The Archive Project

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Min Jin Lee Feb 26, 2020

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, novelist Min Jin Lee discusses her writing craft and inspiring personal journey to become a professional writer. With warm humor, Lee honestly opens up about her struggle to succeed—as a Korean-born American immigrant battling a life-threatening chronic illness—within the publishing industry, and details her perseverance in the face of countless rejection letters. A life-long reader and lover of books, Lee shines as she speaks of the necessity of the arts as a vehicle to empower those who are disempowered.

“I had already failed for such a long time, but I still cared about writing something really beautiful. No matter who I was, and no matter the consequences, it was still within my power to write about the people who fascinated me.”

“I am a great reader. It is that identity that I still cling to today.”

Min Jin Lee’s novel Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017. The San Francisco Chronicle lauds it as “beautiful… Lee’s sweeping four-generation saga of a Korean family is an extraordinary epic.” It was on over 75 best books of the year lists, and will be translated into 27 languages. Her debut novel, 2007’s Free Food for Millionaires, was also a national best seller as well as a Top 10 Books of the Year for The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air, and USA Today. Lee is a recipient of fellowships in fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard.

Scene of the Crime: Portland Thrillers Feb 19, 2020

Show notes

This episode of The Archive Project features an onstage conversation from the 2019 Portland Book Festival between Portland-based authors Rene Denfeld and Phillip Margolin, with moderator Amy Stewart. As writers, Denfeld and Margolin each pull from their own personal and professional experiences to craft high-octane thrillers that are as detailed and insightful as they are compelling and bingeable. Though there are many similarities between the two, including their chosen form, genre, and the fact that their books are set in Portland, these writers are also very different. What makes this conversation interesting is hearing them discuss how they approach their material, what about that material is important to them as writers, how they construct their novels, and how their remarkable professional lives in the legal world helps to make them the celebrated writers they are today.

“To me, setting is actually a character. The place that the novel inhabits is in and of itself a character. And, for writers, we have this wonderful opportunity to capture these places and to take readers into worlds that they’re not familiar with.” – Rene Denfeld

“My advice, if you want to be a writer and you’re just learning how to do it, is this: Once you get your idea, do not write. Think.” – Phillip Margolin

“I think readers and writers are two sides of the same coin. We all love story.” – Rene Denfeld

Rene Denfeld is an award-winning author, journalist, and licensed private investigator living in Portland, Oregon. She is the bestselling author of The Child Finder, The Butterfly Girl, and The Enchanted, which was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel prixe and received the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in France. She has written for many publications, including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Oregonian.

Phillip Margolin has written over twenty novels, most of them New York Times bestsellers, including Gone But Not Forgotten, Lost Lake, and Violent Crimes. His most recent book is The Perfect Alibi. In addition to being a novelist, he was a long-time criminal defense attorney with decades of trial experience, including a large number of capital cases. Margolin lives in Portland, Oregon.

Amy Stewart is the New York Times best-selling author of ten books, including Girl Waits with Gun and the rest of the Kopp Sisters series, which are based on the true story of one of America’s first female deputy sheriffs and her two rambunctious sisters. The books are in development with Amazon Studios for a television series. Her popular nonfiction titles include The Drunken Botanist, Wicked Plants, and Flower Confidential. While they have not been adapted for television, there are a few bars around the world named after The Drunken Botanist, which is even better. She lives in Portland with her husband Scott Brown, a rare book dealer. They own an independent bookstore called Eureka Books, which is so independent that it lives in California while they live in Oregon.

V. S. Naipaul Feb 12, 2020

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, we share the late V. S. Naipaul’s 1991 event in Portland, Oregon. Naipaul visited Portland on the occasion of the publication of India: A Million Mutinies Now. The book was the third installment of travelogues about his ancestral India, at a time when the nation was in the midst of a massive transformation. Naipaul, who refers to the book as “an exploration of an old civilization through the experiences of the people who live in it,” introduces the listener to diverse voices from India. Through reading selections from the book, Naipaul gives us an intimate look at the lives of both the wealthy upper caste, and also their servants. The stories take us from palaces to slums, to the homes of the burgeoning middle class. Naipaul’s writing is attentive to the details, and sympathetic to his subjects.

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. His novels include A House for Mr. Biswas, The Mimic Men, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. In 1971, he was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, The Masque of Africa, and a trio of books about India: An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now. In 1990, Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He lived with his wife Nadira and cat Augustus in Wiltshire, England, and died in 2018.

Dangerous Love: Desire & Obsession Feb 05, 2020

Show notes

This episode features an event from the 2019 Portland Book Festival called Dangerous Love: Desire & Obsession. The event’s panel includes some of the greatest poets at work today: Diannely Antigua, Jericho Brown, Malcolm Tariq, and was moderated by Erika Stevens.

The conversation explores what poetry is, what it can do, and who it is for. Through their writings, these poets engage with our most urgent issues and speak powerfully about an individual experience of race, class, power, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Antigua, Brown, and Tariq each write with urgency, passion, anger, and joy. And in conversation, they perform a vital function by approaching all of our most essential challenges from a perspective fundamentally different from our news cycle, and from our polarized political discourse. Through poetry they are able to give us a new and surprising perspective on experiences and issues that we may otherwise feel are intractable. They are what we need to advance the conversation.

“I feel like I’m always sitting around with my rage and with my fears. And I feel like the only reason my rage and my fears don’t lead me to do particularly violent things is because I can be honest with myself about the fact that they’re there, and I can talk to them [through poetry].” – Jericho Brown

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize. A graduate of the MFA program at NYU, she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program. Her poems can be found in Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. Her heart is in Brooklyn.

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. His 2019 collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press), was a National Book Award finalist. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.

Malcolm Tariq is from Savannah, Georgia, and is the author of Extended Play, winner of the 2017 Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. His debut poetry collection is Heed the Hollow (Graywolf Press). A graduate of Emory University, Tariq has a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. He lives in New York.

Erika Stevens is senior editor at Coffee House Press, and was previously in acquisitions at the University of Georgia Press and the University Press of Florida. She has taught in the Graduate Program in Book Publishing at Portland State, and she does manuscript consulting, coaching, and developmental editing under the name of Quick Bread Editorial.

Elaine May Jan 29, 2020

Show notes

This episode of The Archive Project features notable funny woman, Elaine May, in a talk from 1997. In it, May explores the art of writing comedy, drawing on her lengthy career as a screenwriter, actor, comedian, director, and playwright. She asks “why are things funny?” and details how to craft comedy out of life’s ordinary moments. Through sharp jokes and personal anecdotes, May’s bright wit shines.

Depth is easy. Comedy is hard.

It’s so hard to say what comedy is because it’s only when you laugh. …You can immediately prove comedy because if nobody laughs, it isn’t funny.

You can get away with a lot in comedy because you deal with—or, I deal with at any rate—very ordinary things, which are probably what concern people the most.

Elaine May is an American comedian, screenwriter, director, and actress. She made her initial impact in the 1950s from her improvisational comedy routines with Mike Nichols, performing as Nichols and May. After her duo with Nichols ended, May subsequently developed a career as a director and screenwriter, best known for A New Leaf (1971), The Bird Cage (1996), Primary Colors (1998), and Small Time Crooks (2000). In 2013, President Barak Obama awarded her a National Medal of Arts, and in 2019, at the age of 86, New York’s Film Forum payed tribute to her.

Tommy Orange Jan 22, 2020

Show notes

This episode of The Archive Project features acclaimed author Tommy Orange in his appearance at the 2019 Sun Valley Writers’ Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. In this onstage interview with Andrew Proctor, the executive director of Literary Arts, Orange discusses his bestselling debut novel, There There, as well as his personal passions and journey to becoming a writer.

Orange’s wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. A national best-seller, There There has won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Nation Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and an American Book Award. It was named to numerous Book Books of the Year lists and was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

I think fiction can do anything. I think if you write a sentence well enough, and collect those sentences together, you can convince people of anything. The possibilities are endless.

I knew I wanted to write a novel but I didn’t necessarily know what. And I didn’t have the drive to even start until I found out I was going to be a father. I was writing a lot of experimental stuff, and it was pretty unreadable, but something about the experience of becoming a father—and the role of teaching another human how to be a human—switched something in me and made me want to take writing more seriously and to take on a real project.

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.

Ties that Bind: Epic Family Sagas Jan 15, 2020

Show notes

This episode of The Archive Project features a panel discussion of modern masterpieces in a classic genre: the intergenerational family epic. In a conversation recorded live at the 2019 Portland Book Festival, authors Karl Marlantes, Elizabeth McCracken, and Daniel José Older—with moderator Maria Russo of the New York Times—discuss how the themes of their latest works, including ancestry and genealogy, intersect.

Karl Marlantes’s Deep River follows Finnish immigrants, who flee Russian imperialist rule in Finland in the early 1900s and settle in a Washington state logging community, where they strive to rebuild lives and families in an American in flux, while holding fast to the tradition of the home they left behind. A sweeping and enchanting new novel from award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway is the story of three generations of an unconventional New England family who own and operate a candlepin bowling alley. A sudden death throws the family into upheaval, unraveling myths and secrets long buried. Daniel José Older’s The Book of Lost Saints, Ramon is living in modern New Jersey when the spirit of his aunt, who vanished in the Cuban Revolution, prompts him to unearth their painful family history in this story of revolution, loss, and forgiveness.

It’s very much about history as something that is alive and breathing and moving through us constantly. Most of us have grown up under this false mythology that history is something that has ended and will never happen again, but we all are very aware in our everyday lives that history does walk with us in palpable ways. Discovering that and seeing that in the pages of a book, for me, is immensely gratifying. – Daniel José Older

I always feel like my ability to write from a character comes from if I can create that character from the inside and not the outside. If I’m ever writing any sort of character and I feel like I’m dealing with a mass of attributes and trying to shape them into a character, I know I can’t write that character. But if I feel like I understand the soul of the character, and I’m building outward, then I will hazard it. – Elizabeth McCracken

Karl Marlantes is the author two New York Times bestsellers: Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War and his nonfiction book What It Is Like to Go to War. His most recent book is Deep River. He is married and has five adult children and three grandchildren. He grew-up in a small logging town on the Oregon coast and fished commercially with his grandfather as a teenager.

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of six books, Bowlaway, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry (stories), The Giant’s House (a National Book Award finalist), Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, and Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize, long-listed for the National Book Award), three of which were New York Times Notable Books. She has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently holds the James Michener Chair for Fiction at the University of Texas at Austin.

Daniel José Older is the New York Times bestselling author of the young adult series The Shadowshaper Cypher, the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, the middle-grade historical fantasy series Dactyl Hill Squad, and Star Wars: Last Shot. He won the International Latino Book Award and has been nominated for the Kirkus Prize, the Mythopoeic Award, the Locus Award, the Andre Norton Award, and the World Fantasy Award. Shadowshaper was named one of Esquire’s 80 Books Every Person Should Read. His most recent book is The Book of Lost Saints.

Maria Russo, co-author of How to Raise a Reader, is the children’s books editor of the New York Times Book Review. She has been a writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times, the New York Observer, and Salon, and holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her husband and three children.

Robert Bly Jan 08, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, we feature poet Robert Bly who came to Portland as part of our Poetry Downtown series in 2006.

Born in 1926, Bly is considered one of the legends of contemporary poetry. He is not only the author of more than 30 collections of poems, he has also written many works of nonfiction, and, crucially, he introduced many unknown European and South American poets to a U.S. audience through his work as an editor. Robert Bly passed away in November 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.”

Toni Morrison (Rebroadcast) Jan 01, 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.

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.

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.

Between the Lines: Harper Lee & Boris Pasternak Dec 18, 2019

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.

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