Episodes

This episode of The Archive Project features filmmaker and writer Francis Ford Coppola discussing his new book, Live Cinema and Its Techniques, with New York Times’ Melena Ryzik. In this eye-opening interview, Coppola discusses his thoughts on live cinema, a technique in which movies are performed live and broadcast via satellite into theaters. Throughout the conversation, Coppola looks back on his own career and the history of the art form itself, giving us an intimate and informative glimpse i...

For over 50 years, Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction and fantasy books offered hope and inspiration to readers and writers everywhere. Le Guin passed away on January 22, 2018. This live event, presented in Portland, Oregon on June 13, 2018, featured tributes from writers and friends who represent the wide-ranging influence Le Guin has had on international literature for more than 50 years, including Margaret Atwood (by video), Molly Gloss, Walidah Imarisha, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, China ...

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 of The Archive Project features New York Times bestselling author in conversation with fellow nonfiction favorite Chuck Klosterman, discussing life, career, and the ethics of writing nonfiction. In her newest collection of essays, Look Alive Out There, Crosley explores active volcanoes, crashing shivas, befriending swingers, and squinting down the barrel of the fertility gun, always rising to the occasion with unmatchable nerve and electric one-liners. In this episode, Klosterman, f...

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...

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 ...

This episode features internationally acclaimed and award-winning writer Michael Ondaatje reading primarily from his canon of poetry. Spanning decades and continents, Ondaatje’s work gives a glimpse into a poetic mind turned novelist. This reading crosses the globe, jumping from Ondaatje’s native Colombo, Sri Lanka to his eventual home in Toronto, Canada. A skilled reader in addition to his poetic abilities, this reading truly transports the listener to those precious moments that have inspired ...

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...

This episode features acclaimed chef and food writer Ruth Reichl as she discusses her rise to fame, the intersection of food and storytelling, and the future of fine dining. Reichl deftly illustrates her own trajectory through the food world, beginning in the Berkeley, CA culinary revolution of the 1970s, through her time as a disguise-donning food critic for the New York Times, to the publication of her first novel Delicious!. But beyond the fancy food, Reichl’s story is about a journey towards...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we celebrate Portland’s creative youth during our sixth annual Verselandia! poetry slam. This city-wide event features students from Parkrose, Roosevelt, Metropolitan Learning Center, Benson, Lincoln, Gresham, Sam Barlow, Franklin, Madison, Wilson, Jefferson, Grant, and Cleveland high schools. Verselandia! is the Grand Slam for the winners from individual school slams hosted by public high school library media specialists. This episode features a small sel...

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 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 2017 new releases. Their books examine psychological mysteries where children go missing and painful truths are revealed in crisis, and that explore 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 childre...

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. 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 n...

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 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...

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...

This episode features a panel discussion from the 2017 Portland Book Festival wherein 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 Portland writer and performer Béalleka. Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet and activist whose p...

Wright begins his lecture by elaborating on his recent journalistic investigation into the history of Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard. Wright seeks to answer two overarching questions: 1) Where do new religious ideas come from? and 2) why would anybody believe them? Although he focuses on Scientology, Wright also emphasizes the fundamental needs that drive people to all organized religions: hope, play, purpose, community, and structure. He credits the unique appeal of Scientology to a potent mixt...

Ursula Le Guin begins her discussion with Margaret Atwood in 2010 by saying, “I emailed Margaret about six weeks or so ago and said, ‘What are we going to talk about?’ and she replied, ‘I expect we will talk about 1) What is fiction?; 2) What is science fiction?; 3) The ones who walk away from Omelas—where do they go?; 4) Is the human race doomed?; 5) Anything else that strikes our fancy.’” The two women examine these questions and talk through their answers. They delve into their writing proces...

Ursula K. Le Guin opens with the question, “Where do you get your ideas from?” and replies with her favorite response, from Harlan Ellison: “He says he gets his ideas from a mail-order house in Schenectady.” Le Guin goes on to seriously address the question, because “unanswerable questions are just what fiction writers like to answer.” She discusses the process of all artists’ work, of the connection between experience and imagination, and the tendency for Americans to prefer realism in their no...

In this episode of The Archive Project, Ann Patchett retraces the steps that lead to her 2013 essay collection, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. With a seemingly endless wellspring of wit and charm, Patchett takes us a series of adventures that ultimately lead to her first and only collection of essays. From refilling ketchup bottles to writing pieces for Seventeen and Vogue to opening up her own bookstore, Parnassus, Patchett effortlessly weaves the story of her literary journey. Simultan...

In this episode, Jeffery Eugenides and Danzy Senna discuss their most recent works. Fresh Complaint, Eugenides’s first collection of short stories, centers on people in the midst of crises—both personal and political. In Senna’s New People we meet a self-identified “mulatto” couple as they navigate the messy realms of love, race, and identity. Both works fearlessly approach the realm of the taboo with a humor and tenderness that renders them utterly human. No strangers to representing the taboo ...

In this episode of the Archive Project, author Daniel Handler (also known as Lemony Snicket) is interviewed by the New Yorker’s Gilbert Cruz at Wordstock: Portland’s Book Festival. As the enigmatic author of children’s, young adult, and adult fiction, Handler offers a unique perspective on literature, life, and the creative impulse. In this interview, he reflects on the moments that drew him to both reading and writing, describing his creative process and inspiration. With his signature dry, dar...