Episodes

Toni Morrison begins her lecture by saying she wants to discuss two of her books in particular—Beloved (1987) and Jazz (still forthcoming at the time)—and the progression of her writing. She considers the impact of history on both novels. In discussing Beloved, Morrison touches on the pornography of writing about violence as a voyeur and how she worked to keep the focus on the characters themselves, not the institution of slavery. For Jazz, Morrison discusses the genre’s contradictions, its plac...

In a lecture titled “Finding the Known World,” featured in the collection The World Split Open (Tin House 2014), Edward P. Jones opens up about his original fascination with writing and the simple images that inspired him to write an entire novel. In the early 1990s, he became interested in the way slavery and Black history are depicted in America. He read dozens of books on the subject as a means to begin “building a novel.” In the end, Jones discovered that it was his own imagination and heart...

Chinua Achebe begins his presentation by reading a passage from his 1987 novel, Anthills of the Savanna, as well as several of his poems. The photographer Robert Lyons, who Achebe collaborated with to produce the book Another Africa, joins him on stage. Lyons discusses the role that photography plays in developing stereotypes in African cultures, and he explains his approach to depicting the complexities of the huge, diverse continent. Both Achebe and Lyons talk about their work to broaden the g...

With self-deprecating humor and insight, Colson Whitehead discusses his youth as “a bit of a shut-in” and his development as a writer, poking fun at his early misconceptions about the profession, stating, “Half the reason I got into the writing business was so I could sit on my ass all day.” He goes on to tell anecdotes about the successes that helped his career flourish, as well as his plans for the future. Toward the end of his lecture, Whitehead gives a lengthy reading from his then-upcoming ...

Nikky Finney, the 2011 National Book Award winner for poetry, tells a full-house audience that her grandmother’s words have always guided her work as a poet: “To tell a lie is a sin of the highest order.” She gives extensive, fascinating introductions for each of her long-form narrative poems before performing them. Her subjects include family ties, the writing life, oppression, maternity, solidarity, class disparity, and the plight of Black women in America. Both her poems and her commentaries ...

In one of the earliest recordings of Portland Arts & Lectures, Paul Theroux talks about the definition of travel writing and how, oftentimes, the best travel writing can take place at home. He declares that it is always about discovery and learning something new, whether about oneself or others. Theroux is fascinated with people who go through some kind of struggle or ordeal that forces them to test their limits. He tells personal anecdotes about his life and his travels through China. Although ...

With his signature humor and intellect, Hitchens begins by asking his audience to consider whether morality is innately human or divinely imposed, citing examples of people committing horrific crimes in the name of religion. He denounces the moral relativism of religions and argues that atheists also have strong moral convictions and high principles. His intellectual commentary continues along the lines of his bestselling book, God is Not Great, as he argues that the mythology of religions is no...

Frank McCourt blends satire with honesty as he tells his audience about what led him to becoming a teacher. He begins by discussing the jobs he had before being admitted into New York University, noting that his experience training attack dogs in Germany for the US Army was particularly helpful for his career as a teacher. McCourt also talks extensively about his education in Ireland while he was growing up there, and explains how Catholicism and sin occupied most of his education. By the time h...

Elizabeth Strout describes this lecture as “Why I think fiction matters.” She declares that in good fiction, a reader finds “the truest things,” and says that she wants to talk about what that phrase means and why it is important to discover. Strout goes on to describe the human experience as necessarily lonely, and she explains how fiction gives us access to the experiences of others; she believes that in this way, fiction facilitates the compassion necessary for understanding ourselves and oth...

A.L. Kennedy gives an amusing lecture about her journey to becoming a writer, beginning with an anecdote about learning to read as a child and how excited she was: instead of telling anyone at school that she could read, Kennedy kept it to herself and therefore only read books that she wanted to read. She also talks about the “oral culture” in Scotland and how big of a role storytelling plays there. Throughout her speech, Kennedy reads excerpts from other writers (such as C.S Lewis) when she wan...

In an off-the-cuff lecture, McBride strolls through his childhood in a busy household of twelve to his time at Oberlin College as an undergrad and Columbia as a budding journalist. His vibrant writing career placed him at People magazine, where his sole job was to cover Michael Jackson. Later, he moved on to The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. McBride explains why he left the journalism world to tour the country as a professional musician and composer for nearly eight years. During this ti...

Saul Bellow declares the title of his talk to be “The Decline of Something or Other” and begins by reading a text he has been working on about boyhood, nostalgia, and growing up as a voracious reader with similar-minded friends. In Chicago, he explains, the adults frowned upon this “intoxication with literature” and treated most culture and the arts with indifference. He proceeds to explain the important role that the arts play in society—especially the novel, which he calls “a very special sort...

Verghese opens his lecture with the quote “Geography is destiny,” and goes on to discuss growing up in Ethiopia and his journey to becoming a physician and a writer. He says that his “real call to medicine” came through a book—he had a profound epiphany while reading Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham—and has since then realized the power of books to change the course of a person’s life. He discusses his journey into medicine, which also informed his development as a writer—specifically during...

Margaret Atwood’s signature wit is in full force in this landmark lecture on, as she phrases it, “problems of female bad behavior in the creation of literature.” Novels, she argues, are not moral tracts for teaching readers how to behave. One can almost hear her smile when she says that “art is what you can get away with.” Atwood dissects the cultural expectations of female characters—often a polarity of virtuous or monstrous—noting the struggles that feminist writers face when confronting these...

In a talk that switches conversationally between explaining her influences and reading from a few of her poems, Natasha Trethewey discusses writing her third collection of poetry, Native Guard, her upcoming collection at the time, Thrall, and the ways that personal and national histories intertwine. For her, writing is a pilgrimage and a way of coming to terms with what has happened. She is obsessed with learning about the South and its oppressive history because it is a part of her own history,...

Chimamanda Adichie opens her lecture by discussing her childhood as a voracious reader in Nigeria, specifically her experience of reading about and wanting an American “ba-gelle” and her eventual disappointment in discovering these were “really just a dense doughnut.” Her life as a reader and writer brings her “extravagant joy,” and she talks about her rituals, progress, and occasional struggles with balancing creativity and socializing. She also touches on living in Chinua Achebe’s house, and h...

Wallace Stegner, “the dean of Western writers,” grapples with his process of reconciling the need for conflict and ambiguity in plot with his distaste for mechanical, method-oriented writing. “The writers I admired and still admire were not carpenters, but more like sculptors,” he says. “Their art was and is a real probing of real and troubling human confusions.” He discusses writers as shape-shifters and ventriloquists, seeking to tell the truth through fiction, and declares that writing is an ...

In this episode, Marjane Satrapi discusses her writing and art, specifically the film production of Persepolis (2000). She first establishes that she makes “comics” not “graphic novels,” dismissing the term “graphic novel” as a marketing ploy among publishing companies. She also establishes that the comic form is not a genre, but an artistic medium—one that allows for narrative structures that are quite different from books and paintings. She goes on to explain that she wanted to stay true to th...

Ron Chernow opens his talk with a discussion on being a biographer—from the perils of picking a subject to debates about how much one should reveal about that subject. Specifically, he discusses his research on the life of John D. Rockefeller for his book Titan (1998) and how it is not unusual when writing a biography to encounter “somebody I had not met in any of the earlier biographies. Here was a man with a beautiful, dry Midwestern wit; somebody with an inexhaustible fund of droll stories; s...

In one of the earliest recordings of Portland Arts & Lectures, we hear Calvin Trillin humorously describe his upbringing in Kansas City and the culture shock that he experienced when he entered the WASP society of Yale University. He then focuses on the differences between Kansas City and his current home in New York. Toward the end of his talk, Trillin turns his focus to politics, poking fun at the current issues of the time. Along the way, he gives humorous insight into food culture. Calvin T...

Francine Prose begins by discussing the differences and similarities between writing fiction and nonfiction, which are not always what one might assume. She finds that both require obsessive attention to detail and clarity. Reading from her novel in progress, A Changed Man, she remarks that she has “about three hundred more drafts before it’s done.” Using excerpts from several different books, Prose illustrates how language shapes character and how information is transmitted while maintaining st...