The Archive Project

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Three Poets from Portland Book Festival 2021 (rebroadcast) Oct 31, 2022

Show notes

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 Christopher Rose and Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations, which Oprah.com called “a lionhearted odyssey through the self,” in which the poet “offers us the words to create our own destinies.” Then poet and critic David Biespiel interviews Atsuro Riley, author of Heard Hoard, about his inventive, lyrical new collection told in a chorus of voices calling back to his birthplace in the South Carolina low-country. And finally, Devon Walker-Figueroa, author of Philomath, which contemplates, beauty, nature, and the landscape of the eponymous town in Oregon, dives deep into language, with poet Jennifer Perrine.

The three poets joined us remotely, beaming in from Iowa, San Francisco, and Brooklyn, and the interviewers were live from Literary Arts and Powell’s Bookstore as part of an evening of literary programming.

David Biespiel is a contributing writer at the New Republic, The New Yorker, Poetry, Politico, The Rumpus, and Slate. He is the author of six collections of poetry, four books of nonfiction, and is the editor of two anthologies. His most recent books include the memoirs, A Place of Exodus and The Education of a Young Poet, which was selected a Best Books for Writers by Poets & Writers, and a book of poems, Republic Cafe. Recipient of two Oregon Book Awards, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and Lannan, National Endowment for the Arts, and Stegner fellowships, he has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian Award. He is Poet-in-Residence at Oregon State University where he teaches in the graduate Creative Writing Program and founder of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters.

Donika Kelly is the author of Bestiary, winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry, and the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her most recent collection is The Renunciations. She teaches at the University of Iowa.

Jennifer Perrine is the author of four award-winning books of poetry: Again, The Body Is No Machine, In the Human Zoo, and No Confession, No Mass. Their recent poems, stories, and essays appear in New Letters, The Seventh Wave Magazine, JuxtaProse, The Rumpus, Buckman Journal, and The Gay & Lesbian Review. Perrine lives in Portland, Oregon, where they co-host the Incite: Queer Writers Read series, teach creative writing to youth and adults, and serve as a diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) consultant.

Atsuro Riley is the author of Heard-Hoard (University of Chicago Press, 2021), winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Romey’s Order (University of Chicago Press, 2010), winner of the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, The Believer Poetry Award, and the Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress. His work has been honored with the Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, and the Wood Prize given by POETRY magazine. Brought up in the South Carolina lowcountry, Riley lives in San Francisco.

Christopher Rose is originally from Seattle, Washington, and he teaches poetry, African American Literature, and Science Fiction at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon. His poems have appeared in Fjords Review: Black American Edition, The Pariahs Anthology, Yellow Chair Review, TAYO Literary Magazine, The Hawaii Review, and others. He is a NEH Summer Institute Scholar and a Cave Canem Fellow.

Devon Walker-Figueroa is the author of Philomath (Milkweed Editions, 2021), selected for the National Poetry Series by Sally Keith and of the chapbook, So Lame (Berfrois, 2019). A graduate of Bennington College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the current Jill Davis Fellow in fiction at NYU, her work has appeared in the The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.

Gary Shteyngart (Rebroadcast) Oct 24, 2022

Show notes

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 hear them as we all begin to reckon with this strange and challenging time.

First up is Katherine D. Morgan, who reads her short essay, Wish You Were Here, at the Portland Art Museum as part of the 2020 Portland Book Festival. Then we hear from the hilarious novelist and essayist Gary Shteyngart, in conversation with Portland-based writer Jon Raymond, from the 2021 Portland Book Festival.

Note: Parts of this conversation touch on mature themes that may not be suitable for all listeners.

Katherine D. Morgan is the author of the debut chapbook No Self-Respecting Woman (Dorsa Brevia, ‘19). Her essay about the presidential election of Donald Trump will be featured in the upcoming anthology Fury: Women’s Lived Experience During the Trump Era, published by Pact Press in May 2020. Katherine’s work has appeared or is forthcoming at Huffington Post, The Rumpus, Portland Mercury, HelloGiggles, Pass/Fail, Ravishly, JMWW, and The Establishment. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where you can find her snuggling with her cat Ramona, and crying during the series finale of Frasier.

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. His novel Super Sad True Love Story won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and became one of the most iconic novels of the decade. His memoir, Little Failure, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a New York Times bestseller.His most recent novel is Lake Success. His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in thirty countries. His most recent book is Our Country Friends.

Jon Raymond is the author of three novels, Rain Dragon, The Half-Life, and Freebird, and the short-story collection Livability. His work has appeared in Tin House, the Village Voice, Bookforum, and other places. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Aftermath: Myriam J. A. Chancy & Omar El Akkad (Rebroadcast) Oct 17, 2022

Show notes

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 explore contemporary global events through stories of people in the middle of the crises.

Myriam J. A. Chancy’s What Storm, What Thunder follows ten survivors as they navigate the fallout of the catastrophic Haitian earthquake of 2010. Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise is told from the point of view of two children caught in the global refugee crisis, a boy who arrives on the shores of an island and the girl who tries to help him escape.

A warning: You might want to have some tissues handy. These are not easy subjects – disasters natural and man-made – and Myriam and Omar speak with uncommon grace and empathy about the people living through the very real-world crises depicted in their fiction. Their empathy is something remarkable and hopeful to witness.

Myriam J. A. Chancy is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College. She is the author of What Storm, What Thunder, a novel on the 2010 Haiti earthquake (Harper Collins Canada/Tin House USA 2021) which has been named a Best Book of Fall by TIME, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Good Housekeeping, Buzzfeed and more. Past novels include: The Loneliness of Angels (Peepal Tree 2010) winner of the 2011 Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award, for Best Fiction 2010; The Scorpion’s Claw (Peepal Tree Press 2005); and Spirit of Haiti (Mango 2003), shortlisted in the Best First Book Category, Canada/Caribbean region of the Commonwealth Prize, 2004. She has authored several academic books, including, Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (Rutgers 1997; ebook, 2011). She served as an editorial advisory board member for PMLA from 2010-12, as a Humanities Advisor for the Fetzer Institute from 2011-13, and as a 2018 advisor for the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

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. His latest novel is What Strange Paradise.

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.

Change: John Freeman with Jakuta Alikavazovic, Lana Bastašić, & Aleksandar Hemon (Rebroadcast) Oct 10, 2022

Show notes

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.

Freeman spoke with these three writers who possess links to the Bosnia and the Balkans about language and the way language changes through generations, geography, and translation. We’ll join French author and translator Jakuta Alikavazovic; Yugoslav-born writer Lana Bastašić; and Bosnian-American novelist and memoirist Aleksandar Hemon. These writers came together from all over the world — New York, Barcelona, and Paris — for an illuminating and often hilarious discussion about the transmutable borders of language.

“I’m still creating this language that I need to tell the story of myself.” – Lana Bastašić

Jakuta Alikavazovic is a French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins. She was born in Paris, where she studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure and where she now lives. Her first novel, Corps Volatils (2008) won the Goncourt Prize for Best First Novel and her second and third novels, Le Londres-Luxor (2010) and La Blonde et Le Bunker (2012) won prizes in France and Italy. Her new novel, Night as it Falls (L’Avancee de la Nuit), was published by Faber in 2020. She is also the translator of Anna Burns and Ben Lerner amongst others and teaches at la Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Lana Bastašić is a Yugoslav-born writer. Her first novel Catch the Rabbit (Restless Books) won the European Union Prize in Literature in 2020 and has been translated into fifteen languages. Her last book is Milk Teeth, a collection of short stories published in Serbo-Croatian in 2020. She is one of the founders of Escola Bloom School of Literature in Barcelona. She’s based in Belgrade, but spends most of her time on the road.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, The Lazarus Project, Love and Obstacles, The Making of Zombie Wars, The Book of My Lives and My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You (memoir, May 2019). He is the winner of the 2020 Dos Passos Prize. Hemon co-wrote the script for The Matrix 4, with David Mitchell and Lana Wachowski. He is at work on How Did You Get Here?: Tales of Displacement (oral histories) forthcoming from FSG. How Did You Get Here? was the recipient of a PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History in 2017. His next novel, The World and All That It Holds will be published by FSG in 2022.

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.

2021 Portland Book Festival Highlights (Rebroadcast) Oct 03, 2022

Show notes

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 and OPB’s Tiffany Camhi, and legendary poet Rita Dove and Mary Szybist.

The Portland Book Festival presents a diverse range of writers who have recently published novels, story collections, works of nonfiction and poetry. There were over 50 writers in the festival in 2021, hailing from all over the country. Some are among our most famous writers at work today, and some publishing their first book. All are accomplished artists with powerful ideas and stories that can illuminate our understanding of ourselves and our world.

Tiffany Camhi is a multimedia journalist focusing on arts, culture and environment reporting. You can hear her throughout the state of Oregon on OPB. She spent six years at KQED Public Radio in the San Francisco Bay Area as a host, producer, reporter and all-around audio gopher. Tiffany is an alumni of the City University of New York, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. When Tiffany’s not on the radio you can usually find her riding a motorcycle…or trying to figure out a way to talk about motorcycles on the radio.

Aminder Dhaliwal is a native of Brampton, Ontario and received a Bachelors of Animation from Sheridan College. She now lives in Los Angeles, where she is the Director at Disney TV Animation. Previously, she worked as a Storyboard Director at Cartoon Network and Storyboard Director on the Nickelodeon show Sanjay and Craig. She has serialized Woman World biweekly on instagram since March 2017 and has garnered over 120,000 followers. Woman World was nominated for an Ignatz Award for Outstanding Online Comic. Her most recent graphic novel is Cyclopedia Exotica.

Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate, is the only poet honored with both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts. Her recent works include Playlist for the Apocalypse, Sonata Mulattica, and the National Book Award–shortlisted Collected Poems: 1974–2004. In 2021 she was awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Charlottesville, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia.

Originally from Alabama, Genevieve Hudson earned an MFA from Portland State University and has received Fulbright, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center fellowships. She is the author of Pretend We Live Here: Stories, and lives in Portland, Oregon. Boys of Alabama is her debut novel.

Mary Szybist is most recently the author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award in Poetry. She is the Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis & Clark College.

Brandon Taylor is the author of the acclaimed novel Real Life, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction. His latest book is Filthy Animals.

Amy Tan (Rebroadcast) Sep 26, 2022

Show notes

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 as the writer and producer. There was lots of anticipation about what this writer would do next. Of course, Tan has gone on to have an incredible literary career, publishing half a dozen novels, including the bestseller The Bonesetter’s Daughter, books for children, nonfiction, and most recently a memoir called Where the Past Begins.

In this talk, Tan takes us back through her life to talk about her parents who immigrated from China in 1949, how Mandarin influenced the ways she wrote—and writes—in English, and how she “found her voice by not finding it.” She also talks about her early days first as a freelancer and novice fiction writer when someone told her, upon hearing the premise of the short story that would become The Joy Luck Club, that “no one wants to read about Chinese mothers.” Of course, we now know that millions of readers in 35 counties actually did.

Amy Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life, Saving Fish from Drowning, and two children’s books, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat, which was adapted into a PBS television series. Tan was also a co-producer and co-screenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club. Her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and her work has been translated into thirty-five languages. She lives with her husband in San Francisco and New York.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival: The Cymbeline Project (Rebroadcast) Sep 19, 2022

Show notes

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 Project, an upcoming OSF hybrid production: part theatre, part film, part visual art. As Nataki and Scarlett point out in their conversation, Shakespeare is built to be open to interpretation–to “do” Shakespeare is to experiment; to be true to the text is to break it apart.

In the episode, you will hear a scene from The Cymbeline Project, featuring actors Carolyn Zeller, Jessica Ko, and Shyla Lefner.

View more information about The Cymbeline Project on OSF’s website here: https://www.osfashland.org/en/productions/2022-Digital/cymbeline-project.aspx

Nataki Garrett is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s sixth artistic director. Since her appointment in April of 2019, she has guided the organization through numerous transitions and crises, all while building toward a more sustainable producing and fundraising model. Garrett’s forté and passion is fostering and developing new work, including those that adapt and devise new ways of performing the classics. She has directed and produced the world premieres of many well-known and important playwriting voices of our time, including Katori Hall, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Dominique Morriseau and Aziza Barnes. Garrett is a recipient of the first-ever Ammerman Prize for Directing, given by Arena Stage. She also received the National Endowment for the Arts and Theatre Communications Group Career Development Fellowship for Theatre Directors. She is a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society and a member of the board of directors for Theatre Communications Group, a company member at Woolly Mammoth, and an advisory board member for Mixed Blood Theatre. Garrett is a graduate of California Institute of the Arts with an MFA in directing. Full bio here.

Scarlett Kim is a diasporic Korean director, artist, and producer who uses participatory performance and mixed-reality technology to enact social change. She serves as the Associate Artistic Director and Director of Innovation & Strategy at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Scarlett originates, directs, and collaborates on multimedia projects across theatre, visual art, and new media contexts internationally. She is passionate about creating unclassifiable spaces and uplifting underrepresented voices at the intersection of art, technology, and community through rhizomatic collaboration. Scarlett received her MFA in Theatre Directing from California Institute of the Arts and a BA in Theatre & Performance Studies and Visual Arts from the University of Chicago. Full bio here.

Brit Bennett (Rebroadcast) Sep 12, 2022

Show notes

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 delivered in 2020 with The Vanishing Half. It became an immediate bestseller and earned Bennett comparisons to Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Elizabeth Strout.

Both novels share a focus on the complicated dynamics of family, and on the social and political influence of small-town communities. They are also explicitly centered on secrets, on roads not taken and what ifs.

Bennett joined us for Portland Arts and Lectures on February 17, 2022 to talk about The Vanishing Half and how and why she came to write it, and specifically why she wanted to write a novel in which one of the primary characters passes for white. Bennett dives into the literary history of stories about passing from the beginning of the 20^th century through the present and provides a fresh perspective on the central American themes in fiction: the creative and destructive power of personal transformation.

Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. Her debut novel, The Mothers, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for both the NBCC John Leonard First Novel Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, The Vanishing Half, was an instant#1 New York Times bestseller, longlisted for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Women’s Prize, and named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times. Bennet has been named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, a NAACP Image Award Finalist, and one of Time’s Next 100 Influential People. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.

Everybody Reads: Celebrating 20 Years (Rebroadcast) Sep 05, 2022

Show notes

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 partner of Everybody Reads for over a decade, by bringing the featured author to Portland to culminate the program with a live event at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.

In the episode, we join Vailey Oehlke, who has been director of Multnomah County Library since 2009. Vailey is in conversation with Literary Arts’ executive director, Andrew Proctor. They discuss the inspiration and beginnings of the program at the Library, reflect on the role of public libraries as important and unique cultural resources, share favorite moments from past author visits, and go behind the scenes of how the books are selected. We also hear from previous Everybody Reads authors Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of 2019’s selections Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists; Portland-native Mitchell S. Jackson, author of 2015’s selection The Residue Years; and Ross Gay, author of 2021’s selection The Book of Delights.

Proving Up: Missy Mazzoli, Karen Russell, & Gabriel Kahane (Rebroadcast) Aug 29, 2022

Show notes

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 was recently commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to adapt George Saunders’s novel Lincoln In the Bardon. At Missy’s Open Music evening, one of the pieces featured was an aria, “Who Owns the Land?,” from her opera Proving Up, which is based on a story from Karen Russell’s collection Vampires In the Lemon Grove.

This intersection of music and literature seemed ripe for further discussion, so we gathered Missy, Karen, and Open Music host and Oregon Symphony creative chair Gabriel Kahane at Literary Arts in downtown Portland for a conversation about adaptation.

These are three creative geniuses, and it is moving to hear them explore the narrative strengths of both the page and the stage. They go beyond direct adaptation of a source text, touching on how media consumption becomes source material, and their relationship to that as artists – how something ends up translated from one medium to another. The conversation is a fascinating look into the creative process.

Missy Mazzoli has composed works for opera, orchestra, chamber ensemble, solo artists, vocal artists, and films. As a performer, Mazzoli is active as a pianist and keyboardist, and often performs with her band Victoire. Mazzoli’s works have been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Young People’s Chorus of New York, pianist Emanuel Ax, Kronos Quartet, and the Detroit Symphony, among others. Her music has also been performed globally by eighth blackbird, the New York City Opera, the Sydney Symphony, and the Minnesota Orchestra. Mazzoli received a B.M. in Music Composition from Boston University in 2002, and an M.M. in Music Composition from the Yale School of Music in 2006. She also participated in graduate studies at the Royal Conservatory of Den Haag in the Netherlands. Mazzoli joined the faculty at Mannes College of Music at The New School in 2013.

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.

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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.

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.

Note: Parts of this conversation touch on mature themes that may not be suitable for all listeners.

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.

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.

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.

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