Episodes

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...

Barthelme begins his lecture with a series of readings, including a story about his family’s quest for a dog, his reflections on being a father, the study of angels, and a conversation with Goethe in which he compares music, art, and nationalities to common day objects. Barthelme also previews a selection of excerpts from his forthcoming novel The King, a retelling of Le Morte D’Arthur through the lens of World War II, which he had not yet decided on a title for and which was posthumously publis...

Oliver Sacks begins his lecture by sharing a series of anecdotes about his patients, such as one man who could not recognize faces or objects and mistook his wife for a hat—the inspiration for the title of one of his books. Additional stories include a man with a head injury who lost his sense of smell and a woman who had no left-sided sensory perception. He discusses the relationship between neurology and the soul, including the sub-cortex of the brain, the most primitive part, which affects wi...

Former Executive Director of Literary Arts Julie Mancini gives a speech about the early days of Literary Arts during our 30th birthday celebration on September 8, 2014. She shares memories from her fifteen-year career, including the ways in which she helped convince world-famous writers such as Joan Didion to visit Portland. Sharing feedback from visiting authors, Mancini chronicles how Portland Arts & Lectures grew to be the largest literary lecture series in the nation. We begged writers to c...

Mark Doty reads from his new book, Deep Lane, and discusses his poetic influences, including Walt Whitman and Deborah Digges. These mentors, and the themes and ideas from their works, appear throughout Doty’s poems. Other themes include animals and observations on the natural world. Doty also shares several poems about New York and concludes his reading with a generous Q&A session with the audience. Mark Doty’s Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008....

Mitchell S. Jackson begins with a round of thanks, sometimes unconventional, to all those who influenced his journey to stand before thousands of people in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, as a successful author. He mentions that after he was incarcerated as a young man, he began the process of revision, and he goes on to discuss the differences between editing and revision. “Editing is fixing the small things . . . it is minding convention.” Revision, on the other hand, “is to re-envision.” He...

Kazuo Ishiguro begins the interview by talking about growing up in a Japanese family in England and watching the British with “amused distance,” stating, “I was taught to respect British customs, but they were just that: values and customs that the natives adhered to.” His family finally decided that they would not return to Japan when he was 15, but he says that he first began writing novels with the idea of “this Japan that I never went back to.” He goes on to discuss the real-life places that...

Joyce Carol Oates takes the audience on a dreamlike, philosophical journey as she discusses the origins of art and stories. She poses several hypothetical questions, touching on the purpose of human existence and the reasoning behind our desire to create art. Oates explores these questions by tracing the evolution of the writer: the writer as a child, the writer in school, and so on. She is fascinated with how people progress with the craft of writing and how they contribute to the evolution of ...

Carlos Fuentes gives a talk titled “After the Cold War: The Rise of a New Agenda.” It is the keynote address for a conference intended to help Oregonians put into a global perspective the cultural, economic, and political significance of the emerging Hispanic population of Oregon and the United States. Fuentes discusses the changes taking place in the world since the end of World War II, mainly focusing on the increases in technology and economy brought on by rapid globalization. Because of this...

Isabel Allende begins her lecture with stories about writing her new book, Island Beneath the Sea, focusing specifically on the connections between the histories of Haiti and New Orleans. The inspiration for the book came after Allende visited New Orleans and was intrigued by the Haitian refugees who created their own identities in Louisiana. She tells how her research into the plantations and the stories of Haitians imported as slaves made her physically sick, and she was worried until her husb...

John Dunne begins his lecture by discussing how two people can experience the exact same thing and come away with completely different observations—specifically how writers betray the image the subjects hold of themselves. He gives anecdotes about a shared experience with Richard Rhodes and quotes Henry James, saying, “If a writer talks about writing without quoting from Henry James . . . then you should get your money back.” Joan Didion then takes the stage to talk about being a journalist and ...

Ruth Ozeki discusses her novel A Tale for the Time Being, specifically the phrase “time being” and its several meanings. Ozeki tells the story of discovering her main character, Nao, and her journey toward figuring out all the various narrative elements of her novel. It was a long, circuitous route: world affairs, books, and life experiences all influenced the characters and events Ozeki wrote about, and she struggled to decide who Nao was writing her journal for: “It was my job, as a novelist, ...

Gore Vidal is interviewed by Lauren Kessler, answering several questions about his political writings and the power of writers in America, specifically Mark Twain and Noam Chomsky. Vidal says he strongly dislikes systems, especially the press, whom he calls “part of the corporate ownership of the country.” He goes on to discuss his work, including a comparison of his novel, The Smithsonian Institution, and its fantasy elements to his historically accurate nonfiction books, Lincoln, Burr, and Jul...

Award-winning poet Terrance Hayes begins by reading from his most recent collection, Lighthead, opening with “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy.” He is relaxed and conversational about his writing, pausing between poems to discuss why he chose to write about specific ideas and to define words that, he says, “only people east of the Mississippi would understand.” (For example: muscadine.) Many of the poems he reads lean toward the autobiographical side, often commenting on race and culture in Ameri...

Jane Hirshfield reads poems from her new collection at the time, After, which was named a ‘best book of 2006’ by The Washington Post. The poem she begins with— “Theology”—immediately establishes Hirshfield as a writer in tune to the frequencies of the natural world, observing life and death, animals and humans, through a stunning montage. Between poems, Hirshfield shares the meaning of her collection: After is meant to encompass the idea of continuity after death. Each poem is an elegy, paying t...

During his lecture, award-winning poet Li-Young Lee reads seven of his poems: “Station,” “The Children’s Hour,” “Have You Prayed?,” “Self-help for Fellow Refugees,” “Immigrant Blues,” “Trading for Heaven,” and “Virtues of the Boring Husband.” He introduces each poem with anecdotal information, including his philosophies about romantic love and its connection to finding God. In the Q&A afterward, Lee talks about the psychological and physiological processes involved in reading a poem and the role...

In one of the earliest recordings of Portland Arts & Lectures, Oregon writer Barry Lopez begins his lecture with stories about his travels in the Arctic, where he struggled with the language barrier but discovered a word that spoke volumes to him: isumatug, which translates roughly to “storyteller” or “the person who creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself.” Throughout his talk, Lopez focuses on using stories as a way to “get out of the self” and find one’s way back into the univer...

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...

Robert Stone begins by comparing morality and art, describing the former as “a neo-Gothic structure: immense, ornate, and sterile” and the latter as “like a black panther…radical, the appealing cousin of crime. Never a dull moment with art.” He discusses the relationship between truth and beauty, and emphasizes the importance of fiction. “Storytelling is not a luxury to humanity,” he says, “it’s almost as necessary as bread. We cannot imagine ourselves without it, because the self is a story.” ...

With his signature dry humor, Bill Bryson discusses incidents throughout his life that later became part of his nonfiction books. He begins with the story of hiking and his fear of bears, saying that one should “always go hiking with someone who can’t run as fast as you can.” He says that Oregonians have a well-developed, sophisticated sense of humor and notes the similarities to the dry humor in Iowa, where he was raised, and England, where he has lived for several years. Bryson also discusses ...

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...

Kopple opens by talking about being grateful that documentaries are moving into the mainstream, with audiences appreciating these “real-life, nonfiction films.” She then tells about her journey to becoming a filmmaker, which started while she was studying political science in college and, instead of writing a paper, decided to make a short film showcasing people who’d had lobotomies. “My professor was outraged,” she said. “I got a D….but I was hooked.” Kopple goes on to discuss her process makin...

Journalist and documentary filmmaker Sebastian Junger begins his lecture by stating that he had no idea he was going to be a war reporter. Starting out as an anthropology major, Junger spent several years as a tree-climber until he cut open his leg with a chainsaw and began questioning his path in life. “There was a war in Bosnia,” he says, “and I just went.” Junger talks about his work reporting on combat in Afghanistan just before and during the U.S. invasion and how this intense experience i...

Three months after the catastrophic earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat begins her lecture with a proverb from the country she grew up in: “We remember, but we move forward.” She mentions Haiti’s nickname, terre glissée or “slippery ground,” and expounds on the metaphoric and literal connotations of that phrase. With the devastation still on everyone’s mind, Danticat tells of both her own and her family’s experiences during and after the earthquake, mentioning ...