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Edwidge Danticat, 2010 (Rebroadcast) Jul 01, 2020

Show notes

Three months after the catastrophic earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat begins her lecture with a proverb from the country she grew up in: “We remember, but we move forward.” She mentions Haiti’s nickname, terre glissée or “slippery ground,” and expounds on the metaphoric and literal connotations of that phrase. With the devastation still on everyone’s mind, Danticat tells of both her own and her family’s experiences during and after the earthquake, mentioning that her cousin Maxo was killed. She witnessed bodies in the rubble and an “altered human landscape” of so many people with injuries. After the quake, Haitians would simply call it “the thing,” or “the devil dancing,” or even onomatopoeias like “gudugudu.” Referencing several other Haitian writers throughout her lecture, such as Dany Lafferière, Danticat discusses the role of the artist who comes from a place of loss, including the importance of bearing witness.

“There is poetry often in Haitian language, through proverbs, through the way that we try to interpret tragedy.”

“I kept wondering, would there be poetry amidst the Haitian ruins?”

“Nou led, nou la; we are ugly, but we are here.”

“The Angel of Death is more democratic [than God]; everybody goes.”

Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including Claire of the Sea Light, a New York Times notable book; Brother, I’m Dying, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist; Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; and The Dew Breaker, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the inaugural Story Prize. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She lives in Miami.

Julia Alvarez (Rebroadcast) Jun 24, 2020

Show notes

Julia Alvarez reflects on her dual childhood in the Dominican Republic and in the United States: living in a world under the hand of a dictator; her poor performance in school but robust and diverse education at home; her difficult time adjusting to immigrant life and the prejudice she faced; the sixth grade teacher who showed her the world that existed within books; and her realization that 1) intelligence comes in many forms and 2) imagination can save you.

“One thing that hasn’t changed is my faith in the power of stories. Even before I came into English, or became a reader, or wanted to be a writer, stories were helping me find my way to the person I would become, the writer who stands before you today.”

“One thing the Dictator Trujillo could not repress was the irrepressible need of the human creature for stories.”

“Ours was not a literary culture but an oral culture, a storytelling culture . . . Years later, when I attended a graduate program in creative writing, I would realize that all that I was being taught about character and plot and timing and rhythm and lyricism and metaphor I had learned in my home land, in many cases by people who could not read or write or had minimal book learning. It was an important discovery for me to make as a young writer.”

Julia Alvarez was born in New York City on March 17, 1950, the second of four daughters. Three months later, her parents returned to their native Dominican Republic after a self-imposed exile from General Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship. When her parents became involved in an underground movement to overthrow Trujillo, the Alvarez family was forced to flee the Dominican Republic in order to escape imprisonment. They returned to the United States in August of 1960, when Alvarez was 10 years old. The immigrant experience and bicultural identity is the subject of much of Alvarez’s fiction and poetry, including her popular first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, which was published in 1991. Since then, Alvarez has gone on to publish more than 20 additional works.

2020 Oregon Book Awards Jun 23, 2020

Show notes

The 2020 Oregon Book Awards ceremony was originally scheduled on April 27, 2020 as a live event. However, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, our 33^rd annual ceremony was reimagined into this special, state-wide broadcast and podcast episode, with special thanks to our partners at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Since 1997, the Oregon Book Awards have celebrated the work of our state’s authors. This year, 215 books from 44 towns across Oregon were submitted. Out-of-state judges determined the finalists and winners. In this episode of The Archive Project, you’ll hear excerpts read by the winning authors themselves. Our guest hosts for this special episode are previous Oregon Book Award winners Elena Passarello and Omar El Akkad.

Our episode hosts:
Elena Passarello is an actor, essayist, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018, and has been translated into German, Italian, French, and Mandarin. She is the author of the essay collections Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses, the latter of which won the 2018 Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction and made the Best Books of 2017 lists in the New York Times, Guardian, and Publisher’s Weekly. Passarello teaches creative writing at Oregon State University and appears weekly on the nationally-syndicated PRI radio variety show LiveWire!.

Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt and grew up in Doha, Qatar until he moved to Canada with his family. He is an award-winning journalist and author who has traveled around the world to cover many of the most important news stories of the last decade. His reporting includes dispatches from the NATO-led war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantànamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. He is a recipient of Canada’s National Newspaper Award for investigative reporting and the Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Canadian Journalists, as well as three National Magazine Award honorable mentions. His debut novel is American War, for which he won the Oregon Book Award for Fiction. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Toni Morrison (Rebroadcast) Jun 17, 2020

Show notes

Toni Morrison begins her lecture by saying she wants to discuss two of her books in particular—Beloved (1987) and Jazz (still forthcoming at the time)—and the progression of her writing. She considers the impact of history on both novels. In discussing Beloved, Morrison touches on the pornography of writing about violence as a voyeur and how she worked to keep the focus on the characters themselves, not the institution of slavery.

For Jazz, Morrison discusses the genre’s contradictions, its place in the cultural psyche, and how the Jazz Age “was a period when black people placed an indelible hand of agency on the cultural scene.” All of this, she says, was part of her sustained investigation of “self-regard, in both racial and gendered terms.” Morrison also discusses the interior, imaginative freedom that jazz fostered and how this agency changed the course of cultural history in America.

“The embrace of history and fiction is what I was concerned with—or rather, the effort to disentangle the grip of history, while remaining in its palm, so to speak.”

“We move from data to information, to knowledge, to wisdom. And separating one from the other, being able to distinguish among and between them, that is knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category of intelligence. That’s generally what serious education is about.”

“It’s impossible to hear that sort of blues cry without acknowledging in it the defiance, the grandeur, the agency that frequently belies the wale of disappointed love. And it may be through that agency—and the even more powerful assertiveness of what we call Jazz, which uses those gestures—that is how compromise becomes reconciliation. It’s also the way in which imagination fosters real possibilities. If you can’t imagine it, you can’t have it.”

Toni Morrison was born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. She was an avid reader, and her favorite authors included Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. Morrison attended Howard University and wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye, while teaching there and raising two children. She went on to become the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Sula, Song of Solomon, Jazz, and Home. In 1988, she won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for Beloved, and in 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best American novel published in the previous twenty-five years. In 1993, Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her most recent book, The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, Meditations, was published in February of 2019. Morrison passed away in August of 2019.

Tommy Orange: Everybody Reads 2020 Jun 03, 2020

Show notes

This episode of The Archive Project features a lecture from Tommy Orange in Portland, Oregon. This lecture was the culminating event of the Multnomah County Library’s 2020 Everybody Reads program—an annual shared reading experience that includes city-wide events for readers of all ages. In his lecture, Orange details his experience as a Native American growing up and working in Oakland, California. He didn’t always want to be a writer, and he shares the twisting path that led him to this work. His debut novel, There There, is a winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and named one of the best books of the year by numerous publications. There There—and Orange himself in this lecture—explores a multitude of themes, from identity and ownership to the urban-rural divide.

Link to “Ghost Dance” short film referenced in Orange’s lecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5plHAdBums

Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California.

Between the Lines: Harper Lee & Boris Pasternak (Rebroadcast) May 27, 2020

Show notes

This episode of The Archive Project, features a panel discussion between authors Casey Cep, Lara Prescott, and moderator Pamela Paul of The New York Times, from the 2019 Portland Book Festival. Cep and Prescott are both New York Times best selling debut authors who have drawn inspiration from famous figures in literary history. Cep’s nonfiction book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, explores the true-life murder trial that inspired Harper Lee to research and write To Kill a Mockingbird. Prescott’s novel, The Secrets We Kept, is inspired by the true story of the CIA plot to infiltrate the hearts and minds of Soviet Russia with the greatest love story of the twentieth century: Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The women discuss their works, historical inspirations, and writing craft in this engaging conversation.

Casey Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in English, she earned an M.Phil in theology at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New Republic, among other publications. Furious Hours is her first book.

Lara Prescott received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin. She was previously an animal protection advocate and a political campaign operative. Her stories have appeared in The Southern Review, The Hudson Review, Crazyhorse, Day One, and Tin House Flash Fridays. She won the 2016 Crazyhorse Fiction Prize for the first chapter of The Secrets We Kept. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Pamela Paul is the editor of The New York Times Book Review and oversees books coverage at The New York Times, which she joined in 2011 as the children’s books editor. She is also the host of the weekly Book Review podcast for The Times. She is the author and editor of six books, including: My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues, The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony, Pornified, Parenting, Inc., and By the Book. She is a former columnist for The Economist, Worth, and The New York Times Styles section. Her work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Slate, Vogue, Psychology Today, Brown Alumni Magazine and other national publications.

Eavan Boland May 20, 2020

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, poet Eavan Boland reads a selection of her poetry and prose, pausing between pieces to discuss how each particular work originated and her writing process. The topics of her work include history vs. the past and love vs. loss (most often as these topics relate to Ireland), and she weaves Greek and Roman mythology into many of her poems. At the end of her reading, she answers a series of questions from the audience.

“I grew up in a time in Ireland when Irish history was made…In many ways that narrative was the story of a small country against a great one and was a story of heroes. But the past is a different place from history. The past, you know, consists of these shadows and whispers and lost names and no heroes. And increasingly it was the past that seemed to me the place where I would turn.”

“For these couple of sentences, these people, whoever they were—without name, without history, without anything—gleam into account and are gone. And I wanted to write the poem really to reproach the forms we have, the histories we have, and love poetry, which so rarely recognizes that sort of immense defeat and immense steadfastness.”

“If you can open the classroom to even impolite questions, then you give some access. The last thing you want is some sacred classroom where people are just struggling through the stuff.”

Born in Dublin, Ireland, Eavan Boland divided her childhood between London and New York. She later returned to Dublin to attend Trinity College, during which time she published her first collection of poetry, titled 23 Poems. The collection focused on Boland’s experiences as a young wife and mother and highlighted the role of women in Irish history and culture. These became reoccurring topics of Boland’s work. In an online interview, Boland further explained, “I began to write in an Ireland where the word ‘woman’ and the word ‘poet’ seemed to be in some sort of magnetic opposition to each other. Ireland was a country with a compelling past, and the word ‘woman’ invoked all kinds of images of communality which were thought to be contrary to the life of anarchic individualism invoked by the word ‘poet’…I wanted to put the life I lived into the poem I wrote. And the life I lived was a woman’s life. And I couldn’t accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation.”

Boland’s books of poetry include A Woman Without a Country, Domestic Violence, An Origin Like Water, and In Her Own Image. She also authored A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, a collection of essays that won the 2012 PEN Award, and The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, a volume of prose. Her awards include a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry, an American Ireland Fund Literary Award, and a Jacob’s Award for her involvement in The Arts Programme broadcast on RTÉ Radio. She taught at several colleges and universities, including Trinity, was a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and was a regular reviewer for the Irish Times. Boland passed away in April 2020 at the age of 75.

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