The Archive Project

Latest Episodes:

Brit Bennett Mar 14, 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.

Ash Davidson Mar 07, 2022

Show notes

In this episode, we feature novelist Ash Davidson in conversation with writer and educator, Jacqueline Fitzgerald. The event took place at the Portland Book Festival in November 2021.

The novel, Damnation Spring, by Davidson was one of the most anticipated and celebrated books of 2021. It takes place in 1977 in the Pacific Northwest, near the end of the era when the timber industry dominated the region, and a nascent environmental movement is just beginning to take root. A fissure runs through the Gunderson family that threatens their way of life and their very identity. And Damnation Spring’s themes and tensions around timber, the environment, the needs of community to have work and to have their health, are so deeply resonant with the recent history here in Oregon and the greater Pacific Northwest.

In this conversation, we hear about Davidson’s ten-year journey writing the novel including the how she synthesized the massive amount of research that went into it, how she approached the political nature of her subject, and about her own background growing up in remote parts of this country.

Ash Davidson was born in Arcata, California, and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has been supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts and MacDowell. Her debut novel is Damnation Spring. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Jacqueline Fitzgerald is a transformation coach, educator, and artist who centers healing, creativity, and embodied equity to cultivate collective belonging. After over a decade of experience as a teacher and facilitator in Portland area public schools, Jacque brings a trauma-informed, joyful, and loving approach to her values re-alignment work. Her writing has been published in The Oregonian, The Learning Network of the New York Times, and Beacon Magazine. Currently she is recording her debut album under the artist name Echo Onda.

Everybody Reads: Celebrating 20 Years Feb 28, 2022

Show notes

Tickets for the 2022 Everybody Reads event with Mira Jacob, author of the graphic memoir GOOD TALK, on Thursday, March 10 are available now. Click here for more info.

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.

This year’s 2022 Everybody Reads selection is Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob. Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation, and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions.

Mira Jacob will visit Portland on Thursday, March 10 for a special event at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Tickets are available now.

Stephen King Feb 21, 2022

Show notes

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 difficult to define; a mixture of psychological horror, fantasy, realism, and occasional whimsical and/or satirical humor. He was certainly one the best-selling author of the second half of the 20^th century.

In this talk, King regales the audience with stories, real and imagined, with his signature mastery of plot, suspense, and hilarious punch lines that define his work. He ranges from his early days working at an industrial laundry facility where he made $1.60 an hour, to how the plots of some of his most famous novels where constructed. Throughout you can hear the tension between King’s pop culture credentials and the judgement of literary establishment, between King’s working-class roots and so-called “high” culture.

When he joined us in 2006, he had just published Lisey’s Story, and both talks about writing it and reads a few pages from the book. Throughout King is self-deprecating, hilarious, and also serious about craft.

“People ask me, ‘Do you have bad dreams?’ and I say to them, ‘Yes. When I don’t write, I have bad dreams.’”

Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, and Doctor Sleep are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival: Confederates Feb 14, 2022

Show notes

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 spy and a brilliant professor in a modern-day university.

Garrett and Morisseau discuss their experiences as Black women in contemporary theater, and the challenges of that space. Part of that discussion centers on the work to widen the audience for theater and other artistic performance. They speak candidly about the importance of not only experiencing other lives, different than your own, in art, but especially the critical importance of seeing oneself.

Morisseau said that she started writing Confederates because she needed to see herself, a Black woman, in history.

View more information about Confederates on OSF’s website here: https://www.osfashland.org/productions/2022-plays/confederates

Dominique Morisseau is the author of The Detroit Project (A 3-Play Cycle) which includes the following plays: Skeleton Crew (Atlantic Theater Company), Paradise Blue (Signature Theatre), and Detroit ’67 (Public Theater, Classical Theatre of Harlem and NBT). Additional plays include: Pipeline (Lincoln Center Theatre), Sunset Baby (LAByrinth Theatre); Blood at the Root (National Black Theatre) and Follow Me To Nellie’s (Premiere Stages). She is also the TONY nominated book writer on the new Broadway musical Ain’t Too Proud – The Life and Times of the Temptations (Imperial Theatre). Dominique is alumna of The Public Theater Emerging Writer’s Group, Women’s Project Lab, and Lark Playwrights Workshop and has developed work at Sundance Lab, Williamstown Theatre Festival and Eugene O’Neil Playwrights Conference. She most recently served as Co-Producer on the Showtime series “Shameless” (3 seasons). Additional awards include: Spirit of Detroit Award, PoNY Fellowship, Sky-Cooper Prize, TEER Trailblazer Award, Steinberg Playwright Award, Audelco Awards, NBFT August Wilson Playwriting Award, Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama, OBIE Award (2), Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, Variety’s Women of Impact for 2017-18, and a recent MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow.

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.

Cathy Park Hong Feb 07, 2022

Show notes

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 being—an artist, and is also an account of her and her family’s experience as Korean Americans in this country. But she has emphasized that this is a book about America, not necessarily about being Asian. It is also a book infused with her sensibility as a poet, as someone who is fascinated with the endless mutability and power of language. Hong has published three acclaimed collections of poetry, and many listeners who know and have read Minor Feelings might be surprised to learn she primarily identifies as a poet not as an essayist.

The theme of her talk is “community and belonging” and she threads a narrative through pop culture, religion, autobiography, and 20^th century history, in order to try to understand the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans during the pandemic, and the broader discrimination so many Americans experience in their daily lives. That she does this with anger, humor, and tenderness speaks to her remarkable powers as a writer and speaker.

Cathy Park Hong is the author of three poetry collections and Minor Feelings, a New York Times bestselling book of creative nonfiction which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. Hong is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and other journals. She is the poetry editor of The New Republic and full professor at Rutgers University–Newark.

Aftermath: Myriam J. A. Chancy & Omar El Akkad Jan 31, 2022

Show notes

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.

Daniel James Brown, in conversation with Tom Ikeda Jan 24, 2022

Show notes

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 Facing the Mountain, which shares many of the same themes and preoccupations as The Boys in the Boat, but also delves into a more complex and darker chapter in America’s history. Facing the Mountain tells stories of four World War II American soldiers, men of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team of the U.S. Army, a segregated, all-Japanese unit. They are all nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans, and volunteered to serve in combat, even as the federal government incarcerated many of their families in concentration camps.

As a writer, Brown occupies an unusual professional position: He is the teller of personal historic narratives, though he is neither a formal historian nor a novelist. In addition to being one of our great storytellers, Brown is a great listener, and his work is almost always a collaboration. In the case of Facing The Mountain, Brown collaborated with Tom Ikeda from the nonprofit Densho to learn the stories of Japanese Americans from this time period and to connect with the families and communities of those individuals whose stories are centered in the book.

After Brown’s talk, Ikeda joins him in conversation. We’ll also hear the voices of the four men featured in the book from interviews preserved on the Densho website. Read more about Densho: https://densho.org/about-densho/

“I don’t really write ‘history,’ as I think of it, per se. I write personal stories that shed some light on a slice of history that I’m interested in, or that I think needs some light shed on it.”

Daniel James Brown is the author of Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II, The Indifferent Stars Above, Under a Flaming Sky, which was a finalist for the B&N Discover Great New Writers Award, and The Boys in the Boat, a New York Times bestselling book that was awarded the ALA’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. He has taught writing at San José State University and Stanford University. He lives outside Seattle.

Tom Ikeda is the founding Executive Director of Densho. Tom is a sansei (third generation Japanese American) who was born and raised in Seattle. Tom’s parents and grandparents were incarcerated during World War II at Minidoka, Idaho. In addition to leading the organization over the last 24 years, Tom has conducted more than 250 video-recorded, oral history interviews with Japanese Americans. Prior to working at Densho, Tom was a General Manager at Microsoft Corporation in the Multimedia Publishing Group. Tom has received numerous awards for his community and historical contributions, including the Humanities Washington Award for outstanding achievement in the public humanities, the National JACL Japanese American of the Biennium Award, the Microsoft Alumni Integral Fellows Award, the Japanese American National Museum Founder’s Award, and the Robert Gray Medal from the Washington State Historical Society.

“In America, patriotism and national identity aren’t contingent on race, religion, or ethnicity. That really is the whole point of America, in fact.”

Change: John Freeman with Jakuta Alikavazovic, Lana Bastašić, & Aleksandar Hemon Jan 17, 2022

Show notes

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.

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.

Joan Didion (Rebroadcast) Jan 10, 2022

Show notes

In this episode we feature the iconic writer of nonfiction, Joan Didion, from a special event in 2001. She briefly reads from her then new book Political Fictions, and then talks with David Sarasohn from The Oregonian.

Didion’s career began in 1956 when she began writing for Vogue. She wrote more than a dozen books of essays and nonfiction, including the 2005 national bestseller The Year of Magical Thinking, which became a Broadway production. Didion contributed work to virtually major magazine and newspaper in the country, and wrote several screenplays with her late husband John Gregory Dunne.

Her writing about American politics began in earnest in 1988 when she got an assignment from The New York Review of Books to cover the presidential election. This reporting was collected, along with other articles and essays, into the book Political Fictions, which was published in 2001 and was the reason for this event in Portland. The reading and conversation in this episode is fascinating because as she says “history is context.” Didion connects her observations in 1988 about the professional political class to the contested political election of 2000, which had occurred just a year earlier. And her insights and thoughts about the dangerous implication for how our American political life was evolving feel eerily prescient for our current situation.

Didion died on Thursday, December 23, 2021 at the age of 87.

“I have a strong sense that we better start noticing the rest of the world.”

Joan Didion was one of America’s most respected writers, her work constituting some of the greatest portraits of modern-day American culture. Over the four decades of her career, she produced widely-acclaimed journalistic essays, personal essays, novels, non-fiction, memoir and screenplays. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award in 2005.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Tickets for the 2022 Everybody Reads event with Mira Jacob, author of the graphic memoir GOOD TALK, on Thursday, March 10 are available now. Click here for more info.

This year’s 2022 Everybody Reads selection is Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob. Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation, and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions.

Mira Jacob will visit Portland on Thursday, March 10 for a special event at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Tickets are available now.

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected