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Li-Young Lee Apr 17, 2015

Show notes

During his lecture, 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. (Source: poets.org)

Barry Lopez Apr 02, 2015

Show notes

In one of the earliest recordings of Portland Arts & Lectures, Oregon writer Barry Lopez begins his lecture with stories about his travels in the Arctic, where he struggled with the language barrier but discovered a word that spoke volumes to him: isumatug, which translates roughly to “storyteller” or “the person who creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself.” Throughout his talk, Lopez focuses on using stories as a way to “get out of the self” and find one’s way back into the universe. According to Lopez, writing about a human’s connection to landscape is one of the most significant things a storyteller can do—it’s not always just an environmentalist’s way to share a political message. Lopez discusses the differences between exterior and interior landscapes, along with the mysteries that they both hold, and defines “story” as the way these two types of landscapes are connected.

Barry Lopez was born in 1945 in Port Chester, New York. He grew up in Southern California and New York City and attended college in the Midwest before moving to Oregon, where he has lived since 1968. He is the author of Arctic Dreams, for which he received the National Book Award; Of Wolves and Men, a National Book Award finalist; and eight works of fiction, including Light Action in the Caribbean, Field Notes, and Resistance. Lopez’s essays are collected in two books, Crossing Open Ground and About This Life. He contributes regularly to Harper’s, Granta, The Georgia Review, Orion, Outside, The Paris Review, and Manoa, among others. His work has also appeared in dozens of anthologies, including Best American Essays, Best Spiritual Writing, and the “best” collections from National Geographic, Outside, The Georgia Review, The Paris Review, and others. His most recent books are Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape and Outside. Lopez is a recipient of several awards, including the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; Guggenheim, Lannan, and National Science Foundation fellowships; and Pushcart prizes in fiction and nonfiction. (source: www.barrylopez.com)

When you really begin to work with story, you see that it is infinitely complex—the more simple it becomes, the more complex it really is revealed to be.”

“Publishing is not a business of trying to serve the most minds; it is a business of trying to take the best of what we are capable of making clear and giving it to as many people as have need of it or sense that in it they find a reflection of the order that they’re trying to establish in the world for themselves.”

“I don’t mean to make a distinction between fiction and nonfiction, but between the inauthentic and the authentic.”

“Part of what you’re trying to do as a reader—or a writer, rather—is respect the mystery of the exterior landscape: you’re never going to get it all.”

Stephen Sondheim & Frank Rich Mar 27, 2015

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.”

Robert Stone Mar 20, 2015

Show notes

Robert Stone begins by comparing morality and art, describing the former as “a neo-Gothic structure: immense, ornate, and sterile” and the latter as “like a black panther…radical, the appealing cousin of crime. Never a dull moment with art.” He discusses the relationship between truth and beauty, and emphasizes the importance of fiction. “Storytelling is not a luxury to humanity,” he says, “it’s almost as necessary as bread. We cannot imagine ourselves without it, because the self is a story.”

He goes on to discuss writing his books and how his travels influenced the political and social aspects of those narratives. Several times he repeats “the first law of heaven: nothing is free.” This lecture is transcribed in the Literary Arts anthology, The World Split Open (Tin House, 2014).

Robert Stone’s novel Dog Soldiers (1974) won the National Book Award. His other novels include A Flag for Sunrise (1981), which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award; Children of Light (1986); and Bay of Souls (2003). He also published a memoir, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, in 2007. His latest novel, Death of the Black-Haired Girl, was published in fall of 2013. He lives in Key West, Florida. (source: The World Split Open)Laughter represents a rebellion against chaos, a rejection of evil, and an affirmation of balance and soundness.”

“There is no brown temple where morality resides. There is no high wire above where the artist whirls in freedom. If there’s a wire, it’s the wire we’re all on out here—the one that we live on—with only each other for company. Our having each other is both the good news and the bad.”

“Fiction is an agent against loneliness, an appeal to community, a bet on the possibility of spanning the gulf that separates one human being from another. “

Bill Bryson Mar 20, 2015

Show notes

With his signature dry humor, Bill Bryson discusses incidents throughout his life that later became part of his nonfiction books. He begins with the story of hiking and his fear of bears, saying that one should “always go hiking with someone who can’t run as fast as you can.” He says that Oregonians have a well-developed, sophisticated sense of humor and notes the similarities to the dry humor in Iowa, where he was raised, and England, where he has lived for several years. Bryson also discusses his fear of flying in small planes and relates an amusing story about a trip to a refugee camp in Kenya where he flew through a storm and was sure he was going to perish. Finally, he discusses how the people he writes about have reacted to being featured in his books, specifically his friend Stephen Katz whom he hiked the Appalachian Trial with and then wrote about in the bestseller A Walk in the Woods.

Bill Bryson’s bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, A Walk in the Woods, and Notes from a Small Island, which was voted the book that best represents Britain in a national poll. His acclaimed book on the history of science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Royal Society’s Aventis Prize as well as the Descartes Prize, the European Union’s highest literary award. He has written books on language, on Shakespeare, and on his own childhood in the hilarious memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. His most recent bestseller is At Home: a Short History of Private Life, and his most recent critically lauded book is One Summer: America 1927, which chronicles a forgotten summer when America came of age and changed the world forever. He was born in the American Midwest and lives in the UK. (source: www.billbryson.co.uk)

It wasn’t until I left the [Appalachian] trail and did additional research and started thinking about things that I realized there were instances along the way that might make a fuller story. Then I actually got a sense that there could be a book about this whole thing.”

“There’s nothing better in the world than to discover books for yourself, rather than have them thrust on you. It’s such a feeling of excitement when you discover something that you think is really good rather than just confirming someone else’s opinion.”

“The great thing about coming from America is that almost anything that’s worthwhile will follow you to wherever you go. Culturally, we are very lucky that America goes everywhere, so there isn’t anything, very much, that you miss.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Mar 20, 2015

Show notes

Ursula K. Le Guin opens with the question, “Where do you get your ideas from?” and replies with her favorite response, from Harlan Ellison: “He says he gets his ideas from a mail-order house in Schenectady.” Le Guin goes on to seriously address the question, because “unanswerable questions are just what fiction writers like to answer.” She discusses the process of all artists’ work, of the connection between experience and imagination, and the tendency for Americans to prefer realism in their novels and to put genre fiction in the literary ghetto. She warns against the dismissal of fantasy: “People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.” She goes on to explain the importance of reading, and how this virtual experience not only feeds writers’ imaginations, but is also a wholly different experience than viewing stories onscreen. She ends with a profound meditation on the nature of rhythm in the world and the way art breaks down barriers between people. This lecture is transcribed in the Literary Arts anthology The World Split Open (Tin House, 2014).

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in 1929 in Berkeley, and lives in Portland, Oregon. As of 2013, she has published 21 novels, 11 volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, 12 books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many honors and awards including the Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, and PEN-Malamud. Her most recent publications are Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2010 and The Unreal and the Real: Selected Short Stories, which received the 2012 Oregon Book Award for Fiction. (from www.ursulakleguin.com)

This is a very radical job, dealing with the ideas you get if you are an artist and take your job seriously, this shaping a vision into the medium of words. It’s what I like best to do in the world, and what I like to talk about when I talk about writing.”

“Fiction results from imagination working on experience. We shape experience in our minds so that it makes sense. We force the world to be coherent, to tell us a story.”

“Literature is a communal enterprise…The stuff from other people’s books gets into us just as our own experience does, is composted and transmuted and transformed by the imagination just as actual experiences are, and comes forth entirely changed.”

Barbara Kopple Mar 03, 2015

Show notes

Kopple opens by talking about being grateful that documentaries are moving into the mainstream, with audiences appreciating these “real-life, nonfiction films.” She then tells about her journey to becoming a filmmaker, which started while she was studying political science in college and, instead of writing a paper, decided to make a short film showcasing people who’d had lobotomies. “My professor was outraged,” she said. “I got a D….but I was hooked.” Kopple goes on to discuss her process making several films, including Winter Soldier, Harlan County, USA, American Dream, Fallen Champ: the Untold Story of Mike Tyson, Century of Women, Wild Man Blues, and My Generation. She emphasizes her desire to portray people in truthful ways—to delve deeper than the headlines and expose her audiences to new perspectives that they would never see otherwise.

Barbara Kopple is a two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker. A director and producer of narrative films and documentaries, her most recent project is the documentary Running from Crazy, which examines the personal journey of writer, model and actress Mariel Hemingway, the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, as she strives for a greater understanding of her complex family history. Barbara has received several awards, including the Human Rights Watch Film Festival Irene Diamond Award, National Society of Film Critics Award, the SilverDocs/Charles Guggenheim Award, , the White House Project’s EPIC Award, the International Documentary Association Career Achievement Award and the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize. In 2010, Barbara received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from American University. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Director’s Guild of America, New York Women in Film and Television, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and actively participates in organizations that address social issues and support independent filmmaking. (source: www.cabincreekfilms.com)

I had parents who did everything, and still do, everything they could for me, and gave me a real sense of self so I could take risks. And I decided that I really wanted to do films that were so far from what I understood and what I knew to sort of bring me closer and make me able to communicate.”

“What was the most important thing for me, really, was to go beyond the headlines, and go beyond the tabloids, and really find out who this kid is, and what he’s about, in a way that nobody else could. And something that I really like to do is to look under a blanket where you’re not supposed to see, and pull things out, and that’s what I tried to do in the Mike Tyson piece.”

Sebastian Junger Mar 03, 2015

Show notes

Journalist and documentary filmmaker 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 war 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.

Sebastian Junger is the internationally acclaimed bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, A Death in Belmont, and Fire. As 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 been awarded the National Magazine Award and an SAIS Novartis Prize for Journalism. The Perfect Storm 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.

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’s work has also been published in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, and Men’s Journal. 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. He has worked as a freelance radio correspondent during the war in Bosnia. He ccurrently lives in New York City and on Cape Cod. (source: www.sebastianjunger.com)

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.”

“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.”

“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.”

Edwidge Danticat, 2010 Feb 26, 2015

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.

Toni Morrison Feb 18, 2015

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.

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