Episodes

Don’t miss the 2023 Verselandia! competition at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Thursday, April 27 at 7:00 p.m. More information & tickets at literary-arts.org. In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature some of the incredible slam poets who performed as part of Verselandia!—the annual, city-wide youth poetry slam championship event, presented by Literary Arts—in 2022. Each year, youth spend months writing and competing in slams on high school campuses across the city. Then, each A...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we are celebrating the kickoff of National Poetry Month with a special event, recorded in front of a live audience at Literary Arts event space in downtown Portland on September 17, 2022. This event was part of a partnership with the Alano Club of Portland and their Artists in Recovery series, about the intersections of mental health and substance use recovery, creativity, and building community. Learn more at PortlandAlano.org. Alano Club director of dev...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we’re reaching back more than 30 years into the archive to feature the prolific novelist Jane Smiley from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in 1991. This period was an inflection point in her career. At that time, she had established herself as an important and respected American writer, but had yet to find a large audience—to this day, many believe The Greenlanders, published just three years before this talk in 1988, to be a significantly underappreciated...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature journalist Patrick Radden Keefe from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in February 2023. Keefe is the author of five books of nonfiction, most recently Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Rebels, and Crooks, a collection of essays from his work as a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. NPR called Rogues “a wonderful book, not only because Keefe’s prose is masterful, but because he has a preternatural gift for reading people. He recognizes that ...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we share a conversation from the 2022 Portland Book Festival. Actress Selma Blair discusses her debut memoir, Mean Baby, with Esmé Weijun Wang, author of the novel The Border of Paradise and the best-selling essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias. March is National Disability Awareness Month. Much of Selma’s memoir describes her life with a litany of symptoms that were diagnosed as the autoimmune disorder multiple sclerosis, or MS, in 2018 when Bla...

The 2023 Everybody Reads title is A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. Join us at the Keller Auditorium on Thursday, March 16 for an evening with Ruth Ozeki. More info and tickets here. In this episode of The Archive Project, we bring you a talk from Mira Jacob, which was the culminating event of the 2022 Everybody Read’s program. 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...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature one of the highlights of the 2022 Portland Book Festival. It’s a conversation between two of our most accomplished fiction writers, George Saunders and Jess Walter. Their conversation is by turns hilarious, caustic, tender, and profound. Our interviewer for the event was OPB’s own Geoff Norcross, who does his usual masterful job moderating. Find your copy of Saunders and Walter’s books through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG. George Sa...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Lauren Groff from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in early 2023 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Groff is the author of six books of fiction, the last three of which, Fates and Furies, Florida, and Matrix were all national bestsellers and all finalists for the National Book Award. One of the many delights in reading Groff’s books is the dramatic shift in time, place, and focus from title to title. She is not an artist writing the same boo...

This week’s episode of The Archive Project features a conversation from the 2022 Portland Book Festival. Portland-born writer Mitchell S. Jackson interviewed Leila Mottley about her debut novel, Nightcrawling. Jackson is the author of the novel The Residue Years and the nonfiction book Survival Math. He is the winner of a Whiting Award and he received the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for his piece on Ahmaud Arbery. Leila Mottley is the former youth poet laureate of Oakland, California. Nig...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we bring you an event from the 2022 Portland Book Festival, which took place on Saturday, November 5, 2022. The hour is split into two halves of thematically related conversations. Up first, OPB’s Tiffany Camhi interviews writer Melissa Febos about her essay collection, Girlhood; in the second half of the show, OPB’s Jenn Chavez speaks with music critic and New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu about his memoir, Stay True. We paired Melissa and Hua for this fest...

This week on The Archive Project, we bring you a lecture from the 2003/2004 season of Portland Arts & Lectures, featuring renowned memoirist and short story writer Tobias Wolff. Best known for his memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, Wolff has also published award-winning fiction, mostly short stories, and in this lecture is discussing his 2003 novel, Old School, which was a finalist for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In his lecture, Wolff explores the balance and conflict b...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a discussion on late writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s legacy of pacifism and environmentalism. Our moderator is Theo Downes-Le Guin, Ursula’s son and literary executor. Theo is in conversation with Oregon-based writers Juhea Kim, author of the novel Beasts of a Little Land, a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Michelle Ruiz Keil, author most recently of the young adult novel Summer in the City of Roses, which was a finalist for the...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk by Russell Banks from 1999. Banks was the author twenty-one books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He was twice a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, first in 1985 for his seminal work of fiction Continental Drift, and then again in 1998 for Cloudsplitter. The New York Times lauded his “vivid portrayals of working-class Americans grappling with issues of poverty, race, and class” and placed him “among the first ranks of contemporary noveli...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we reach back to the year 2000 to highlight one of the best conversations about writing found in our archives: A special event with Amy Bloom and Michael Cunningham. Amy Bloom had just published a collection of stories entitled, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, and Cunningham had published one his most important and bestselling novels, The Hours, just two years earlier. The Hours went on to become a movie that received nine Academy Award nominatio...

This episode of The Archive Project features notable funny woman, Elaine May, in a talk from 1997. Elaine May may be one of the most important Broadway and Hollywood stars you’ve never heard of. In 2019, The New York Times wrote a long appreciation of her in which they referred to her ability to “fuse verbal and physical comedy” as possibly singular, and called her a “criminally underappreciated filmmaker.” May began her career on stage doing improvised comedy with Mike Nichols in the early 195...

In this episode, we feature an event from the 2020 Portland Book Festival, moderated by author and editor, John Freeman. The event title keyed off of Freeman’s anthology of the same name: Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World. Freeman sat down with authors Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Kawai Strong Washburn to talk about writing and the environment, and the conversation naturally turns to language and its relationship to history, connection, identity and t...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a conversation from Pickathon 2022. Literary Arts partnered with the Pickathon music festival to program on-stage author readings, and for a live recording of The Archive Project at the Lucky Barn stage. At The Archive Project live, Oregon poet laureate Anis Mojgani led a wide-ranging conversation with Portland-based multidisciplinary writers and artists Dao Strom, author most recently of the music and poetry project Traveler’s Ode/Instrument; a...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Scottish novelist Douglas Stuart, winner of the Booker Prize for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain. He speaks about his new novel, Young Mungo, with Portland-based author and Oregon Book Award winner Omar El Akkad. They discuss the desire and longing at the heart of the story of the love between two working class young men from different religious backgrounds in Glasgow. A highlight is Stuart’s description of how his previous career in the textile i...

This week’s episode of The Archive Project features Reza Aslan discussing his new book, An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville. Aslan was interviewed by Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor at the 2022 Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America, which took place on Saturday, November 5 in downtown Portland. Iran has been in the news this fall for a new wave of protests in reaction to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was a...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Leslie Marmon Silko in conversation with Molly Gloss from a special event in 2010, at Portland State University’s Lincoln Hall. While Leslie Marmon Silko had begun to publish poems and short stories in the 1960s, it was her iconic and ground-breaking novel, Ceremony, published in 1978, that established her as one our greatest living writers. Since then, Silko has gone on to publish widely and across genres with a distinct voice, deeply rooted i...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Abdulzarak Gurnah from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in September 2022. He joined us as part of the American launch of his most recent novel Afterlives. He had just won the Nobel prize for literature, after a long and distinguished career as a novelist in Britain, thought he was relatively unknown here in the United States. In his talk, Gurnah describes the rich layers of cultural influence that formed his native Zanzibar, now known as Tanza...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature two virtual events form the 2021 Portland Book Festival with very different subjects, that take place nearly 1000 years apart, but that both feature powerful female protagonists and heroes changing their worlds. In the first half of our show, we feature Julia Cooke, author of Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am. She is in conversation with Amy Wang from The Oregonian in an event broadcast live from Powell’s Books in Port...

Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America, returns to downtown Portland on Saturday, November 5, 2022 with a full day of all-ages fun, including author panels, readings, an extensive book fair, kids’ activities, music, food trucks, and more. More info and passes here. Tune in for this special podcast-only release of The Archive Project for 2022 Portland Book Festival. Acclaimed, award-winning cookbook author Naomi Duguid discusses her new book, The Miracle of Salt: Recipes and Techniq...

Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America, returns to downtown Portland on Saturday, November 5, 2022 with a full day of all-ages fun, including author panels, readings, an extensive book fair, kids’ activities, music, food trucks, and more. More info and passes here. Tune in for this special podcast-only release of The Archive Project for 2022 Portland Book Festival. This episode features a conversation on adaptation and the connection between music and the written word, between Oreg...