The Archive Project

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Doris Lessing Dec 07, 2016

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, Doris Lessing discusses “the machinery of the literary scene,” going beyond the romanticization of publishing to the nuts and bolts of how it all works. She delves into the shift from small, family-owned publishers to gigantic corporations; the intense, almost indescribable partnership between an author and an editor; and the various adaptations to the lifestyle of a writer that have led to the state of publishing today.

“One has to remind [publishers] that what authors need is quiet—all writers need to be quiet; that we need in fact to be rather bored, we need to be unstimulated. We spend large quantities of our time alone, solitary, slopping about somewhere, probably in a dressing gown. This is what we need. This is the last thing that publishers these days are interested in.”

Doris Lessing was born in Persia (now Iran) in 1919 to British parents. Enticed by the promise of the riches to come from maize farming, the family moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1925. Lessing described her childhood as an uneven mixture of some pleasure and much pain, once commenting that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers. Lessing broke into popular consciousness with her second novel, The Golden Notebook, a narrative that delved into the multidimensional lives of contemporary women in a dynamic new way. Over the course of her writing career, Lessing went on to publish more than 55 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In 2007, at the age of 88, she became the oldest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and published her final book, Alfred and Emily, in 2008. Lessing died in 2013, at the age of 94.

“I must tell you of course that there is no such thing as a villain—there are no villains in this scene. It started in the 1950s with this meanness of the publishers about advertising and, as I said, coincided with this hungry media and has grown to where it is now. And you can’t say that it is anyone’s fault, it just happened.”

Malcolm Gladwell Dec 01, 2016

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, Malcolm Gladwell examines the idea of the underdog (namely, why the underdog persists in their quest despite the odds) through the story of Alva Belmont, also known as Alva Vanderbilt, a prominent multi-millionaire American socialite and major figure of the suffragette movement in the early 20^th century.

“Why do underdogs fight? We have all of these cases, in all sorts of contexts, where the weaker party in a conflict continues to rebel long after we feel like they should, when the odds seemed overwhelming stacked against them, when the logic of the situation would suggest that what they really should do is give up. But they don’t give up. They keep fighting.”

“Nothing serves as a greater engine of defiance than the condition of being denied standing and neutrality.”

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers–The Tipping Point, Blink,Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces the podcasts Revisionist History, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood, and Broken Record, where he, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musicians across a wide range of genres. Gladwell has been included in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list and touted as one of Foreign Policy‘s Top Global Thinkers. His latest book is 2019’s Talking to Strangers.

Annie Proulx Nov 29, 2016

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, Annie Proulx shares her life’s journey, including her life-long love of reading, history, and the great outdoors; her reflections on being a woman in a culture where women are “denied time for reflection and meditation”; her perchance for falling in love with places; and her travels across the world in search “some half-wild place.”

Probably the most important thing you should know about me is that I am a reader, I have always been a reader, and it’ll probably be the last thing I do.”

“Gradually, I began to write—not starting with fiction, but articles for horticulture magazines, books on rural living, apple cider, and that sort of thing. And I kept looking for some half-wild place. As children, I think we often experience inchoate and unspecified longings, those childhood moods and feelings of something important that’s out there.”

Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Her most recent novel is Barkskins. She lives in Seattle.

Verselandia! 2016 featuring Portland High School Students & Anis Mojgani Nov 16, 2016

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, we’ll listen to compositions from several students who participated in the 2016 Verselandia! Poetry Slam Competition, the grand slam of the individual school slams held throughout the year. Touching on such topics as race, gender, loss, and love, these students confront issues that are core to the human experience. The top five winners for the night were:

1^st Place: Tea Johnson from Grant High School

2^nd Place: Lily Lamadrid from Franklin High School

3^rd Place: Alexis Cannard from Roosevelt High School

4^th/5^th Place (tie): Zoe Stuckless from Wilson High School & Maia Abbruzzese from Lincoln High School

This episode also features an extended interview with Anis Mojgani, the host of the 2016 Verselandia! Mojgani is a two time National Poetry Slam Champion and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam. He is the author of three poetry collections—Songs From Under the River, The Feather Room, and Over the Anvil We Stretch—and a fully illustrated poetry memoir, The Pocketknife Bible.

The majority of us don’t care about poetry, or believe we don’t care about poetry, or don’t believe that it’s something for us—that it’s not something we’re smart enough to understand, that it’s for a very small percentage of people. As opposed to the idea that poetry is simply a tool for explaining what it means to be human—for processing that, for communicating that, for sharing that, and for being shared that with by others.”
—Anis Mojgani

“I always fluctuate back and forth between how much I loathe poetry and how much I love it. But one thing I don’t swing back and forth about is how much I love young folks being introduced to poetry, and writing it, and finding their voice through it.”

—Anis Mojgani

Julia Alvarez Nov 10, 2016

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.

Sandra Cisneros & Elena Passarello Oct 26, 2016

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, award-winning novelist, poet, and author of The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros, discusses her new book, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, at the 2015 Wordstock Festival. A House of My Own is a richly illustrated compilation of true stories and nonfiction pieces that, taken together, form a jigsaw autobiography—an intimate album of a beloved literary legend. Cisneros is in conversation with Elena Passarello, author of the essay collection Let Me Clear My Throat.

“I grew up in Chicago, with poor neighborhoods and poor schools but great museums. And the museums were important in shaping us…For a whole generation of us, our lives were enriched thanks to museums being free on the days that working class people had off.”

“You can’t write about things that you’re angry about and publish it when you’re angry. You need to write when you’re angry, and then you need to compost and keep writing until you’re not angry anymore and you understand the situation with clarity and generosity, and then some little flower can grow out of that compost.”

“For all of us, I think stories enter us—especially the ones that are the real stories, the ones we wish we could forget—like grains of sand, and we have to cover them with nacre. Each time we tell the story, it’s like we’re trying to survive the event.”

Sandra Cisneros is the author of several books, including the widely acclaimed novel The House on Mango Street. In addition to establishing the Latino McArthur Fellows, she is the founder of two organizations that serve writers: the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award, and the American Book Award. Cisneros has been writing for more than 45 years, and her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Her most recent book is A House of My Own. Cisneros lives in central Mexico.

Elena Passarello is the author of the essay collection Let Me Clear My Throat, a finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Awards. Her essays on pop culture, performance, and the natural world have appeared in several publications, including Oxford American, Creative Nonfiction, and Slate. She is the recipient of the 2015 Whiting Award in Nonfiction and is a member of the creative writing faculty at Oregon State University. Her latest collection of essays, Animals Strike Curious Poses, was published by Sarabande Books in July 2016.

Jesse Eisenberg interviewed by Jon Raymond Oct 20, 2016

Show notes

This episode of The Archive Project features a conversation between Academy Award-nominated actor Jesse Eisenberg and Portland novelist and screenwriter Jon Raymond, recorded at Wordstock: Portland’s Book Festival in 2015. Eisenberg is known for his iconic film roles, as well as regular pieces in The New Yorker and three critically acclaimed plays. During this conversation, he presents his fiction debut, the whip-smart Bream Gives Me Hiccups: And Other Stories. The National Post called the collection, “Funny and poignant, a darkly comic look at family, insecurity, and, briefly, Cameroonian separatism.”

I realized that during this difficult transition that we all make to these different stages of our lives, we react to things usually with kind of these histrionic emotions that we didn’t even know we had.”

“One of the great things about acting is that it forces me to get into the emotional experience of a character in a way that maybe if I was sitting in my room trying to conjure it [through writing], it would be either less effective or more inefficient.”

“Now the two things seem unrelated as finished products, but that’s the nature of art—whatever you’re doing seems to infect everything else.”

Jesse Eisenberg is an Academy Award-nominated actor, playwright, and contributor to The New Yorker and McSweeney’s. His acting credits range from indie films like The Squid and the Whale to Oscar contenders like The Social Network. His latest film is Batman v. Superman, in which he takes on the role of the villainous Lex Luthor. Eisenberg is also the author of three plays, including The Spoils, which won the Theater Visions Fund Award. In 2015, he published his first book, Bream Gives Me Hiccups, a short story collection.

Jon Raymond is the author The Half-Life and Rain Dragon, both novels. He also wrote the short story collection Livability, which was chosen as a Discover Great New Writers selection by Barnes & Noble. His screenwriting credits include Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, and Night Moves, which features Jesse Eisenberg in the lead role. Raymond currently serves on the Board of Directors for Literary Arts, and his next novel is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2017.

Mohsin Hamid Oct 05, 2016

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, author Mohsin Hamid discusses his childhood transitions from Pakistan to the United States and back again, citing Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons as two of his earliest storytelling influences. He goes on to highlight moments on his journey as a writer, including how Moth Smoke, his debut book, began as his Harvard Law thesis; how he convinced a supervisor to let him have three months off each year to work on his writing; and the most basic human trait that unites us all: mortality.

“At one point, [Douglas Adams] writes that ‘the secret to flying is throwing yourself at the ground and missing.’ And that is really how I approach writing novels. I throw myself at the ground and hit, repeatedly, for years—I write draft after draft after draft…and eventually, hopefully, I miss.”

Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid is the author of three novels and one collection of essays. His debut book, Moth Smoke, was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award, propelling him from his career as a management consultant in New York to an author in his hometown of Lahore. His second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was an international best seller, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and adapted into a movie directed by Mira Nair. His book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations, contains his reflections on life over the past 15 years. Hamid spent much of his childhood and early adulthood alternating between life in Pakistan and life in the United States. From this experience, Hamid has noted, “I’m somebody who can blend in usually quite quickly, but inside continues to retain a sense of feeling foreign.” In addition to living in Lahore, New York, and California, Hamid spent eights years in London following the start of his professional writing career. Of the central theme of his works, Hamid has stated, “All of my novels are love stories, in a way. I think love is kind of the plot in our lives, you know? It’s embedded in the culture and even the religion of the part of Pakistan I’m from, which is that one of the ways in which we can confront the horror of being mortal and dying one day is to love enough that we’re not so central to ourselves that we can’t face the fact that we’re going to end.”

Al Gore Jun 08, 2016

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, former vice president and environmental activist Al Gore discusses the past, present, and future state of the world in the context of global warming. He supports his argument for the need for change with extensive scientific research and discusses the merits of various alternative energy resources. He focuses the latter half of his lecture on emphasizing the need to prepare and assist the next generation with the climate challenges ahead.

It is possible to make the choice to shift away from a source of energy on which we now depend that is dirty, polluting, vulnerable, going to be in short supply, very expensive, and connected to national security concerns to a new source of energy that is based on fuel that is free forever.”

“In the last 100 years, we have quadrupled the number of people on the Earth, and that increase will continue through 2050—halfway through this century—when it’s expected to stabilize just above 9 billion.”

“There is an old African proverb that I site in the book: ‘If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’ We have to go far, quickly—which means we have to get our act together, quickly.”

Born in Washington, D.C., Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. had a political life from day one. His father was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, and his mother was one of the first women to graduate from Vanderbilt Law School. Gore spent half his childhood in a hotel room in the nation’s capitol during the school year, and the other half on his family’s Tennessee farm during the summer. He went on to attend Harvard, where he wrote his thesis on “The Impact of Television on the Conduct of the Presidency, 1947-1969” and roomed with actor Tommy Lee Jones.

In 1988, Gore won five southern states in a bid for the Democratic nomination on Super Tuesday, but eventually lost to Michael Dukakis. He later became Bill Clinton’s running mate and, eventually, the Vice President of the United States. In 2000, he successfully achieved the Democratic presidential nomination, but ultimately lost the election to George W. Bush. In the years that followed, Gore focused much of his energy on highlighting climate change and won the Nobel Prize for his environmental activism. His best selling books include Earth in the Balance, An Inconvenient Truth, The Assault on Reason, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, and The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change.

Andrei Codrescu Jun 02, 2016

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, Andrei Codrescu shares an epic poem he wrote in honor of Portland’s Lovejoy Columns, which once supported the now demolished Lovejoy Ramp at the Pearl District entrance to the Broadway Bridge. The columns themselves were sparred from demolition by the efforts of the architectural group Rigga, who are introduced at the beginning of Codrescu’s lecture. Following his reading, Codrescu answers questions from the audience about his thoughts on the past and future of Portland, art, and poets—among other topics—weaving his trademark dry humor and frankness throughout his discussion.

I don’t like things, you know? I am sort of intrigued by them…That’s the most you can do with the world is find it interesting—if you like it, you’re doomed.”

“The danger of it…is that it doesn’t leave room for the unpredictable. You can plan too far ahead and you take all of the shadows out and then it becomes very, very boring—you know, like all Utopias. Nobody really wants to live in paradise.”

“That’s why I think every city bureaucratic should be doubled by a poet. Or they should live with a poet, or you know, keep a poet as a pet. Poet is just pet with an o.”

“We need to be saved from our own arrogance in a certain way and the fact that we feel so good. Because feeling good is not great. Feeling good leads to fascism, you know? When people feel really good they want to march somewhere and beat people up—that’s fascism. It’s good to be a little sick. It makes you sensitive and it gives you empathy. So, I mean, an excess of health is what we really need to be saved from.”

“I have always found if you slide a little French word in your title, things sound better.”

Born in Romania, Andrei Codrescu emigrated to the United States in 1966. His first book of poetry, License to Carry a Gun, won the 1970 Big Table Poetry award. In 1983, he founded Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Books & Ideas and became a regular commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered. In 1989, he returned to Romania to cover the fall of the Ceausescu regime for NPR and ABC News. From this experience, he wrote The Hole in the Flag: an Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution. Codrescu is the author of over forty books, including The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess, Jealous Witness, and Whatever Gets You Through the Night. He is also a screenwriter and received the Peabody award for his film Road Scholar, which he also starred in. He has taught literature and poetry at Johns Hopkins University, University of Baltimore, and Louisiana State University, where he was MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English.

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