The Archive Project

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Tales of Two Planets: Aimee Nezhukumatathil & Kawai Strong Washburn (Rebroadcast) Dec 26, 2022

Show notes

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 the natural world. How and why do we write about a natural world in crisis? What are the ethics of doing so? What lesson can we draw on from biodiversity for our own cultures?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an acclaimed poet and author of the illustrated essay collection World of Wonders. It’s a book about the natural world and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us. Kawai Strong Washburn’s debut novel Sharks in the Time of Saviors is about the supernatural events that force a family to reckon with the meaning of heritage and the cost of survival.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author World of Wonders, an illustrated essay collection, as well as of four books of poetry, most recently, Oceanic, winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Other awards for her writing include fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Mississippi Arts Council, and MacDowell. Her writing appears in Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, ESPN, and Tin House. She serves as poetry faculty for the Writing Workshops in Greece and is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.

Kawai Strong Washburn was born and raised on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. His work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other outlets. He was a 2015 Tin House Summer Scholar and 2015 Bread Loaf work-study scholar. Today, he lives with his wife and daughters in Minneapolis. Sharks in the Time of Saviors is his first novel.

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary annual published by Grove Press, and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. He has written several books of nonfiction including, How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as three collections of poems, Maps , The Park, and the forthcoming Wind, Trees. Between 2014 and 2020, he edited a series of anthologies on inequality, concluding with Tales of Two Planets, which focuses on the climate crisis and global inequality. His latest books are The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story and, with Tracy K. Smith, There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love, in which poets, novelists and essayists create a space to respond to catastrophes and racialized violence of 2020. Freeman’s work has been translated into more than 20 languages and appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Zyzzyva. He lives in London.

Pickathon 2022: Jon Raymond & Dao Strom, with Anis Mojgani Dec 19, 2022

Show notes

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; and Jon Raymond, author of the recent novel Denial and screenwriter of First Cow and many more projects.

The trio talks about what their processes are like as artists with multiple and often hybrid modes of creativity, how they started as artists and how their genres have changed over the years as they move between music, visual art, filmmaking, fiction, poetry, written versus spoken literary work, and more. It’s interesting to hear how they think about the different pros and cons, as an artist, of more solitary versus collaborative work depending on the kind of art they are making. It’s a wonderfully curious, inquisitive, and open conversation about art and art-making, and we’re grateful to our friends at Pickathon for providing a platform for literary arts at this year’s festival.

Find your copy of Jon, Dao, and Anis’s books through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Jon Raymond is the author of the novels The Half-Life, Rain Dragon, and Freebird, and the story collection Livability, winner of the Oregon Book Award. He has collaborated on six films with the director Kelly Reichardt, including Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves, First Cow, and the forthcoming Showing Up, numerous of which have been based on his fiction. He also received an Emmy Award nomination for his screenwriting on the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce directed by Todd Haynes and starring Kate Winslet. He was the editor of Plazm Magazine, associate and contributing editor at Tin House magazine, and a member of the Board of Directors at Literary Arts. His writing has appeared in Zoetrope, Playboy, Tin House, The Village Voice, Artforum, Bookforum, and other places. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. Using practices of polyvocality, fragmentation, and (re)assemblage, Strom writes arrangements of poetry, music, image, song and sound, to be experienced as performance, installation, multimedia, recordings, and inside the spaces of a book. Strom is the author of a bilingual poetry/art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, (Hanoi: AJAR, 2018), a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, with song-cycle, East/West, and two books of fiction. She is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital Award and a 2020 Oregon Literary Arts Career Fellowship. She has received support from RACC, Precipice Fund, Oregon Arts Commission, NEA, and others.

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.

Douglas Stuart, in conversation with Omar El Akkad Dec 12, 2022

Show notes

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 industry relates to his work as a writer.

The conversation between Douglas Stuart and Omar El Akkad was recorded in front of a live audience at Powell’s City of Books in Portland on May 5th, 2022. For a complete lineup of Powell’s upcoming in-person and virtual author event programming, please visit them at powells.com/events.

We’ll join Douglas and Omar at the beginning of the event, with a moving introduction from Powell’s employee Nick Yandell.

Douglas Stuart is a Scottish-American author. His New York Times-bestselling debut novel Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker Prize and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was the winner of two British Book Awards, including Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, Kirkus Prize, as well as several other literary awards. Stuart’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker and Literary Hub.

Omar El Akkad is an author and a journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work earned Canada’s National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.

Reza Aslan: An American Martyr in Persia Dec 05, 2022

Show notes

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 arrested by the morality police for not wearing her hijab “properly” and died while in police custody. The protests have been remarkably widespread, and the government response severe. Aslan asserts this current movement is a fourth Iranian revolution, after 1979, 1953, and the 1906 constitutional revolution his book focuses on.

In An American Martyr in Persia, Aslan describes the events of that 1906 revolution through the story of Howard Baskerville, the son of a preacher and a student of Woodrow Wilson, who found himself in Tabriz, Iran in 1907, working as a Presbyterian minister and teacher. What happened next is well-known to Iranians but almost totally unknown to Americans.

“People ask me, ‘What can we do to help the people of Iran?’ Well, when you ask the people of Iran, ‘What do you need?’ they say, ‘Pay attention, that’s what we need.’ We have the ability to say, ‘We hear you. We’re paying attention. We’re going to shine a light on this for as long as it takes.’ That is far, far more powerful and valuable than you think it is.”

Find your copy of An American Martyr in Persia through the Literary Arts page on Bookshop.org.

Reza Aslan is an acclaimed writer and scholar of religions. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Zealot, No God but God, and editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Andrew Proctor has been the director of Literary Arts since 2009. Born and raised in Canada, Proctor, earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Music at Concordia University in Montreal, and later worked in London for the Cultural Attaché to the Canadian High Commission. In the UK, he also earned an MA in English Literature at the University of East Anglia under the supervision of England’s then Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. From 2000-2004 Proctor worked as an editor for HarperCollins in New York City and then as the Membership and Operations Director of the PEN American Center, a global literary and human rights organization focused on the welfare of writers and editors. In total, Proctor has worked in the literary world for over twenty years in the governmental, for profit and nonprofit sectors.

Leslie Marmon Silko & Molly Gloss Nov 21, 2022

Show notes

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 in the landscapes and culture of the American Southwest.

She joined us in 2010 as part of the launch of her first book of nonfiction, The Turquoise Ledge, which was a highly anticipated release in part because it was her first book in more than a decade. The Turquoise Ledge has been called a “highly original self-portrait” and is written in fragments that blends nature writing, memoir, history, parables and legends. When asked by an interviewer about the book’s fluid structure and movement between memory and reality, Silko said, “Linear time is itself a fiction which I find tedious and simpleminded.” And as she says in this conversation, linear time can also be very dangerous.

Silko is in conversation with writer Molly Gloss, a celebrated writer of many novels, including the acclaimed The Hearts of Horses, and the winner many prestigious prizes including the Oregon Book Award.

Leslie Marmon Silko was born in New Mexico in 1948 to a family whose ancestry includes Mexican, Laguna Indian, and European forebears. She is the author of ten books of fiction, poetry, and memoir, including Ceremony, Storyteller, Almanac of the Dead, Gardens in the Dunes, and The Turquoise Ledge. Considered by many as one of the most important contemporary Native American writers, Silko’s honors include a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” fellowship, the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for significant contribution to American literature, and the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime achievement by a writer whose work focuses on the American West. She has been named a Living Cultural Treasure by the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities Council, and has also received the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award.

Molly Gloss is a fourth-generation Oregonian who now lives in Portland on the west side of the Tualatin Hills. She is the author of five novels: The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, Wild Life, The Hearts of Horses, and Falling from Horses, and one collection of stories, Unforseen. Her awards include the Oregon Book Award, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the PEN West Fiction Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and a Whiting Writers Award; and her short story, “Lambing Season” was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Her work often concerns the landscape, literature, mythology, and life of the American West.

Abdulrazak Gurnah Nov 14, 2022

Show notes

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 Tanzania, as an international trading hub through the centuries, and his formative decision to move to England as a young man, a decision that would shape his life and his writing.

Afterlives is a novel set in on the west coast of Africa during World War I that centers the lives of Africans, not their European colonizers, and their struggles to survive the war and then make sense of their lives in its immediate aftermath.

Encountering the work of a writer for the first time can be thrilling. For most readers here in the United States, the Nobel Prize brought to light not only a writer few of us knew, but one that has been writing profound novels about colonialism and migration for decades. Gurnah’s work is both beautiful and important, giving important and fresh perspective on the recent past, and today.

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in Zanzibar in 1948 and teaches at the University of Kent. He is the author of six novels, including Paradise, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, and By the Sea, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.

Come Fly the World & Matrix (Rebroadcast) Nov 07, 2022

Show notes

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 Portland. The evening of events was themed “Hidden Worlds,” and in Cooke’s book she takes us behind the scenes of one of the most important global enterprises of its day: Pan Am, the first modern-day international airline. Between 1966 and 1975, the airline and the women who staffed their flights played a crucial role in international affairs–especially in America’s role in Vietnam–far beyond what is commonly understood.

In the second half of our show, we feature Lauren Groff in an interview with Literary Arts’ Andrew Proctor. Groff is the author of six books of fiction. She rose to national recognition with her novel Fates and Furies, published in 2015. Groff joined us from Florida for this virtual event, broadcast from Annie Bloom’s Books in Portland. Her new book Matrix had been just been published, so Groff and Proctor talked about writing a novel that was a significant departure from her previous work—part historical fiction and part magic realism–and what motivated her to create a story entirely populated by female characters with a plot that could perhaps be best described as feminist revisionist history.

Julia Cooke‘s journalism has been published in Time, Smithsonian, and Condé Nast Traveler. She is the author of The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba, and the daughter of a former Pan Am executive. Her new book is Come Fly the World: The Jet Age Story of the Women of Pan Am.

Lauren Groff is the New York Times bestselling author of four novels and two short story collections. Her 2021 novel Matrix, which Esquire described as “Incandescent… a radiant work of imagination and accomplishment,” was a National Book Award finalist and was selected by President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year. Her works have won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, and France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne. Groff is a three-time finalist for the National Book Award and twice for the Kirkus Prize, and has been shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. She lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband and two sons.

Amy Wang covers Oregon’s literary scene and writes a books newsletter for The Oregonian, where she is a staff editor. She previously was on the editing staff of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Amy has a degree in journalism from Columbia University.

TAP@PBF: Naomi Duguid, The Miracle of Salt Nov 03, 2022

Show notes

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 Techniques to Preserve, Ferment, and Transform Your Food with Liz Crain (Dumplings Equal Love). The Miracle of Salt is —a deep dive into the miracle of salt and its essential role in preserving, fermenting, and transforming food. Naomi and Liz chat about age-old techniques, favorite recipes, and translating traditional methods for modern kitchens.

Naomi Duguid is a writer, photographer, traveler, and home cook. Her new book is The Miracle of Salt, and her recent cookbook Taste of Persia is the winner of a James Beard Award, an IACP Cookbook Award, and a Taste Canada Award. Her book Burma: Rivers of Flavor is also an IACP Cookbook Award and Taste Canada Award winner. Her six previous award-winning titles, co-authored with Jeffrey Alford, include two now-classic cookbooks that won the James Beard Award for Cookbook of the Year: Flatbreads & Flavors: A Baker’s Atlas and Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey Through Southeast Asia. Naomi leads small-group food-immersive trips to the Republic of Georgia and elsewhere. She is a Trustee of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, and is a frequent guest speaker and presenter at food conferences, particularly those focused on grains. She lives in Toronto.

Liz Crain is the author of Food Lover’s Guide to Portland, and coauthor of the cookbooks Toro Bravo and Hello! My Name Is Tasty, as well as Grow Your Own: Understanding, Cultivating, and Enjoying Cannabis. Her latest is the cookbook Dumplings Equal Love. She is a longtime writer on Pacific Northwest food and drink, and her writing has appeared in Lucky Peach, Food & Wine, the Sun magazine, the Progressive, and the Guardian. She is also a seasoned copywriter, fiction writer, as well as co-organizer of the annual Portland Fermentation Festival.

TAP@PBF: Karen Russell & Oregon Symphony Nov 02, 2022

Show notes

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 Oregon Symphony creative chair Gabriel Kahane and author Karen Russell (Sleep Donation).

Karen Russell won the 2012 and the 2018 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia! (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has also written Orange World and, most recently, Sleep Donation. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, the “5 under 35” prize from the National Book Foundation, the NYPL Young Lions Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and is a former fellow of the Cullman Center and the American Academy in Berlin. She currently holds the Endowed Chair at Texas State University’s MFA program, and lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and son.

A singer-songwriter, pianist, and composer, Gabriel Kahane works at the blurred edges of journalism, ethnography, storytelling, and music. He is currently the Creative Chair of the Oregon Symphony, which commissioned his 2018 oratorio, emergency shelter intake form. Over the last decade, Gabriel has worked in an array of diverse musical spaces. Memorable projects have included tours with Andrew Bird and Punch Brothers; recordings with Sufjan Stevens, Phoebe Bridgers, and Blake Mills; and an arrangement of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” written for Paul Simon’s Farewell Tour in 2018. As a composer, he has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and Carnegie Hall. Gabriel is also a regular guest on American Public Media’s Live From Here with Chris Thile.

TAP@PBF: Keep Swimming Nov 01, 2022

Show notes

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, moderated by OPB’s Paul Marshall.

Karen Eva Carr is Associate Professor (Emerita) in the Department of History at Portland State University, and is the author of Vandals to Visigoths: Rural Settlement Patterns in Early Medieval Spain (2002).

Bonnie Tsui lives, swims, and surfs in the Bay Area. A longtime contributor to the New York Times and California Sunday Magazine, she has been the recipient of the Jane Rainie Opel Young Alumna Award from Harvard University, the Lowell Thomas Gold Award, and a National Press Foundation Fellowship. Her last book, American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods, won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and Best of 2009 Notable Bay Area Books selection.

A native Oregonian and a lifelong resident of Portland, Paul Marshall was first introduced to OPB by watching PBS Kids and “PBS Newshour” as a youth. Prior to OPB, he worked as a sportswriter covering sports in the Atlanta University Consortium. He also worked as a sportscaster, show host and producer for KWVA Eugene 88.1 FM’s Sports Department. In addition to his work in radio, Paul writes as a freelance journalist, covering events like the Portland Pro-Am Basketball League and profiling the Scarlett Brothers. His work has been published in the Portland Observer and the Catholic Sentinel. He’s also worked as a PA announcer for Portland Community College.

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Find your copy of Jon, Dao, and Anis’s books through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Find your copy of An American Martyr in Persia through the Literary Arts page on Bookshop.org.

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.

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.

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.

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