Episodes

Every year, the Multnomah County Library chooses one book they hope the whole city of Portland will read. Between January and April, the Library, and their partner organizations, host events based around the themes of the book, and they distribute thousands of free copies—thanks to the Library Foundation—to readers of all ages from across the county. Here at Literary Arts, our role is to bring the author to town for a talk in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. This year, the 2025 Everybody Reads...

It’s Valentine’s Day weekend, and love is in the air on The Archive Project. We are featuring two conversations from the 2024 Portland Book Festival with bestselling contemporary romance writers. In the last few decades, writing romance has become big business. From the Fabio-adorned mass market paperbacks of the 90s to self-published ebooks like Fifty Shades of Gray in the early 2000s, to now, when we are amidst an explosion of the genre with more than 39 million print copies of romance novels ...

A life-long Northwesterner, Egan has spent much of his career exploring his home region. One might even say he is the quintessential Pacific Northwest writer. He served as the first Pacific Northwest correspondent for the New York Times and he also wrote one of the definitive books about our region in 1990, The Good Rain. During his eighteen-year tenure at the New York Times, Egan covered everything from the Exxon Valdez disaster to the OJ Simpson trial. In 2001, he and a team of reporters rece...

In this episode, we feature Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation with Omar El Akkad from the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in October 2024. Coates’ versatility and virtuosity as a writer makes him one of the most singular and important writers at work today. He first rose to national recognition as a staff writer at The Atlantic Magazine, and in particular for an article he wrote in 2014 titled The Case for Reparations. A year later, Coates published his second book, a long essay called Between the ...

This week’s episode features one of the most highly anticipated conversations from the 2024 Portland Book Festival. Author Rachel Kushner joined the festival with her most recent novel, the Booker Prize finalist Creation Lake, her take on a noir spy thriller. We paired her with Danzy Senna, whose new novel is Colored Television, the story of a struggling novelist attempting to break into Hollywood. We invited Oregon-based writer Mat Johnson, whose most recent book is the fantastic Invisible Thin...

This week we have a conversation between one of the ultimate literary power couples: Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt. Paul Auster passed away in April of 2024. The New York Times obituary called him the “patron saint of literary Brooklyn.” He wrote screenplays, poetry, and nonfiction, but is probably best known as a novelist, and as an novelist his best known work is the New York Trilogy—City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, all published in the mid-1980s–which he discusses in this conversat...

This week’s episode features the trailblazing, legendary journalist: Connie Chung, in conversation about her new memoir, CONNIE. In her book, Chung shares the story of her decades-long career as an Asian woman in the white-male-dominated world of broadcast journalism, when she relentlessly pursued stories and fought hard for scoops. Her hard work – her schedule for many years was truly unbelievable, with six days of work on multiple programs at her own request — Her hard work, which she connects...

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. Just one year after almost a decade in hiding from the Iranian government, Rushdie made his first public appearance in Portland, discussing the ideas, both mythical and musical, that inspired this New York Times bestseller. In his remaking of the myth of Orpheus, Rushdie tells the story of Vina Apsara, a pop star, and Ormus Cama, an extrao...

On April 5, 2016, former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove was honored as Oregon State University’s Stone Award winner. The Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement honors a major American author who has created a body of critically acclaimed work and been a dedicated mentor to succeeding generations of young writers. In her acceptance interview with OSU Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing Karen Holmberg, Dove addresses her writing process, adapting her work to the stage, and facin...

“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.” In this episode of The Archive Project, Yann Martel reads selections from his novel Life of Pi, which received the Man Booker Prize in 2002 and was later adapted into a feature film. Between readings, Martel shares information about his writing process and his overarching philosophy behind the book. At the conclusion of the reading, he answers a series of questions from the audience, including ...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we take you behind the scenes at the 2024 Portland Book Festival, hosted by Literary Arts in downtown Portland on November 2, 2024. The festival featured over 100 writers in more than 50 events throughout the day. Our editor and producer Matthew Workman is stepping in front of the microphone for this one, guiding you through the festival as he searches for festival authors and asks them to share their book recommendations. You’ll not only get a behind the...

“I’m always thinking: This is the story I know, but what is the story I haven’t been told?” In this episode, we revisit a 2021 Portland Arts & Lectures conversation with novelist Madeline Miller. When we hosted Miller in January 2021, she had not one but two books on the New York Times Best Seller list: The Song of Achilles and Circe. Both books are retellings, in novel form, of ancient Greek myths. But they are also more than simply retellings. Her books are the reinterpreting of myths that rev...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we revisit a rare public appearance by one of Oregon’s greatest entrepreneurs, Phil Knight, for the release of his 2016 memoir, Shoe Dog. In this candid and riveting memoir, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company’s early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world’s most iconic and profitable brands. “I think one of the things that is unique about Nike is that when we go to work on Monday morning an...

In 1989, an unknown writer named Amy Tan published a novel entitled The Joy Club, and the career of a major American writer was born. In this episode of The Archive Project, we are reaching deep into the archive to 1991, when we hosted Tan because there’s something very special about hearing from a writer at the very beginning of their career. At the time, The Joy Luck Club had been on the New York Times bestseller list for two full years and the movie of the book was in development, with Tan a...

This episode features Malcolm Gladwell in conversation about his newest book, Revenge of The Tipping Point. He spoke with Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor in front of a live audience in downtown Portland in October 2024. The Tipping Point hit shelves in 2000 and became a true cultural phenomenon, spending a whopping 334 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and turning everyone—from your priest to your barista—into budding social scientists. Multiple New York Times bestsell...

This episode features readings and conversations from an event entitled “I See My Light Shining.” The event was a part of the Elders Project, which is sponsored by Columbia University and features interviews with African Americans from across the country. Here in Portland, acclaimed writer Renée Watson interviewed dozens of Portlanders about their lives for the project. Through the episode, we’ll take you through the event and hear the stories of some of the elders Watson interviewed. In this e...

This episode features a great event from the 2023 Portland Book Festival on the relationships between humans and animals, and on our ideas about the meaning of animals.  Erica Berry is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, winner of the 2024 Oregon Book Award in creative nonfiction. Erica is based in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, and teaches in Literary Arts Writers in the schools program.  Sabrina Imbler is the author of How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in ...

This week we have a conversation featuring Naomi Alderman, who joined us for Portland Book Festival in November 2023 for the very first event for her new novel, The Future. Alderman is the author of the mega best-seller, Barack Obama-endorsed, Margaret Atwood-mentored novel The Power. She talks with interviewer Omar El Akkad about the pressure she felt writing this follow-up, about a handful of friends who plot a daring heist to save the world from the tech billionaires who are threatening it. B...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation with author Tommy Orange from the 2023 Portland Book Festival. Viet Than Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his debut novel The Sympathizer, which sold more than one million copies worldwide, catapulted him to national fame. Since then, Nguyen has gone on to publish two more books of fiction, and a work of nonfiction, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. He joined us for the Festival on the ...

This episode is a celebration of the life of writer and teacher Tom Spanbauer, who passed away on September 21, 2024.     Born in rural Idaho in 1946, Spanbauer spent time in Kenya in the Peace Corps after attending Idaho State University. He returned to the United States in 1978 and moved several times before landing in New York City, where he earned an MFA from Columbia University 1988. He published his first novel Faraway Places a year later at the age of 43.      In 1991, Spanbauer moved to ...

To close out the celebration of National Poetry Month, this episode featured poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil at the final event of the 2023-24 season of Portland Arts & Lectures.  Nezhukumatathil is an accomplished poet: Literally every one of her four published poetry collections is prize-winning, and she is the first-ever poetry editor of Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of the Sierra Club.    In 2020, she turned to prose with a book of essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of F...

This week, we continue to celebrate National Poetry Month with a conversation from the 2023 Portland Book Festival. Jane Hirshfield is one of our most important living poets, and last year she released The Asking, a new and selected volume. Hirshfield has published ten volumes of poetry, two now-classic essay collections on the craft of poetry, and she has co-translated four books presenting world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield is in conversation with her friend and fellow poet, Major Ja...

As part of 2023 Portland Book Festival Cover to Cover, a weeklong event series with bookish events happening all over the Portland area, local bookstore Broadway Books hosted an evening honoring the late Oregon writer Barry Lopez. Broadway declared 2023 the “year of reading Barry Lopez,” and we gathered three writers to share their memories of Barry and what his work meant to them, centered on his posthumous essay collection, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World. Barry Lopez passed away in Dece...

We continue to celebrate National Poetry Month with a deep dive into Verselandia!, the annual city-wide high school poetry slam championship. In this week’s episode of The Archive Project, we’ll hear from some of the 2023 competitors, and we’ll follow a few 2024 hopefuls as they compete in their school slams.   Verselandia! was founded by a visionary team of Portland public high school librarians and educators who ran individual poetry slams at their schools. As the competitions grew, Literary A...