes of Mckesson’s upcoming first book, On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope, a meditation on re...

In this episode, Harvard professor, staff writer at The New Yorker, and New York Times bestselling author Jill Lepore discusses her newest work, These Truths: A History of the United States. Cited as the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—”these truths,” Jefferson called them...

In this episode, Dawn Lundy Martin, Morgan Parker, and Danez Smith discuss the intersection of race and language, and what it means to render black bodies in literature. Together, these poets explore what it means to be a black artist in America today, and what it means to represent this experience in their work. This panel is moderated by local writer and performer Béalleka. Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet and activist whose poetry collections include Discipline (2011), winner of the Nightboat Boo...

In this episode of The Archive Project, Omar El Akkad, Benjamin Percy, and Lidia Yuknavitch discuss their newest works in a conversation titled “Resistance and Rebellion: Dystopian Fiction” at the 2017 Portland Book Festival. El Akkad’s début novel American War imagines an American landscape devastated by its second Civil War and tells the story of the young woman who carries the war-torn country’s fate. Benjamin Percy’s Dark Net is set in contemporary Portland, where a group of misfits must wor...

In this episode of The Archive Project, Doree Shafrir and Ellen Ullman discuss their work as authors and as women in the booming, male-dominated world of technology. Shafrir’s Startup tells the stories of Mack, Katya, and Sabrina, three very different people whose lives become perilously engulfed in a tech startup scandal. Ullman’s second memoir, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, takes a grounded look at the ever-evolving tech industry and the very human implications and casualties...

This special episode of The Archive Project is broken up into three sections, each corresponding to a single event during Lit Crawl Portland 2017. Lit Crawl is an eclectic mix of literary events staged in nontraditional locations. From poetry readings in bars to literary trivia and karaoke in hotel lobbies, Lit Crawl seeks to unite readers and writers in a single night jam-packed with literary fun. The first segment features a reading cohosted by De-Canon: A Visibility Project, White Noise, and ...

In this episode of The Archive Project, bestselling authors Maile Meloy and Claire Messud discuss their new books: psychological mysteries where children go missing and painful truths are revealed in crisis, exploring the spaces between childhood innocence and the hard realities of adulthood. In Maile Meloy’s Do Not Become Alarmed, the children go missing while two families are vacationing in Latin America, sending the parents into panic and forcing the children to discover untapped resourcefuln...

How do we create art from our own wounds and wonders? In their poetry, memoirs, and essays, writers Kaveh Akbar, Melissa Febos, and Megan Stielstra reckon with personal trauma and healing. Tracking the joys and pains of the path through addiction, and wrestling with desire, inheritance and faith, Calling a Wolf a Wolf is the darkly sumptuous debut from award-winning poet Kaveh Akbar. His are powerful, intimate poems of thirst: for alcohol, for other bodies, for knowledge and for life. In her mem...

How do we create art from our own wounds and wonders? In their poetry, memoirs, and essays, writers Kaveh Akbar, Melissa Febos, and Megan Stielstra reckon with personal trauma and healing. Tracking the joys and pains of the path through addiction, and wrestling with desire, inheritance and faith, Calling a Wolf a Wolf is the darkly sumptuous debut from award-winning poet Kaveh Akbar. His are powerful, intimate poems of thirst: for alcohol, for other bodies, for knowledge and for life. In her mem...

Pretend boyfriends, arranged marriages, getting photographed by the paparazzi? These YA novelists don’t write your typical love stories In Sandhya Menon’s When Dimple Met Rishi, two first-generation Indian-American teens are set up by their parents in an arranged marriage, but the plans backfire when they are paired up at the same coding camp. In Zan Romanoff’s Grace and the Fever, Grace is swept up in the world of the boy band she secretly loves and struggles to keep up her double life as she l...

This episode features award-winning poet and thinker Claudia Rankine discussing race in America in the years since the publication of her hybrid form volume of poetry Citizen: An American Lyric. In this lecture, Rankine explores not only what it means to be black in America today, but how the black experience relates to what we unconsciously consider the standard, white experience. In a society that sees whiteness as the default, how do we interpret and interrogate what it means to be white in A...

This episode features Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen reading from his novel The Sympathizer. Between readings, Nguyen humorously meditates on his own refugee experience as a Vietnamese American growing up in post-war Sacramento, California. A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties. In both conversation with and opposition to the narratives of...

In this episode, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, cultural critic, journalist, and professor Margo Jefferson asks, “How do we teach ourselves to go beyond the limits of our own experience?” The daughter of a prominent physician and social worker-turned-socialite mother, Jefferson grew up in an upper-middle class black neighborhood of Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s. In this lecture, Jefferson uses her own unique experience and perspective to explore how our nation, with its seemingly infinite identi...

In this episode of The Archive Project, author Mohsin Hamid discusses the themes in his novel Exit West, Multnomah County Library’s 2018 Everybody Reads selection. About Exit West: Shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize, Exit West tells the story of Nadia and Saeed, who begin their love affair against an increasingly unsettling backdrop of unrest and violence. As the city turns into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, the couple begins to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whis...

This is a special episode featuring a staged reading of Cindy Williams Gutiérrez’s Words That Burn, winner of the 2017 Oregon Book Award for Drama. Words That Burn is a dramatization of the World War II experiences of William Stafford, Lawson Inada, and Guy Gabaldón. Especially relevant in today’s political climate, Words That Burn brings to life the distinctive voices of a conscientious objector, a Japanese-American internee, and Chicano Marine, juxtaposing the history and perspectives of thre...

In this lecture, Siddhartha Mukherjee dives into the complex topic of genetic research and why he wanted to write The Gene: An Intimate History, reasons of which include his family’s own history with genetic diseases. He shares the timeline of historic discoveries in the science of genes, from Gregor Mendel’s work with inheritance patterns in pea plants to modern-day somatic cell and germ line gene therapies, and speculates on the scientific possibilities in the future of genetic research. Throu...

In this episode of The Archive Project, New Yorker staff writer George Packer speaks on the subject of “American Identity in the Age of Trump” using the lens of his most recent book, The Unwinding. In this work of nonfiction, Packer tells the political and socio-economic story of the past three decades by journeying through the lives of several Americans, including a son of tobacco farmers who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to...

In this episode, George Saunders discusses the process that lead to his award-winning first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which contemplates the time Abraham Lincoln spent in his son’s tomb following his death and the fate of the young boy’s soul. With all the characteristic wit and humor of his short stories, Saunders takes the audience through the process of writing the novel—from the first spark of inspiration decades ago, through many iterations, to the final masterpiece. Saunders explores bo...

This episode of the Archive Project features writer and thinker Reza Aslan as he takes the listener on a historical journey to find the roots and reasons for faith. In this lecture, Aslan reflects on the nature of faith, highlighting the human tendency to depict higher powers in our own image. Aslan uses evidence from several archaeological sites—some from as far back as 14,000 B.C.—to illustrate the human drive toward ritual faith and humanization of the divine. Aslan asks the listener to consi...