The Archive Project

Latest Episodes:

Ross Gay: Everybody Reads 2021 (Rebroadcast) Jan 03, 2022

Show notes

In this episode, we bring you writer Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights. We hosted Gay in the culminating event of Multnomah County Library’s 2021 Everybody Reads program—an annual shared reading experience that includes city-wide events for readers of all ages. This year, because of the public health restrictions, we brought Ross Gay to Portland virtually. He gave an incredible lecture and then engaged in a thoughtful, funny, and heartfelt conversation with Oregon-based writer Lidia Yuknavitch.

In his talk, Ross Gay takes us back to his hardscrabble childhood in Philadelphia and traces his coming-of-age story from newspaper boy to internationally recognized poet and writer. The Book of Delights, an essay collection, contains “essayettes,” as Gay refers to them, written over one year, recording the small joys of life: Nicknames, being called “baby” by a waitress, birds in the Detroit airport, writing by hand. And as he catalogs his delight, Gay does not avoid the harshness and unfairness that accompanies life in twenty-first century America, including racism, grief, climate disaster, and more. But Gay shows us that it is possible to notice delight amid grief and upheaval, and how this delight connects us, not only to the world around us, be to each other.

“We are all of us in the field of each other’s becoming. We are the field of each other’s becoming.”

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019. Gay is also the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook “Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens,” in addition to being co-author, with Rosechard Wehrenberg, of the chapbook, “River.” He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin’, in addition to being an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He also works on The Tenderness Project with Shayla Lawson and Essence London. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the nationally bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, Dora: A Headcase, the memoir The Chronology of Water and The Misfit’s Manifesto, based on her TED talk “On the Beauty of Being a Misfit,” which has been viewed over 3.5 million times. She is the recipient of two Oregon Book Awards and a Willamette Writers Award, and has been a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and the PEN Center Creative Nonfiction Award. She is the founder of the literary innovation laboratory Corporeal Writing. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Robert Bly (Rebroadcast) Dec 27, 2021

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, Robert Bly shares selected poems during his visit to Portland, Oregon in 2006 for Poetry Downtown. Robert Bly is a National Book Award-winning poet who has authored more than 30 collections of poetry. Considered one of the legends of contemporary poetry, Bly is the voice of transcendentalism and meditative mysticism for his generation. Active from 1950 through the present, Bly’s body of work is filled with poetry that is spiritual yet worldly, celebrating the uncanny beauty of the everyday. This episode sparkles with Bly’s masterful command of the form and acerbic wit.

Robert Bly passed away on November 21, 2021, at the age of 94.

“What’s the most beautiful word in the English language? I think maybe it’s ‘listen.'”

“For a couple of years, I stayed in bed until I had written my poem for the day.”

Robert Bly is the author of more than 30 books of poetry, including The Light Around the Body (1967), which won the National Book Award. He is also an editor, translator, and nonfiction writer. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Bly received a Fulbright scholarship to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. During his time as editor of the magazine The Sixties, he introduced many unknown European and South American poets to an American audience and because of this, is regarded by many to have had a profound impact on the shape of American poetry. His honors include Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, as well as The Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.

“When we stride or stroll across the frozen lake, we place our feet where they have never been. We walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy.”

Louise Erdrich & Trevino Brings Plenty Dec 20, 2021

Show notes

In this episode, we feature a conversation between Louise Erdrich and Portland-based writer Trevino Brings Plenty from the 2021 Portland Book Festival. Louise Erdrich joined us virtually from Minneapolis for an event in front of a live audience at the Newmark Theater. She is on our most celebrated and writers alive. Her novels include The Night Watchman, which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, The Round House, which won the National Book Award for Fiction, Love Medicine, and LaRose received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. She joined us on the occasion of the publication of her most recent novel, The Sentence.

Trevino L. Brings Plenty is a poet and musician who lives, works, and writes in Portland, OR. Trevino is an American and Native American; a Lakota Indian born on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, South Dakota, USA. Some of his work explores the American Indian identity in American culture and how it has through genealogical history affected indigenous peoples in the 21st century. He writes of urban Indian life; it’s his subject. His works include Wakpá Wanáǧi, Ghost River (2015); Real Indian Junk Jewelry (2012); and Shedding Skins: Four Sioux Poets (2008).

Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. Love Medicine and LaRose received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. Her most recent book, The Night Watchman, won the Pulitzer Prize. A ghost lives in her creaky old house.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival: The Cymbeline Project Dec 13, 2021

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.

Russell Banks Dec 06, 2021

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk by Russell Banks from 1999. Banks was the author twenty-one books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He was twice a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, first in 1985 for his seminal work of fiction Continental Drift, and then again in 1998 for Cloudsplitter. The New York Times lauded his “vivid portrayals of working-class Americans grappling with issues of poverty, race, and class” and placed him “among the first ranks of contemporary novelists.”

Banks also worked extensively in Hollywood, beginning when two of his novels—The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction—were made into feature-length movies.

In this talk, Banks talks about the uneasy and sometimes downright hostile history between authors and Hollywood with some hilarious anecdotes. And while this tension continues today, there’s also another fascinating contemporary resonance in his talk. At the time, the digital transition in filmmaking was dramatically lowering the cost of production, allowing serious films to be made from literary fiction and nonfiction. A blossoming of these so-called indie films resulted in the late-90s and the aughts. Today, another revolution has taken hold: streaming. It too has brought us another wave of incredible novelistic narratives on the screen, but this time on what we traditionally have called TV.

Banks’ career was long and varied and he made an incredible and enduring contribution to our national culture. Russell Banks died on January 8, 2023 at the age of 82.

“Writing and reading literary fiction and poetry are activities almost too intimate to talk about. Literature is intimate behavior between strangers.”

Russell Banks, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Common Wealth Award for Literature. Banks passed away in January 2023 at the age of 82.

Stephen Sondheim & Frank Rich (Rebroadcast) Nov 29, 2021

Show notes

In this episode, we feature a conversation with Stephen Sondheim. Considered “one of the greatest songwriters in the history of musical theater,” Sondheim died at the age of 91 on November 26, 2021.

Sondhiem’s storied career includes mentorship by another icon of musical theater from a previous generation, Oscar Hammerstein. The first show for which Sondhiem would write the music and lyrics was Saturday Night in 1954 and from there he would go on to collaborate on some of the most influential musicals ever made including West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, and Into The Woods. Sondheim won every conceivable award, including the Pulitzer Prize, eight Grammys and eight Tonys, as well as an Academy Award. His work has stood the test of time, with current revivals of his shows on and off Broadway, and a movie version of West Side Story, directed by Stephen Spielberg.

In this episode we feature Sondhiem in a conversation with Frank Rich who was the drama critic of the New York Times from 1980 to 1993, and then an Op-Ed columnist from 1994 to 2011. It was during his time as drama critic that Rich became friends with Sondhiem. What makes this conversation so incredible is the intimacy and rapport these two writers have with each other. Rich asks Sondheim about the evolution of his career, touching on the stories behind his best-known works and their adaptations.

Their appearance for Portland Arts & Lectures in 2008 was one of only a very few appearances the two ever made together.

“If you’re doing a musical that tells a story through song, then you’ve got to find a way of translating one medium into another.”

Stephen Sondheim was a composer and lyricist who collaborated on more than a dozen landmark shows (from which have come many standard songs) and who was the single most influential force in bringing the Broadway musical into the modern age. Beginning in his twenties, Sondheim contributed the lyrics to two classic collaborations with the playwright Arthur Laurents and the director-choreographer Jerome Robbins: West Side Story (1957; music by Leonard Bernstein) and Gypsy (1959; music by Jule Styne). The first Broadway show he produced as both composer and lyricist, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), had an even longer run than its predecessors. As Sondheim’s lyrics have entered the American language—from “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” to “The Ladies Who Lunch”—so too has his music liberated Broadway from traditional songwriting conventions. It is impossible to find a new musical of artistic ambition today that hasn’t been influenced by his breakthroughs in remaking the rules that once governed the traditional Broadway musical. Many of his musicals have been made into movies, including the Tim Burton-directed adaptation of Sweeney Todd. Sondheim won every conceivable award, including the Pulitzer Prize, two Grammys, an Oscar, and eight Tonys. He also won a special award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theater, The Kennedy Center Honors, the MacDowell Medal, the President’s Medal for the Arts, and the Praemium Imperiale (referred to as the “Nobel Prize of the Arts”). Sondheim passed away on November 26, 2021.

Frank Rich started as a Times Op-Ed columnist in January 1994. From 1999 to 2003, he was also a senior writer for The New York Times Magazine, a dual title that was a first for The Times. Rich joined New York magazine in June 2011 as writer-at-large, writing monthly on politics and culture and editing a special monthly section anchored by his essay. Among other honors, Mr. Rich received the George Polk Award for commentary in 2005. He has also written The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush’s America (2006), and his drama reviews were collected in Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993. Since 2008, Rich has also been a creative consultant at HBO and is an executive producer of Veep and Six by Sondheim, the Peabody Award-winning documentary about Stephen Sondheim.

“There has to be an emotional action in a song. I’ve always had very specific ideas as to what should happen in the number, either physically, or emotionally, or in terms of the other characters.”

“Many songs are just static. I try to write non-static songs.”

Paul Theroux, 1994 Nov 22, 2021

Show notes

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

It was his 1975 travelogue The Great Railway Bazaar, which recounted his passage by train from London to Southeast Asia by way of the Middle East and India, and back again on the Trans-Siberian Railway, which brought him to international prominence. In 1986 his novel The Mosquito Coast was adapted for a film starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren. His most recent book is the 2021 novel Under the Wave at Waimea.

In this lecture from 1994, Theroux talks about the role of travel writing and how it differs from journalism. He describes how great travel books are imprinted with the author’s world view and offer us a time stamp of a given place at specific time. This last note struck us about this show (The Archive Project) itself, in the way it reveals authors at a particular moment in their career in the context of a particular time.

“Travel writing is a kind of biography of a place. It is a portrait of a place.”

“A [travel book] is not about the place as much as it is about the person who’s writing about the place.”

Paul Theroux is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Lower River, Jungle Lovers, and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

2021 Portland Book Festival Highlights Nov 15, 2021

Show notes

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 are over 50 writers in the festival this year and they hail 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.

To listen to full discussions from this episode, and the rest of the Festival, visit PDXBookFest.org.

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.

TAP@PBF: Collective Wisdom with Grace Bonney, Lisa Congdon, Ngọc Minh Ngo, & Sonoko Sakai Nov 11, 2021

Show notes

Grace Bonney, author of the bestselling books In the Company of Women and Design*Sponge at Home, leads this conversation with three of the women from her newest book, Collective Wisdom: Lessons, Wisdom, and Advice from Women Over 50. Lisa Congdon, Ngọc Minh Ngo, and Sonoko Sakai discuss their sources of creativity, what makes them feel empowered, and how they view common misconceptions about aging.

Grace Bonney is the author of the bestselling books In the Company of Women and Design*Sponge at Home. She is passionate about equity, inclusivity, and supporting all members of the creative community: She founded Design*Sponge, a daily website dedicated to the creative community, which reached nearly 2 million readers per day for 15 years and is now officially archived in the Library of Congress; Good Company, a print magazine and podcast about creative entrepreneurs; and After the Jump, a podcast about creatives that has reached over 500,000 listeners per episode. Bonney lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her wife and their pets. She is currently working toward a graduate degree in marriage and family therapy at Syracuse University. Her latest book, Collective Wisdom, was published in October 2021.

Lisa Congdon is an artist and illustrator known for her colorful paintings, drawings, hand lettering, and pattern designs. Her books include Find Your Artistic Voice, Whatever You Are, Be a Good One, and Art, Inc., and most recently, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Elements. Lisa lives in Portland, Oregon.

Ngoc Minh Ngo is a celebrated photographer and the author of two books. Ngoc’s images have been published in publications such as T Magazine, Architectural Digest, Cabana, and House & Garden UK.

Sonoko Sakai’s cooking reflects her rich cultural upbringing. Born in New York and raised by Japanese parents, she lived in many places as a child, including San Francisco, Kamakura, Mexico City, and Tokyo. She is the author of two books, Rice Craft (Chronicle, 2016) and The Poetical Pursuit of Food (Potter, 1986). She has worked as a recipe developer, producer, creative director, cooking teacher, and lecturer. She is also a grain activist. Sonoko currently lives in Los Angeles and Tehachapi, California, with her sculptor husband, Katsuhisa Sakai.

TAP@PBF: Reunion with Kaveh Akbar, Melissa Febos, & Megan Stielstra Nov 10, 2021

Show notes

This special podcast-only episode of Literary Arts’ The Archive Project, features a reunion of a panel discussion from the 2017 Portland Book Festival. (In fact, you can hear the original event on The Archive Project here.) Join poet Kaveh Akbar (Pilgrim Bell), memoirist and essayist Melissa Febos (Girlhood), and essayist Megan Stielstra (Once I Was Cool) and moderator Marisa Siegel (The Rumpus) as they revisit their 2017 discussion and share their new books and projects.

Kaveh Akbar’s second full-length volume of poetry, Pilgrim Bell, was published by Graywolf in August 2021. His debut, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is out now with Alice James in the US and Penguin in the UK. He is also the author of the chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, published in 2016 by Sibling Rivalry Press. In 2022, Penguin Classics will publish a new anthology edited by Kaveh: The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine. His poems appear in the New Yorker, New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. In 2020 Kaveh was named Poetry Editor of The Nation. The recipient of honors including multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Levis Reading Prize, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart and two essay collections: Abandon Me, a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist and Publishing Triangle Award finalist, and Girlhood, a national bestseller. Catapult will publish a collection of her craft essays, Body Work, on March 15, 2022. A recipient of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary and of fellowships from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The BAU Institute at The Camargo Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Foundation, and others; her essays have appeared in the Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Granta, The Yale Review, Tin House, The Sun, and the New York Times Magazine. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.

Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections: Everyone Remain Calm, Once I Was Cool, and The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, winner of the 2017 Book of the Year Award from the Chicago Review of Books. Her work appears in Best American Essays, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Believer, Poets & Writers, Tin House, and elsewhere. A longtime company member with 2nd Story, she has told stories for National Public Radio, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and theatres, festivals, and classrooms across the country. She teaches creative nonfiction at Northwestern University and weird, wonderful Zoom spaces in your living room.

Marisa Siegel lives, writes, and edits near NYC. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Mills College in Oakland, CA. Her essay “Inherited Anger” appears in the anthology Burn It Down (Seal Press, 2019) and her debut poetry chapbook, Fixed Stars, is forthcoming from Burrow Press in March 2022. She is senior acquiring editor for trade at Northwestern University Press, and owner/publisher of The Rumpus.

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