The Archive Project

Latest Episodes:

Edwidge Danticat, 2022 May 15, 2023

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk from Edwidge Danticat from Portland Arts & Lectures on May 12, 2022.

Danticat became nationally recognized with her debut novel published in 1994 Breath, Eyes, Memory which was an Oprah Book Club selection and national bestseller. Since then, she has gone on to publish more than a dozen books in multiple genres—novels, short fiction, memoir, literary criticism, young adult, and children’s books—many which were bestsellers including the Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, and Claire of the Sea of Light.

In her talk, Danticat gives an intimate picture of her life, from her childhood in Haiti to her immigration as a young adult to Brooklyn. The talk is structured around her mother’s diagnosis and treatment of cancer. It explores Danticat’s life growing up in an extended family in two countries and the beauty and struggles this life brought her. She offers us a portrait of Haitian culture that reveals it beauty, joy and strength rather than centering the tragedies that nation has suffered as is so often the case. In all, this an inspirational talk about intergenerational and international families, migration, and holding multiple cultures within oneself. It gives a deeper understanding of Danticat as a writer, and sheds important light on a culture often misunderstood here in the United States.

Find your copy Danticat’s books through

the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including The Art of Death, a National Book Critics Circle finalist; Claire of the Sea Light, a New York Times Notable Book; Brother, I’m Dying, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist; The Dew Breaker, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the inaugural Story Prize; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah’s Book Club selection; and Krik? Krak!, also a National Book Award finalist. A 2018 Neustadt International Prize for Literature winner and the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” grant, she has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere.

Storytelling for Change: Kiese Laymon & Imbolo Mbue May 08, 2023

Show notes

On this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a conversation between Kiese Laymon and Imbolo Mbue on storytelling, environmental racism, and activism, recorded at the 2023 AWP Conference in Seattle, Washington.

Set in a fictional African village being polluted by an oil company, Imbolo Mbue’s latest novel, How Beautiful We Were, confronts environmental devastation, corporate colonialism and activism. Kiese Laymon, author of the memoir Heavy, has multigenerational roots in Mississippi have led him to consider climate justice and the ways that extractive agriculture, corporate interests, and the legacy of slavery impact communities of color in the US.

Find your copy Kiese and Imbolo’s books through

the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the Libby Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. Laymon is the author of Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times critics. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. Laymon is at work on the books, Good God, and City Summer, Country Summer, and a number of other film and television projects. He is the founder of “The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative,” a program based out of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, aimed at aiding young people in Jackson get more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing on their on their own terms, in their own communities. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.

Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. The novel has been adapted into an opera and a stage play, and optioned for a miniseries. Her second novel, How Beautiful We Were, about a fictional African village’s fight against an against American oil company, was named by the New York Times as “One of the 10 Best Books” of 2021. Her works have been translated into eighteen languages and published in dozens of countries. A native of Limbe, Cameroon, and a graduate of Rutgers and Columbia Universities, Mbue lives in New York.

Ada Limón May 01, 2023

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Ada Limón from the closing night of the 2022-23 Portland Arts & Lectures series.

Limón is the author of six books of poetry and a finalist for numerous prizes for her work. In 2022, Limon published a collection of new poems The Hurting Kind and was also named the 24^th Poet Laureate of the United States, at the age of 46. Of this recognition Limón said, “Again and again, I have been witness to poetry’s immense power to reconnect us to the world, to allow us to heal, to love, to grieve, to remind us of the full spectrum of human emotion… I am humbled by this opportunity to work in the service of poetry and to amplify poetry’s ability to restore our humanity and our relationship to the world around us.”

In her talk, Limón takes us back to her lonely childhood in Sonoma, California where she first connects with nature, begins to discover the power of what she calls “paying attention,” and first falls in love with language. Throughout her talk, and throughout her work, Limón calls on us to slow down and really look at the world, and our lives, as a way to make sense of them. To actually take a moment to breathe. She demonstrates over and over again how poetry, with its attention to details, its structure of line breaks, calls the world’s details into greater focus, providing as she says, no answers but that rather provides an “unclaimed space for human fullness.” In making her case for poetry, Limón is unpretentious, accessible, funny, dark, insightful and ironic.

“Read poetry, and you will feel as if the doors of the world are opening.”

Find your copy Limón’s books through

the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was the host of the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes and teaches remotely. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is out now from Milkweed Editions. She is the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States.

Portland Youth Philharmonic & In Mulieribus: Because I Will Not Despair Apr 24, 2023

Show notes

On this episode of The Archive Project, we have a conversation recorded exclusively for our show. We are featuring Portland Youth Philharmonic, the nation’s oldest youth orchestra, and we’ve brought together a conductor, a composer, a poet, and a vocalist to discuss their cross-disciplinary collaboration on a poetry-inspired piece titled Because I Will Not Despair.

The piece is based on the poetry of Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient and Oregon Book Award finalist Alicia Jo Rabins. Composer Jessica Meyer has adapted Rabins’s poetry to music, and vocalist Anna Song and the In Mulieribus vocal choir will join Portland Youth Philharmonic’s chamber orchestra, conducted by David Hattner to perform this new piece in Portland on May 5, 2023.

It’s especially interesting to hear these four collaborators–Alicia, Jessica, Anna, and David–discuss work that is ongoing, as the piece is still being shaped. We also hear how different it is for a composer or a conductor to put their work into the world, versus a poet. Rabins phrases it well, saying: “As artists, we are part of one massive human conversation, and we put as much as we can into the piece or the performance, and the people interacting with it are what make that a complete process, whether that’s the audience or the reader or another artist you’re collaborating with.”

Most music requires collaboration and interpretation, and hearing how inspiring it is for the musical artists on this piece to work with, in their words, a “living” poet and poetry and text makes this conversation a pleasurable listen.

Find Alicia Jo Rabins’ poetry through

the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

David Hattner is the Musical Director of the highly acclaimed Portland Youth Philharmonic (Oregon), the nation’s oldest youth orchestra. The fifth music director in its distinguished 93-year history, he is the first to be born in the United States. Known for his encyclopedic knowledge of American repertoire, Hattner’s programming is relevant, thoughtful, and “especially attractive.” (The Chicago Tribune). Hattner received rave reviews following his debut with PYP in November 2008: “The Portland Youth Philharmonic roared like a Maserati on Saturday in its first concert under music director David Hattner. The route was challenging, the execution distinguished and the ride delightful,” wrote David Stabler for The Oregonian.

With playing that is “fierce and lyrical” and works that are “other-worldly” (The Strad) and “evocative” (New York Times), Jessica Meyer is an award-winning composer and violist whose passionate musicianship radiates accessibility and emotional clarity. Recent premieres include works for the St. Lawrence String Quartet as the composer in residence at Spoleto Festival USA, musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra, Bangor Symphony as the winner of the 2nd Annual Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Composer’s Award, and the Argus Quartet as a winner of Chamber Music America’s Commissioning Program Award. Her first Symphonic Band piece recently had its NY premiere in Carnegie Hall by the President’s Own Marine Band, and her orchestral works have been performed by the Phoenix, North Carolina, Charlotte, and Vermont Symphonies, and all around the country as part of Carnegie Hall’s nationwide Link Up Program. This season brings the premiere of “GAEA”, a concerto for herself and orchestra, as well as works for the Dorian Wind Quintet and Hub New Music.

Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician, performer and feminist Jewish educator. She is the author of two books of poetry, Divinity School and Fruit Geode, and a recent collection of personal essays. Rabins is the creator and performer of Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about women in Torah, as well as the independent feature film, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. She lives in Portland and was a 2021 Literary Arts Fellow in poetry.

Anna Song is the Director of Choral Activities at Willamette University and directs Chamber Choir and Voce, in addition to teaching courses in musicianship and aural skills. She is the co-founding artistic director of In Mulieribus, a professional women’s vocal ensemble that specializes in works written before 1750 and new music for women’s voices. Under her direction, the ensemble has presented a highly acclaimed annual concert series in Portland since 2007, released recordings that have garnered praise from the American Record Guide and Early Music America, and is regularly broadcast on regionally and nationally syndicated Classical music radio programs.

Charles Simic (Rebroadcast) Apr 17, 2023

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Charles Simic from a Poetry Downtown event in 2007. Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1938, and some of his earliest memories are of German bombs falling on the city. Later the Russian army would arrive. In 1954, Simic was brought to the United States by his family and, at the age fifteen, he began to learn English.

It’s remarkable that nearly half a century later, Simic would be named Poet Laureate of the United States, the same year of this recording. Over the course of his career, Simic has won nearly every prize for poetry, including the Pulitzer, and has published essays, edited anthologies and translated poetry from French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian.

In this recording, Simic reads from work that spans his career, from his violent and also tender childhood, to his early life in Chicago and New York, and then later about New Hampshire where he taught for decades. One reviewer’s comments seem to sum up the experience of reading and hearing his work: “There are few poets writing in America today who share his lavish appetite for the bizarre, his inexhaustible repertoire of indelible characters and gestures… Simic is perhaps our most disquieting muse.”

And in the contrasts among his poems, as he leapfrogs around the decades, a strange resonance can be found with our world today, both here in the US and abroad, at this very strange and particular moment.

Charles Simic died on January 9, 2023 at the age of 84.

Find your copy Simic’s books through

the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Charles Simic, poet, essayist, and translator, was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. Since 1967, he published twenty books of his own poetry, in addition to a memoir; the essay collection The Life of Images; and numerous books of translations for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. Simic was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and in 2007 was chosen as poet laureate of the United States. He was emeritus professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught since 1973, and was distinguished visiting writer at New York University. Simic passed away in January 2023 at the age of 84.

Paulann Petersen‘s collections of poetry include The Wild Awake (2002), Blood-Silk (2004), A Bride of Narrow Escape (2005), Kindle (2008), and The Voluptuary (2010). Her work has appeared widely in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Calyx, Poetry Northwest, and Poetry. A former Wallace Stegner fellow and recipient of two Carolyn Kizer Awards, Petersen has also received the Stewart Holbrook Award for Outstanding Contributions to Oregon’s Literary Life. She is on the board of the Friends of William Stafford, and helps organize events and celebrations of the poet across the country. In 2010, she was elected the state of Oregon’s sixth Poet Laureate.

Verselandia! 2022 Apr 10, 2023

Show notes

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 April, about twenty student finalists compete for the title of city-wide Portland slam champ.

What is important about this episode is that these young poets are thrilling to hear. They will give you the chills, make you laugh, and perhaps bring tears to your eyes. And what’s more, 2022 was the first time we’d been able to present the competition live since 2019, and it was an especially emotional evening. So, at this moment when it feels our society is cleaved with deep divisions—race, geography, economics and age—it is so important to take the time to really listen to young voices, who are, after all the future. These young writers come from all walks of life in Portland, and have incredible stories to tell.

The 2023 Verselandia! competition returns to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Thursday, April 27 at 7:00 p.m. For more information and tickets visit our website literary-arts.org.

Content note: Some of these poems contain explicit language and mature content, which may not be suitable for all audiences.

Anis Mojgani is Oregon’s current Poet Laureate and the author of five books of poetry. His work has appeared on HBO, NPR, and in journals Bat City Review, Rattle, Buzzfeed Reader, Thrush, and Forklift Ohio, amongst others. A two time National Poetry Slam Champion and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, Anis has done commissioned work for the Getty Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Portland Timbers, and has been awarded artist residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, AIR Serenbe, and the Bloedel Nature Reserve. Originally from New Orleans, Anis currently lives in Portland, OR, where he serves on the Board of Directors for Literary Arts. His latest collection is In the Pockets of Small Gods.

Hanif Abdurraqib, Kaveh Akbar, & Leslie Jamison with Alano Club of Portland Apr 03, 2023

Show notes

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 development and community engagement Kasey Anderson emceed an evening with writers Leslie Jamison, Kaveh Akbar, and Hanif Abdurraqib, who shared recent and brand-new work with the audience, a multi-genre mix of prose and poetry. As they share their own work, talk about each other’s work and their relationship to Alano Club, it’s clear from the fact that they felt comfortable enough to share brand-new writing that these three writers deeply admire and respect each other.

Many of our episodes feature writers in conversation, but this week we have a trio of readings for you. First, we’ll hear from Kasey Anderson, of the Alano Club, and our first writer of the evening is Leslie Jamison, award-winning essayist and author of The Empathy Exams, reads from her memoir The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, as well a new work-in-progress.

Then Kaveh Akbar reads from his most recent book of poetry, Pilgrim Bell, and a novel-in-progress.

We also hear from poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib, author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America, his most recent poetry collection is A Fortune for Your Disaster. Abdurraqib reads from his poetry and a nonfiction project to close out the event.

A quick note: This conversation touches on mature themes of subsctance abuse and recovery that may not be suitable for all listeners.

Find your copy of Hanif, Kaveh, and Leslie’s books through

the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His most recent book, A Little Devil in America, was the winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burns Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Award. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much , was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize and nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us was named a book of the year by NPR, Esquire, BuzzFeed, O: The Oprah Magazine, Pitchfork, Chicago Tribune, among others. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist, and longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune for Your Disaster, won the Lenore Marshall Prize. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Kaveh Akbar is the author of Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, and has received honors such as a Levis Reading Prize and multiple Pushcart Prizes. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in low-residency programs at Warren Wilson and Randolph Colleges.

Leslie Jamison is the author of The Empathy Exams. Her essays have appeared in the Believer, Harper’s, Oxford American, A Public Space, Tin House, and The Best American Essays. She is a regular columnist for the New York Times Book Review and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Jane Smiley, 1991 Mar 27, 2023

Show notes

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 novel. Just six months after this talk, Smiley would published her breakout novel A Thousand Acres and would win the 1992 Pulitzer Prize which catapulted her to literary fame.

The title of the talk is, provocatively, “Can Mother’s Think?” The irony here, of course, is that Smiley is both a brilliant artist and a mother. But as a young writer she could not find literature that rendered the experience of motherhood with the depth, nuance, and power she felt it deserved. She discusses the paternal nature of the books that dominate the so-called canon, the relationship of feminism to motherhood, and challenges the notion of unconditional love, a notion that she believes contributed to the dearth of complex mothers in literature. She also talks about a crop of new writers emerging at the time who were changing the very definition of literature by writing about motherhood in new and profound ways.

Find your copy of Jane Smiley’s books through

the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and the Last Hundred Years Trilogy: Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age. She is the author as well of several works of nonfiction and books for young adults. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has also received the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. She lives in Northern California.

Patrick Radden Keefe Mar 20, 2023

Show notes

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 we’re all unreliable narrators of our own lives, and writes about his subjects with a keen sense of understanding.”

He is also the author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Mystery in Northern Ireland, as well as Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.

In this talk, Keefe speaks to his writing process of what his editor termed “investigative melodrama.” He is drawn in by fascinating real-life characters like Arthur Sackler of Empire of Pain and Dolours Price of Say Nothing as way to explore, as he says, “the arbitrary lines we draw between what’s legal and illegal, what society sanctions and celebrates and what it condemns and punishes.”

We’re including the full event intro and Q&A in this extended version of this episode, since many subscribers couldn’t make it to the concert hall due to the extraordinary weather–Portland experienced an unexpected and historic, record-setting snowstorm the evening of the event.

As a special feature, we start the episode with a short reading from Oregon-based writer, Stephan Nance. Nance was awarded the Edna L. Holmes Fellowship in Young Readers from Literary Arts in 2023. Their reading is a selection from their Young Adult novel-in-progress, A Bird in the Heart, which they describe as a “very birdy young adult novel set in Eastern Oregon”.

Find your copy of Patrick Radden Keefe’s books through

the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the decade by Entertainment Weekly. His previous books are The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change.

Selma Blair, in conversation with Esmé Weijun Wang Mar 13, 2023

Show notes

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 Blair was in her forties. She has since emerged as an advocate for disability awareness and inclusion. Blair told Variety that, after her diagnosis, “I started thinking more about the power of storytelling and why representation in media matters. If I had seen and heard from people who were like me, maybe I wouldn’t have felt so alone. Perhaps if I’d had more diverse representation to look up to, I would have learned about my diagnosis earlier on.”

Selma and Esmé talk about the importance and comfort of seeing other people’s stories, from social media to books and movies. As Selma says, “It’s the little stories that are actually the big stories that shape your life.” In telling her own story in her book, Mean Baby, Selma also reaches a new self-understanding through the process of writing and sharing. It’s a wonderful conversation, full of insight, honesty, and humor. A note that you’ll hear Wang and Blair reference Scout, who is Blair’s service dog, who joined them on stage.

Selma Blair, on growing up: “I was always by myself–really a loner–and books were my friends.”

Find your copy of Saunders and Walter’s books through

the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Selma Blair is an actress best known for her roles in Legally Blonde, Cruel Intentions, The Sweetest Thing, and Hellboy. Her memoir, released in 2022, is Mean Baby. Blair was named a Time Person of the Year in 2017 as one of their Silence Breakers, and she was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for her narration of The Diary of Anne Frank. She is the subject of the documentary Introducing, Selma Blair, which reveals Blair’s intimate and raw journey with multiple sclerosis. Blair lives with her son in Los Angeles.

Esmé Weijun Wang is a novelist and essayist. She is the author of the New York Times-bestselling essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019), and a debut novel, The Border of Paradise. She was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” on its decennial list in 2017 and won the Whiting Award for nonfiction in 2018. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she is the founder of The Unexpected Shape™ Writing Academy for ambitious writers living with limitations.