Episodes

On this episode of The Archive Project, Sharon Olds begins her lecture by reading a poem by Langston Hughes called “Luck,” which she tells the audience she memorized on the subway in New York City. From there, she reads several of her poems on the theme of family and personal life, including a description of her experience learning to read and her memory of running through the airport on the way to visit her dying father. Between her own works, she shares a selection of poems by other people, in...

This episode of The Archive Project, features a lecture from prolific author Jonathan Lethem from 2007. As a writer, Lethem melds genres, often mixing crime and sci-fi with more traditional fiction. He is also known for his unpretentious incorporation of American pop-culture into his works. In this lecture, Lethem’s dry humor, sincerity, literary allusions, and post-modern sensibility are on full display as he discusses what has shaped him as a writer, including growing up in New York during the...

In this episode of The Archive Project, actors from The Milagro Theatre read excerpts from Cristina Henriquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans, Multnomah County Library’s 2016 Everybody Reads selection. Cristina Henriquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans explores the lives of two families who have come to the United States from Mexico and Panama, as well as the experiences of men and women who have immigrated from all over Latin America, as they pursue different versions of the American Dream. It...

Tom Brokaw begins his lecture with a humorous discussion of his transition into retirement as one of the leading American television journalists of the late 20th century. He turns his attention to more serious subjects following this, focusing the remainder of his talk on the major social developments of the 20th century, how these have shaped the attitudes and actions of Americans today, and what he hopes is to come for the nation as it heads farther into the 21st century. As a journalist and ...

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. Since then, 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 ma...

Lydia Davis begins her lecture by explaining her attempt to find a balance between poetry and prose through writing short stories. She discusses several of her favorite authors—including Samuel Beckett, Russell Edson, and Bob Pearlman—and reads short selections from their works. Davis also discusses her work translating Proust and Flaubert, among others. She then reads from a New York poet named Sparrow who writes minimalistic translations, compares his translations to the originals, and asks wh...

Stephen Greenblatt begins his lecture with a discussion of censorship and religious toleration in early Christian Europe. He distinguishes Christianity from earlier Pagan and Jewish ideologies by emphasizing its commitment to a “single absolute doctrinal coherence” and the ways in which the church dealt with heretics. Greenblatt then moves on to discuss the influence of various theologians—including Augustine, John Locke, and Thomas More—on Christian intolerance. Greenblatt emphasizes the Renais...

Scholar and commentator Karen Armstrong begins her lecture by describing her youth in a nunnery, her subsequent departure and return to religion, and her understanding of religious stagnation. She compares modern concepts of God, in which The Almighty is basically a glorified human, to ancient ones, in which God was too great and too expansive to describe. Armstrong proposes that once God is reduced to a being with a definite form, he can tolerate no other Gods and is used to justify violence. S...

Recorded at Wordstock: Portland’s Book Festival on November 7, 2015, the panel “Lost & Found: Fiction on the Threshold” brings authors Carmiel Banasky (The Suicide of Claire Bishop), Sloane Crosley (The Clasp), Katherine Taylor (Valley Fever), and Vendela Vida (The Driver’s Clothes Lie Empty) together to discuss their lost characters and what it means to be found. Each of these four writers read from their daring new novels that feature characters who are searching for mythical objects, lost in ...

In Another Day, best-selling author David Levithan tells the story from the side of Every Day’s Rhiannon as she seeks to discover the truth about love and how it can change you. Girl at the Bottom of the Sea, Michelle Tea’s sequel to Mermaid in Chelsea Creek, finds our hero Sophie traveling from Massachusetts to Poland with her unlikely guardian, the mermaid Syrena. And in Beastly Bones, the follow-up book to the acclaimed Jackaby, William Ritter tells of a supernatural investigation from the pe...

At the age of sixty-four, long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad became the first person to swim the 111 miles from Cuba to Key West without a shark cage, a Herculean feat that had eluded her when she made the attempt three decades earlier, in peak form. Nyad discusses her new memoir, Find a Way, a passionate story of this heroic adventure and the extraordinary life experiences that have served to carve her unwavering spirit, with Cheryl Strayed (Brave Enough). Always that swim has been for me about ...

One of the most acclaimed contemporary historians presents a fresh, startling new look at the Salem witch trials, the first great American mystery. In The Witches: Salem, 1692, Pulitzer Prize winning author Stacy Schiff examines the religious, social, and political context of the Massachusetts Bay Colony that doomed year, the only moment when women played the central role in American history. Schiff is interviewed by Karen Karbo, author Julia Child Rules and the forthcoming In Praise of Difficul...

Acclaimed chef and food writer Ruth Reichl discusses the highlights of her career as a food writer, including how she got her start, her current work, and some of the lessons she has learned along the way. She explains how the many illusions of the fine dining world have taught her a lot about herself. An acclaimed chef and food writer, Ruth Reichl served as a restaurant critic for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and was Gourmet magazine’s editor-in-chief for ten years. As the co-o...

Critically acclaimed, best-selling authors Jon Krakauer (Missoula, Into the Wild, and more) and Barry Lopez (Outside: Stories, Arctic Dreams, and more) are known for writing about human nature in confrontation with the natural world: from summiting Everest to our relationships with wolves and everything in between. In this conversation at the 2015 Portland Book Festival (formerly Wordstock), the two American literary legends discuss both the raw natural world and the interior nature of humanity....

Robert Pinsky begins his lecture by discussing the physicality of poetry. He compares poetry to other modern mediums of creativity and argues that poetry is uniquely intimate because it only reaches full expression in the body of the recipient. Pinsky goes on to discuss the special position of poetry in America: that it often produces ideas on an individual level before they are absorbed into systems of mass culture. Pinsky finishes his lecture by discussing the Favorite Poem Project, which call...

A William Stafford devotee and former mentee, Naomi Shihab Nye opens her lecture by reading from Stafford’s “Time for Serenity, Anyone?” She then discusses the countless ways his work has inspired her and the poets around her. Afterwards, she reads several poems from her most recent collection at the time, Fuel: Poems, many of which focus on the simplicity of everyday life and which contain elements of the Southwest culture in which she spends the majority of her time. “Sometimes it seems to me...

Mary Gordon begins the lecture by discussing how writers of autobiography or memoir often depend on memory to portray the truth. In the case of her own writing, Gordon says memory takes the form of specific images that have stuck with her throughout the years. She reads a selection of excerpts from her work that focus on an image or a concrete moment embedded in her childhood memories. She goes on to talk about the years she spent researching her family’s roots, imagining herself in her father’s...

This episode of The Archive Project features Azar Nafisi, author of the acclaimed Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. In her lecture, Nafisi discusses Iranian literature and how it serves as a source of identity. She examines the fundamentalist Muslim identity in comparison to the national identity, concluding that people must focus on the literature of a nation in order to truly understand a culture. She also reflects on her life in England and her personal need to preserve Iran in her...

In this episode of The Archive Project, Israeli writer Amos Oz discusses Israeli Literature, Hebrew as a spoken and written language, the influence of the Holocaust on literature, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. “I love Israel, even at times that I don’t like it. In fact, I love Israel even at times that I cannot stand it. And Israel, as I’m sure you know, ladies and gentlemen, Israel is neither a country, nor a nation. Actually, it is a fiery collection of arguments. A noisy assembly of ...

Michael Pollan begins his lecture by praising Portland for being one of the incubators of true healthy eating before moving on to discuss the new American food culture. He describes how many Americans have developed an unhealthy obsession with being healthy, which has actually backfired, as evidenced by the obesity epidemic. He labels the prevailing American ideology as “nutritionalism,” which places primacy on the mysterious “nutrient” and requires expert insight to navigate. Next, Pollan quest...

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...

Maxine Hong Kingston appears as part of the Portland Arts and Lectures series not long after many of her belongings and writings were lost in the Oakland firestorm of 1991. Her lecture, entitled “Another Person of Peace,” is about her rediscovering herself as a person and a writer following the fire. Kingston discusses the inspiration behind her book that was lost to the flames, which was to mirror the Books of Peace that appeared in China hundreds of years ago. Coincidentally, these books were ...

Wideman and McMillan begin their lecture with a discussion of the projects they are working on and how they decide what material to write next. McMillan then reads an excerpt of her writing, speaking through the voice of one of her female characters. Wideman follows by reading a segment called “Picking Up My Father From the Springfield Station.” Each writer talks about his or her inspiration: in Wideman’s case, it’s his father’s life; in McMillan’s case, it’s her mother’s life. They discuss thei...

Portland poet and essayist Doug Marx moderates this lecture between former Poet Laureate Robert Hass and Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. Hass and Milosz read and discuss a variety of their poems. Marx periodically asks questions about each poet’s inspiration and their composition process, and Hass and Milosz’s answers often lead to the reading of additional excerpts. “When I said ‘pleasure,’ what I really meant was ‘work,’ which really is the deepest pleasure.” – Robert Hass “It seems to me...