Episodes

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. Karen Eva Carr (Shifting Currents: A World History of Swimming) and Bonnie Tsui (Why We Swim) in conversation, moderat...

Portland Book Festival 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. As part of our celebration of National Poetry Month, this week on The Archive Project we feature excerpts from three Portland Book Festival virtual events, which took place in November 2021. We’ll hear three conversations: First, a conversation with ...

Portland Book Festival 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. In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a reading and conversation about the pandemic lockdowns and how people tried to get through them. They contain stories both sad and funny, strange and completely every day. We thought you’d want to he...

Portland Book Festival 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. In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a conversation from the 2021 Portland Book Festival. This live event was moderated onstage by Andrew Proctor, on the theme of “Aftermath,” bringing together the authors of two haunting novels which ex...

Portland Book Festival 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. In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature editor and poet John Freeman and three writers with roots in the Balkans on the theme CHANGE, through the specific lens of language and translation. This conversation took place as a part of the 2021 ...

Portland Book Festival 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. This episode of The Archive Project features highlights from the 2021 Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America. Listen to excerpts from longer discussions between novelist Brandon Taylor and Genevieve Hudson, cartoonist Aminder Dhaliwal 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...

In this episode, we launch a special collaboration with Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Throughout this season of The Archive Project, we will feature a series of conversations about OSF’s work, exploring storytelling in the intersections of playwriting, theatre production and performance, and literature. This episode features a conversation between Nataki Garrett, OSF artistic director, and Scarlett Kim, the associate artistic director of innovation and strategy. They discuss The Cymbeline Projec...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature the novelist Brit Bennett. Brit Bennett exploded onto the literary stage in 2016 with her novel, The Mothers. In her New York Times review, Mira Jacob praised the novel as a “ferociously moving debut.” Critics also noted Bennett’s talent for creating both propulsive, page-turning plots, and enduring, complex characters that stay with the reader long after the final page. Expectations were accordingly high for her second novel, and Bennett delive...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we celebrate the twentieth year of Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads program. Each year, the Library chooses one book that they hope everyone in Multnomah County will read and talk about. As part of the program, the Library and their partner organizations host events based on the themes of the book, and they distribute thousands of free copies to readers of all ages thanks to support from The Library Foundation. Literary Arts has been a proud part...

In this episode, we share a The Archive Project exclusive: a collaboration with Oregon Symphony, featuring their Open Music program. Open Music is a new concert series in which composers featured in the classical subscription season offer a window into their spirit and creative process through an evening of music and conversation at an intimate venue in Portland. In March, composer Missy Mazzoli joined the program. Time Out New York called Mazzoli “Brooklyn’s post-Millennial Mozart,” and she wa...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature the legendary writer, Stephen King, who appeared at the Newmark Theatre for a Literary Arts Special Event in 2006. King first published in 1967 and went on to write some of the most iconic pop culture classics of the last half century, many of which were made into Hollywood films, including The Shining, Misery, and The Green Mile. He wrote over seventy-five books of fiction and nonfiction, not to mention countless screenplays. His work is diffi...

This episode of The Archive Project is the second of three in this season’s series with Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Artistic director Nataki Garrett is back on the mic, this time in conversation with playwright Dominique Morisseau, whose new production Confederates will be on the OSF stage, directed by Garrett, in the fall of 2022. Confederates explores racial and gender bias in American through the parallel stories of two women living over a century apart: an enslaved Black woman turned Union ...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong from Portland Arts & Lectures in January 2022. Hong became nationally famous in the spring of 2020 for her essay collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, a book so searing and powerful it landed her on the cover of Time magazine’s 2021 issue featuring the 100 most influential people in the world. Minor Feelings is a collection of seven essays is both a deeply personal account of Hong becoming—and...

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 2021. Each year, Portland-area youth spend the year writing and competing with their peers, and each April about twenty student finalists compete for the title of Portland Slam Champ. Because of the pandemic and school closures last year, we had to re-invent the live event to be a virt...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month with a feast of a conversation about Chinese American cookbooks, cuisine, and the history of Chinatowns. The episode is entered on two great cookbooks released last year: Mooncakes and Milkbread: Sweet and Savory Recipes Inspired by Chinese Bakeries by Kristina Cho, and Mister Jiu’s In Chinatown: Recipes and Stories from the Birthplace of Chinese American Food by chef Brandon Jew and writer Ti...

We are closing out season 8 of The Archive Project with the fourth episode in our series with Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in which we have explored storytelling in the intersections of playwriting, theatre production, performance, and literature. This episode features playwright Mona Mansour and director Evren Odcikin discussing unseen, which had its West Coast premiere at OSF in summer 2022. unseen follows an American conflict photographer who wakes up at the site of a massacre in Syria. The ...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk and conversation with Daniel James Brown from 2021. Brown is probably best known for his international bestseller The Boys in the Boat, first published in 2013. It tells a narrative history of nine working-class Americans who rowed their way to gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. It’s a story of young men who persevere against immense challenges and long odds. Brown joined us for Portland Arts & Lectures to talk about his next book Faci...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Paul Theroux. Theroux is an iconic writer of over fifty books of fiction and nonfiction. Most of his work takes the form of travel writing–a genre he has helped define for the 20th and 21st centuries, as he traveled alone to some of the most remote parts of the world, writing about them with sensitivity, insight, wit, and wonder. He was a global citizen long before such a term existed. It was his 1975 travelogue The Great Railway Bazaar, which ...

This episode of The Archive Project is the third in our partnership with Oregon Shakespeare Festival. This week we’ll explore the work and legacy of August Wilson, centered on OSF’s upcoming production of his one-man play, How I Learned What I Learned. August Wilson was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American playwright. His work focuses on the joys and struggles of African Americans in the 20th century. He is perhaps most well-known for the ten-play American Century Cycle; each play focuses on Afric...

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...

In this episode, we share a The Archive Project exclusive: a collaboration with Oregon Symphony, featuring their Open Music program. Open Music is a new concert series in which composers featured in the classical subscription season offer a window into their spirit and creative process through an evening of music and conversation at an intimate venue in Portland. In March, composer Missy Mazzoli joined the program. Time Out New York called Mazzoli “Brooklyn’s post-Millennial Mozart,” and she wa...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month with a feast of a conversation about Chinese American cookbooks, cuisine, and the history of Chinatowns. The episode is entered on two great cookbooks released last year: Mooncakes and Milkbread: Sweet and Savory Recipes Inspired by Chinese Bakeries by Kristina Cho, and Mister Jiu’s In Chinatown: Recipes and Stories from the Birthplace of Chinese American Food by chef Brandon Jew and writer Ti...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature the novelist, Richard Powers. Powers is a writer whose work is difficult to define. It is literary fiction based in a kind of realism, but with elements of science fiction, fantasy, and highly original structural elements that keep readers a little off balance. Powers won the National Book Award in 2006 for The Echo Maker. He is perhaps best known for his magisterial, Pulitzer Prize-winning and internationally best-selling 2019 novel, The Overs...