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Mary Oliver (Rebroadcast) Feb 27, 2017

Show notes

Mary Oliver reads poems from several of her collections, focusing on brief images of the natural world that she believes people need to attend. These poems include “Messenger,” “Thirst,” “Percy 1,” “The Swan,” “Beans,” “Swimming with Otter,” “Wild Geese,” “Percy 2,” “There you were and it was like spring,” and “The Sun.” Between poems, Oliver shares details about her personal life, including her time as a teacher and her time spent observing the world with the help of her partner, photographer Mary Cook.

Certainly anybody who starts reading a sentence has the curiosity to finish that one sentence, yes? And this is why I’ve kind of done what you could do with dashes and semicolons and so forth. A good number of my poems are 36 lines long and one sentence.”

“Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness and empathy was necessary if the attention was to matter.”

“People travel to keep from crying in place.”

A notoriously private person, Mary Oliver has been described by The New York Times as “far and away America’s best-selling poet,” and has written more than 30 collections of poetry and nonfiction. Her allocates include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a Lannan Literary Award. While she never formally completed a degree, Oliver has received honorary doctorates from four institutions, including Dartmouth College and Tufts University. As a teenager, Oliver lived briefly in the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, where she helped Millay’s family sort through the papers the poet left behind. In her review of Oliver’s poetry, Maxine Kumin noted that Oliver “stands quite comfortably on the margins of things, on the line between earth and sky, the thin membrane that separates human from what we loosely call animal,” acting as an “indefatigable guide to the natural world, particularly to its lesser-known aspects.” Though Oliver currently resides in Florida, she lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for roughly 40 years with her partner, photographer Mary Cook, and the location has served as the inspiration for much of her work.

Carlos Fuentes (Rebroadcast) Feb 15, 2017

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, Carlos Fuentes gives a talk titled “After the Cold War: The Rise of a New Agenda.” It is the keynote address for a conference intended to help Oregonians put into a global perspective the cultural, economic, and political significance of the emerging Hispanic population of Oregon and the United States. Fuentes discusses the changes taking place in the world since the end of World War II, mainly focusing on the increases in technology and economy brought on by rapid globalization. Because of this globalization, he says, it is incredibly significant to bridge the gap between “us” and “them.” He makes the case that the solution to many of the divisions in the world lies in coexistence, collaboration, and understanding.

The problem that is rushing forward to meet and embrace us is that of the other—learning to live in our new multi-polar world with he or she who is not like you and me.”

“Melting pots are now either unmelting or brimming over, for the city of the 21st century is demanding that we not only assimilate the foreign, but that finally we accept its continual cultural personality.”

Carlos Fuentes was a Mexican novelist, playwright, critic, and diplomat referred to by The New York Times as “Mexico’s elegant public intellectual and a grand man of letters, whose panoramic novels captured the complicated essence of his country’s history for readers around the world.” His novel The Old Gringo earned him international acclaim in 1985 and was made into a movie featuring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda. It was the first book by a Mexican novelist to become a bestseller in the United States. He received the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious Spanish-language literary award, as well as the National Order of Merit, France’s highest civilian award to a foreigner, and was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times.

Diane Ackerman Feb 09, 2017

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, Diane Ackerman shares the incredible, true story of Antonina Żabińska, whose diary she draws from in The Zookeeper’s Wife. She reads a selection from the book, and expands upon the history of the Żabińska family’s heroic efforts to save over 300 people during WWII by moving them through the underground railroad that ran through their home and zoo. She also expands on the, perhaps surprising, environmental views the Nazis held, including their great respect for rare plants and animals, and their conservation efforts.

“What fascinates me is how often, and with what wholeheartedness, ordinary people will perform acts of compassion, courage, and sacrifice for absolute strangers.”

“Staying emotionally limber enough to love, play, nurture, and marvel, despite all the ligatures of war, that takes a rare kind of courage.”

“[The Nazis] hoped to alter the world’s ecosystems. Not only dominate nations and politics, but the whole planet’s DNA. Changing the genetic spirals of evolution. A goal that, of course, legitimized genocide.”

“There’s been so much written about the Nazis. But for me, looking at it from a natural history perspective goes to the heart of what the Nazi lunacy was all about. Through their passion for genetics and the natural world, we can see the horror of what they were doing, but also a kind of innocent obsession with nature, and animals, and the environment – rather wholesome, all things considered – coexisting with a maniacal, sadistic, murderous racism.”

Diane Ackerman is a naturalist and poet and the author of ten books of literary nonfiction, including A Natural History of the Senses, A Natural History of Love, and Cultivating Delight. Also the author of six volumes of poetry and several nonfiction children’s books, she contributes to the New York Times, Discover, National Geographic, Parade, and many other publications. In her most recent book, The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us, she confronts the unprecedented fact that the human race is now the single dominant force of change on the whole planet. Humans have “subdued 75 percent of the land surface, concocted a wizardry of industrial and medical marvels, strung lights all across the darkness.” Ackerman lives in Ithaca, New York.

Li-Young Lee (Rebroadcast) Feb 01, 2017

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, award-winning poet Li-Young Lee reads seven of his poems: “Station,” “The Children’s Hour,” “Have You Prayed?,” “Self-help for Fellow Refugees,” “Immigrant Blues,” “Trading for Heaven,” and “Virtues of the Boring Husband.” He introduces each poem with anecdotal information, including his philosophies about romantic love and its connection to finding God. In the Q&A afterward, Lee talks about the psychological and physiological processes involved in reading a poem and the role that personal identity plays in poetic composition.

“Now I realize . . . our original condition can’t be summed up somewhere back in time. That can’t be true. It must be here and now, or nowhere.”

“Before you fall in love, before you find somebody who loves you, you’re isolated, and terrified, and lonely. Then you fall in love, and you are overwhelmed, and inhabited by giant feelings and thoughts and cosmic-sized angels walking in and out of you. And you can’t articulate these feelings to anybody. And then you find that you can’t even articulate them to the beloved, and you’re more lonely than when you started. But I have a theory about that . . . romantic love may be, ultimately, supposed to bring you to a place where you encounter God. It’s a way to wean you from the world, and then from the beloved—the mortal beloved—to discover an immortal beloved. But I might be wrong.”

Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His family settled in the United States in 1964. He is the author of Rose (1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award; The City in Which I Love You (1990), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; The Winged Seed (1995); Book of My Nights (2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; and Behind My Eyes (2008). Lee has been the recipient of the Lannan Literary Award; the Whiting Writers’ Award; the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award; the I. B. Lavan Award; three Pushcart Prizes; grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1998, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from State University of New York at Brockport. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, with his wife, Donna, and their two sons.

Marjane Satrapi (Rebroadcast) Jan 25, 2017

Show notes

In this episode, Marjane Satrapi discusses her writing and art, specifically the film production of Persepolis (2000). She first establishes that she makes “comics” not “graphic novels,” dismissing the term “graphic novel” as a marketing ploy among publishing companies. She also establishes that the comic form is not a genre, but an artistic medium—one that allows for narrative structures that are quite different from books and paintings. She goes on to explain that she wanted to stay true to this medium throughout the film production of Persepolis and touches on her initial difficulties with the extremely social moviemaking process in contrast to the solitude of creating comics. Her humor is evident when she talks of the luxury of civilization, the need for gaining distance—in terms of both time and geography—from a personal story to tell it well, and the challenges of traveling as an Iranian with a French passport.

Marjane Satrapi is an Iranian-born French graphic novelist, illustrator, film director, and children’s book author. She was born in Iran in 1969 and grew up in Tehran in a middle-class Iranian family, attending the Lycee Francais until she left for Vienna and, later, Strasbourg to study Decorative Arts. She eventually moved to France, where she now lives with her husband, Mattias Ripa. Satrapi has worked on many graphic novels and animated films, but she attracted worldwide attention for her autobiographical comic series Persepolis. The work chronicles her childhood in Iran and her adolescence in Europe. In 2007, Persepolis was adapted into a critically acclaimed animated film of the same name that received over 25 major international award nominations and over 15 major international awards.

This use of humor was very, very important for me. And the comic gave me this possibility. And, as I said before, it also gave me [the] possibility to use this humor without falling into cynicism. Because if there is one thing that I really hate over all, it’s cynicism.”

“I wouldn’t call my work an autobiography, because an autobiography is normally a book that you make because you have problems with your family and friends and you don’t dare to say it to them, so you make a book and, you know, you solve your problem with people. Believe me, I am not like that.”

“Any intellectual and any artistic work, by definition, is an anti-fanatic work. Fanaticism presses on the button of emotion…When you make an intellectual and artistic work— when you don’t pretend that you have the answers, but you only have questions to ask—when you make this work, for the person who listens to or reads you, not only do you ask them to be smart, but to work—to try to find the answers themselves.”

Sebastian Junger (Rebroadcast) Jan 18, 2017

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, Sebastian Junger begins his lecture by stating that he had no idea he was going to be a war reporter. Starting out as an anthropology major, Junger spent several years as a tree-climber until he cut open his leg with a chainsaw and began questioning his path in life. “There was a war in Bosnia,” he says, “and I just went.”

Junger talks about his work reporting on combat in Afghanistan just before and during the U.S. invasion and how this intense experience informed both his writing and his life. He notes his own strange fascination with war, which fuels his reporting, explaining it as a desire to understand why humans think war is both horrifying and entertaining. Specifically, Junger shares anecdotes about his experience with a unit in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, famous for being the most combat-heavy area in the Afghan War, giving vivid description of combat and every man’s brushes with death, including his own. Throughout the evening, Junger delves into the complex nature of war, the brotherhood that develops amongst soldiers, and society’s responsibilities to these soldiers.

“I realized war is a lot of things. It’s horrifying, but it’s also very exciting, you know. It’s profound, and it’s also very meaningless. It’s a lot of things. And I realized that if I wanted to be a war reporter, I couldn’t step outside the tent for the unpleasant stuff.”

“There are two things that we all have complete control over, that can’t be taken away from us, and that you’re not born with: courage and compassion.”

Sebastian Junger is the internationally acclaimed bestselling author of A Death in Belmont, Fire, and The Perfect Storm, which stayed on the New York Times’ bestseller list for more than three years, set sales records, and became a major motion picture from Warner Bros.

nAs a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a contributor to ABC News, he has covered major international news stories in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and other locations around the globe. He has reported on the LURD besiegement of Monrovia in Liberia, human rights abuses in Sierra Leone, war crimes in Kosovo, the peacekeeping mission in Cyprus, wildfire in the American West, guerilla war in Afghanistan, and hostage-taking in Kashmir, in addition to working as a freelance radio correspondent during the war in Bosnia.

For over a year, Junger and photojournalist Tim Hetherington embedded with the battle company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team in the remote and heavily contested Korengal valley of eastern Afghanistan. Reporting on the war from the soldiers’ perspective, Junger spent weeks at a time at a remote outpost that saw more combat than almost anywhere else in the entire country. The professional result is twofold: the book WAR and a documentary, Restrepo, that won the 2010 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

Junger has been awarded the National Magazine Award and an SAIS Novartis Prize for Journalism, among other accolades. He currently lives in New York City and on Cape Cod.

“That is what makes war so complicated. You can’t package it in a neat liberal or conservative package and dispense with it. War insists on being puzzled over and engaged with. It’s incredibly elusive. It’s like love, like one of these things that’s eternal and ancient and completely elusive, and you’ll never fully understand it.”

Bill Buford (Rebroadcast) Jan 12, 2017

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, Bill Buford discusses his history working at Granta, including iconic magazine covers and experimentations with the magazine’s content. He goes on to talk about being an editor for Granta Books, stating that it is “the aim of every editor, at some point in his or her life, to get arrested.” Later, he discusses his research for Among the Thugs, a nonfiction piece on British soccer and crowd violence, including his experience at the World Cup in Italy in 1990.

There is an ambition in any literary editor, I think, to start a world war because of the cover of his magazine.”

“This was a very self-conscious literary project, this was literature with a capital ‘L,’ and it made me distinctly uncomfortable. And I have to admit I am still uncomfortable with this idea of literature. I don’t really know what it is. I have my own definition of what I regard as a literary work, which is nothing more than ‘a complex piece of writing that allows me to respond to it in a complex way.’ But, actually, literature and the idea of doing a literary magazine—it’s the kind of thing that people who wear socks with their sandals do.”

Bill Buford is a staff writer and European correspondent for The New Yorker, where he has written about sweatshops, the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, and chef Mario Batali, among other topics. Prior to this, he also served as the magazine’s fiction editor, an editor for Granta magazine, and publisher for Granta Books. Buford is the author of Among the Thugs, a personal nonfiction account of crowd violence and British soccer hooliganism, and has edited three anthologies: The Best of Granta Travel, The Best of Granta Reportage, and The Granta Book of the Family. He lives in New York City with his wife and two sons.

Donald Barthelme (Rebroadcast) Jan 03, 2017

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, Donald Barthelme begins his lecture with a series of readings, including a story about his family’s quest for a dog, his reflections on being a father, a study of angels, and a conversation with Goethe in which he compares music, art, and nationalities to everyday objects. Barthelme previews a selection of excerpts from his forthcoming novel The King—a retelling of Le Morte D’Arthur through the lens of World War II—which at the time he not yet named and which was posthumously published in 1990. He returns to a discussion of the short story form following this, tackling the subject of life in New York and revisiting the subject of parenthood.

It is a curiosity of writing about angels that very often one turns out to be writing about men. The themes are twinned.”

“You must not confuse the monster in the story with the monster you see before you; they are two different monsters.”

“It seems to me that in the contemporary world we suffer from something called information sickness; that is, the point is to push away experience, much of it unwanted vicarious experience and much of it synthetic and contrived by other people to manipulate us. If I thought there was any authentic experience to experience, I would probably recommend that—but I’ve seen very little of it.”

Donald Barthelme is a short story writer and novelist who is considered to be critical to the post-modern school of writing, in the company of such writers as John Barth, John Hawkes, William Gass, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon. Recognized for his technical experimentation and melancholy gaiety, Barthelme first rose to national prominence when his debut novel, Snow White, was printed in its entirety in The New Yorker, taking up virtually the entire issue. He later received the National Book Award for his 1972 children’s book, The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or the Hithering Thithering Djinn. In addition to his stories and novels, Barthelme served as a reporter for the Houston Post, the managing editor for Location magazine, and the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. He also co-founded the literary magazine Fiction with Mark Mirsky, Max Frisch, and Marianne Frisch. In his New York Times obituary, the paper remarked that his “minimalist style placed him among the leading innovative writers of modern fiction.” Barthelme died on July 23, 1989, less than six months after his lecture in Portland, OR.

Don DeLillo in conversation with Noah Hawley Dec 21, 2016

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, Don DeLillo and Noah Hawley begin at the end, discussing DeLillo’s writing process for each segment of his novels from finish to start. Throughout this conversation, DeLillo delves into some of the research related to several of the books he has written throughout his career. He and Hawley also compare the process of writing a novel to the process of writing for television or film.

I go sentence by sentence, word by word, and the sentences seem to extend themselves into paragraphs . . . For me there is an element of a certain mystery. The language itself is what matters most to me, and then people evolve out this; people evolve out of words.” – Don DeLillo

“I think there is that novelist tool as well where you write stuff that you don’t know why it’s in there and then months later you have that eureka moment where you realize where you’re going to pay it off.” – Noah Hawley

Don DeLillo was born in 1936 and grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx. As a teenager, he spent many of his work hours reading William Faulkner, James Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, and Ernest Hemingway—writers who would have great influence on his later work. After graduating college and a brief stint as an advertising copywriter, DeLillo lived cheaply in a Manhattan studio apartment and started to work on his first novel, Americana, which was published in 1971. He went on from there to publish 14 more novels, including White Noise, Libra, Underworld, Falling Man, and his latest novel, Zero K. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, among other accolades.

Noah Hawley is an Emmy, Golden Globe, PEN, Critics’ Choice, and Peabody Award-winning author, screenwriter, and producer. He has published four novels and penned the script for the feature film Lies and Alibis. He created, executive produced, and served as showrunner for ABC’s My Generation and The Unusuals and was a writer and producer on the hit series Bones. Hawley is currently executive producer, writer, and showrunner on FX’s award-winning series, Fargo. He is adapting Don DeLillo’s Zero K for film.

Liars’ League PDX (Rebroadcast) Dec 14, 2016

Show notes

The Far East. Western Europe. America’s East Coast. The West Coast. Eastern Oregon. The Willamette Valley. Northeast Portland. Southwest Portland. Each of these brings to mind a distinct idea about lifestyles, political views, fashion trends, reading habits, pet preference, means of transportation—any and all elements of how we live, work, play, think and feel. But can all of that be summed up by a simple directional bearing? And does it create a defining line or a dividing line? Do we automatically fit into such elementary and oppositional stereotypes?

Keiji is a quiet man. He doesn’t like Hank. He finds his beard ridiculous, his clothing too relaxed, and his sleeve tattoos distracting. Hank is younger, 29, but carries himself with the kind of personal confidence that is found, in Keiji’s experience, in old men or drunks. Hank fills silences with questions and small talk. The trip into the parking garage gave them time to cover all of the clichés. The time difference. The flight. The connections. The little frustrations everyone endures in order to arrive on the other side of the world.” – Excerpt from “Infrastructure,” written by Liam Lund and performed by Jon Farley

“I’m really not judging. Had we stayed in the US, I bet I would be just like my old girlfriends. I would make innuendos over macchiatos, have a kick ass work wardrobe, quietly resent my husband and kids, and call it a day.” – Excerpt from “Number 58,” written by M.E. Bergstrom and performed by Barbara Kite

Aundré Barnes is a Portland native who has been involved with many local theater companies since the age of 15. Although he lives to hone his craft on stage, his love for film work constantly calls. Barnes is also a singer/songwriter and plays on his downtime.

E. Bergstrom has bribed her way out of a speeding ticket in Morocco, given a wedding speech in Shanghainese, and impersonated a firefighter in France. She has talked herself into a lot of excellent situations and is always on the lookout for more. She writes both fact and fiction in the Bay Area.

James Dixon is a local singer and actor originally from North Carolina. After nearly 10 years of travel to over 32 states and 7 countries, he decided to make Portland his home. He is an active member of a local classic plays focus group called The Asylum Lab. Most recently, he was the Earthworm in James and the Giant Peach with Oregon Children’s Theatre. Other past favorite credits includes Dalton/Horse Ensemble in Equus with Post5 Theatre and Newt Lee in Parade at Staged! Theater.

Jon Farley is an actor, clown and occasional aspiring aerialist. Portland audiences may have seen him as Bob in Faultline Ensemble’s Holding Onto the Sky, Humphrey in Imago’s Beaux Arts Club, Meera in Tooth of Crime: Second Dance or as Herod in For the Time Being. Film appearances include Portlandia, the indie features sLipPage and Let’s Bury the Hatchet (Deep in Your Face).

Liam Hogan is a London-based writer and host of Liars’ League London. He is the winner of the 2015 Quantum Shorts and Sci-Fest LA’s 2016 Roswell Award and has been published in the online magazine Daily Science Fiction and in more than a dozen anthologies.

Marc Janssen is alive somewhere. There is proof hidden on the internet and in print at such periodicals as The Rio Grande Review, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Off the Coast, Cirque Journal and The Ottawa Arts Review, as well as in the anthologies Manifest West, Green is the Color of Winter and The Northern California Perspective. He also organizes the Salem Poetry Project, a weekly poetry reading in Salem, Oregon.

Barbara Kite graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York City, receiving the prestigious Jehlinger Award for Best Actress. She has gone on to work as a professional actor, director, and acting coach in Toronto, New York and Portland for over 30 years. A short list of Barbara’s film and theatrical credits include All My Children, So the Story Goes, Under Suspicion, The Beau Stratagem, A Little Night Music, Icarus’s Mother and Trojan Women.

Liam Lund is a playwright, unpublished novelist, artist, and news junkie. Those are the things that bring him joy and frustration, but no money. He endures a day job that provides him money and frustration, but no joy. He is a member of the Shakespeare Liberation Army, a group that writes and performs educational Shakespeare plays in public schools.

Liars’ League was founded in London and has taken root in New York City, Hong Kong and Portland. The company is devoted to creative collaboration through showcasing great new writers and talented local performers. With a specific theme in mind for each show, Liars’ League calls upon writers to submit thought provoking and emotionally engaging short fiction, which a crew of actors then rehearses and performs in front of a live audience. To learn more about Liars’ League, visit https://www.liarsleaguepdx.com.

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