The Archive Project

Latest Episodes:

Edward P. Jones Feb 18, 2015

Show notes

In a lecture titled “Finding the Known World,” featured in the collection The World Split Open (Tin House 2014), Edward P. Jones opens up about his original fascination with writing and the simple images that inspired him to write an entire novel. In the early 1990s, he became interested in the way slavery and Black history are depicted in America. He read dozens of books on the subject as a means to begin “building a novel.” In the end, Jones discovered that it was his own imagination and heart that fueled his writing, not the books of research and history that he tried to memorize. When Jones lost his job, he spent all his time writing and creating stories. From there, he invented the entire landscape that his stories are set in.

“The reader I tried to satisfy, day after day, was me. But who was I to say whether what I had produced was any good? We are all, in the end, capable of bad taste at any time. Especially when the dominant voice we hear is the one in our head.”

“I suppose it is inevitable that a Black person writing about slavery leads to speculation that the writer has some agenda. I know this is not true about me…I had no issues I wanted to present. I always felt, from the first words to the last, that I was telling a simple story about complex people who usually tried to do the best they could but who often came up short.”

“At heart, I’m just a fiction writer and not a historian. The facts I need are in the imagination, the facts and the truth of a world of what I make up.”

“I do not say this in any grandiose way, but as a simple storyteller, I became responsible for all the people I imagined. I became a god of the world I was creating.”

Edward P. Jones was born in Washington, D.C., in 1950. He attended the local public schools and won a scholarship to Holy Cross College. Seven years after he graduated from college, he earned his MFA at the University of Virginia. After a series of jobs, he began working for a tax newsletter—first as a proofreader and then eventually as a columnist, a position he held for more than ten years. During this time, Jones kept on writing. His first short story was published in Essence in 1976. Since then, he has had stories published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Callaloo. He has taught creative writing at the University of Virginia, George Mason University, the University of Maryland, and Princeton University. Jones’s first collection of short stories, Lost in the City, was published in 1992 and won the PEN/Hemingway Award; it was also shortlisted for the National Book Award and won the Lannan Foundation Award. His first novel, The Known World (2003), received the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and he was named a MacArthur Fellow for 2004. All Aunt Hagar’s Children, Jones’s latest collection of short stories, was published in 2006. (Source: The World Split Open)

Chinua Achebe Feb 07, 2015

Show notes

Chinua Achebe begins his presentation by reading a passage from his 1987 novel, Anthills of the Savanna, as well as several of his poems. The photographer Robert Lyons, who Achebe collaborated with to produce the book Another Africa, joins him on stage. Lyons discusses the role that photography plays in developing stereotypes in African cultures, and he explains his approach to depicting the complexities of the huge, diverse continent. Both Achebe and Lyons talk about their work to broaden the general public’s perspective on Africa.

“I’ve made it my life’s work to talk about my home, because I couldn’t find—in the books I read, in the pictures I saw, in the thinking that I encountered—any awareness of myself. This is really how my interest in writing came about. Because, you see, every people have their story, and, we in Africa, we’re in the unfortunate position of not having our story in the gallery of world stories. And this struck me even as a child.”

“Speed is violence. Power is violence. Weight, violence. The butterfly seeks safety in lightness, in weightlessness, undulating flight.” (from Achebe’s poem “Butterfly”)

Chinua Achebe was born in Eastern Nigeria in 1930. He went to the local public schools and was among the first students to graduate from the University of Ibadan. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation as a radio producer and Director of External Broadcasting, and it was during this period that he began his writing career. Achebe was the author, co-author, or editor of some seventeen books, among them five novels: Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). He was the editor of several anthologies as well, including the essay collections Morning Yet on Creation Day and Hopes and Impediments, and the poetry collection Beware Soul Brother. He was also the editor of the magazine Okike and founding editor of the Heinemann series on African literature, a list that now has more than three hundred titles. Achebe is often called the father of modern African literature. He has received 25 honorary doctorates from universities throughout the world. (Source: The Paris Review The Art of Fiction No. 139)

Colson Whitehead Feb 07, 2015

Show notes

With self-deprecating humor and insight, Colson Whitehead discusses his youth as “a bit of a shut-in” and his development as a writer, poking fun at his early misconceptions about the profession, stating, “Half the reason I got into the writing business was so I could sit on my ass all day.” He goes on to tell anecdotes about the successes that helped his career flourish, as well as his plans for the future. Toward the end of his lecture, Whitehead gives a lengthy reading from his then-upcoming novel, Sag Harbor.

Colson Whitehead was born in 1969 and raised in Manhattan. After graduating from Harvard College, he started working at the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, books, and music. His first novel, The Intuitionist, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and a winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award.

John Henry Days (2001) followed and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. The Colossus of New York (2003) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) was a recipient of the PEN/Oakland Award. Whitehead’s reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications, such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper’s, and Granta. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, A Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. (Source: www.colsonwhitehead.com)

I was a bit of a shut-in. I would have preferred to have been a sickly child, but it didn’t work out that way. I always like it when I read a biography of somebody, like Joyce, or whatever, and it says, ‘They were a sickly child, forced to retreat into a world of imagination.’ It sounds so wonderful. Instead, I just didn’t like going outside.”

“So then I stated thinking about it scientifically. The average book of literary fiction sells, like, 5,000 copies. 5,000 copies, if you’re lucky. Now, assume that everyone loves the book—doesn’t just throw it into the trash in disgust—and, in addition, makes 10 other people read it, who also love it. Let’s say this book has 50,000 readers—50,000 people who love it. But there are 4.5 billion people in the world. You made an impact in the lives of .00—a lot more zeros—01 % of the population. You’re not even a gnat trying to get the attention of an elephant; you’re a microbe in the butt of a gnat trying to get the attention of an elephant.”

“I really don’t like the precocious teenager in fiction. I never really took to Catcher in the Rye. Looking back, if we just gave Holden Caulfield some Prozac and an Xbox I think he’d be better off, and we could save a lot of trouble.”

Nikky Finney Feb 07, 2015

Show notes

Nikky Finney, the 2011 National Book Award winner for poetry, tells a full-house audience that her grandmother’s words have always guided her work as a poet: “To tell a lie is a sin of the highest order.” She gives extensive, fascinating introductions for each of her long-form narrative poems before performing them. Her subjects include family ties, the writing life, oppression, maternity, solidarity, class disparity, and the plight of Black women in America. Both her poems and her commentaries about them are powerful and moving.

“The influence of my grandmother, who was a farming woman in South Carolina, who probably went as far as the tenth grade or so, but who was the most brilliant woman I ever knew, because she mixed her head knowledge with her belly knowledge, and she never let me forget that. And she did make me tell the truth—or else. And I’m still trying to do that with my work. I’m really trying very hard not to skirt the hard things, but to still say them as beautifully as I know how. Because, who needs someone to rant up on a podium? None of us. But who needs somebody at a podium and a microphone to tell the truth for once: we all do. So I thank my grandmother, every day of my life, for not letting me off easy in that way—because I see so many people lying easily today, like it means nothing.”

“I read poetry in Philly for the first time ever. She started walking up, all the way, from in back of the room. From against the wall she came, big coats, boots, eyes soft as candles in two storms blowing. Something she could not see from way back there, but could clearly hear in my voice. Something she needed to know before pouring herself back out, into the icy city night. She came close, to get a good look, to ask me something she found in a strange way missing, from my black woman poetry. Side stepping the crowd, ignoring the book signing line, she stood there waiting, for everyone to go, waiting like some kind of representative. And when it was just the two of us, she stepped into the shoes of her words: ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘You write real soft, spell it out kind. No bullet holes, no open wounds in your words; how do you do that? Write, like you’ve never been hit before.’ I could hardly speak, all my breath held ransom by her question.”

Nikky Finney was born in South Carolina, within listening distance of the sea. A child of activists, she came of age during the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements. At Talladega College, nurtured by Hale Woodruff’s Amistad murals, Finney began to understand the powerful synergy between art and history. Finney has authored four books of poetry: On Wings Made of Gauze (1985), Rice (1995), The World Is Round (2003), and Head Off & Split (2011). The John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Southern Letters and Literature at the University of South Carolina, Finney also authored the fiction work Heartwood (1997), edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. Finney’s fourth book of poetry, Head Off & Split, was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for poetry.

Paul Theroux Jan 29, 2015

Show notes

In one of the earliest recordings of Portland Arts & Lectures, Paul Theroux talks about the definition of travel writing and how, oftentimes, the best travel writing can take place at home. He declares that it is always about discovery and learning something new, whether about oneself or others. Theroux is fascinated with people who go through some kind of struggle or ordeal that forces them to test their limits. He tells personal anecdotes about his life and his travels through China. Although he admits to being initially intimidated by the country, Theroux learned as much as he could about Chinese history and culture, and explains in his lecture how the journey led him to several self-discoveries of his own.

In a travel book, a character might either be the person writing the book or the people in the country where the person is traveling. Travel writing is often a form of autobiography, and has nothing to do with the place that the person appears to be writing about.”

“You can’t suffer without finding something spiritual about yourself.”

“Travel writing is about discovery. It’s impossible to write anything in which there’s no discovery.”

Paul Theroux is an American travel writer and novelist. He was born in Massachusetts as the third of seven children. He left Medford immediately after high school and eventually joined the Peace Corps, where he was sent to Africa, which he would return to many times throughout his life. Theroux’s highly acclaimed novels include Blinding Light, Hotel Honolulu, My Other Life, Kowloon Tong, and The Mosquito Coast. His renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Dark Star Safari, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and The Happy Isles of Oceania. He currently lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod with his wife, Shelia. (source: www.paultheroux.com)

Christopher Hitchens Jan 23, 2015

Show notes

With his signature humor and intellect, Hitchens begins by asking his audience to consider whether morality is innately human or divinely imposed, citing examples of people committing horrific crimes in the name of religion. He denounces the moral relativism of religions and argues that atheists also have strong moral convictions and high principles. His intellectual commentary continues along the lines of his bestselling book, God is Not Great, as he argues that the mythology of religions is not only absurd but, in many instances, destructive. For Hitchens, the beauty and miracle of life in the universe is even more pronounced when it isn’t attributed to and ruled by a “celestial dictatorship.”

Everything we’re made of—cheer up, we’re not just materialists here—everything we’re made of is stardust. You don’t have to despair and become a bored old morose materialist. You still have irony. You still have music, love, sex, landscape, Chinese food, philosophy—which is much more consoling than mere incantation—and you still have the sense of wonder that comes from the extraordinary beauty and symmetry of the universe, and the wonderful kinship that we’re beginning to find out that we also have through our genome.”

“What is claimed by religion is the power to bind and to loose, to save or to condemn—to offer real salvation, to make the promise of paradise or the threat of hell. A great deal rests on it. The religious are claiming to know more than, in my opinion, any primate or mammal can possibly know.”

“I’m sometimes grouped with a tendency or a faction called the new atheists. There’s nothing particularly new about what we say.”

“But for the idea that we are not allowed to know any of this, without divine permission, that it only comes to us as a gift, that we are mere passive recipients of wisdom and that without submission to this celestial dictatorship we wouldn’t even know how to behave well to one another—I think it’s time to go a bit beyond ridicule and beyond indignation and to say very staunchly that we will resist that and that we will enforce and protect our constitution and its patrolling of the frontier between church and state and its liberty of conscience and its long record of people who have been willing to die to uphold, that as I try and put it, ‘Mr. Jefferson, on that wall of separation, build up that wall!’”

Christopher Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, England in 1949. He attended Oxford and was the first person in his family to go to a university. He moved to the United States in 1981, where he wrote for The Statesman and met Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and James Fenton. Hitchens has said, “They persuaded me that it wasn’t enough just to make the point; that style was substance, and that there was something in language itself.” Hitchens also wrote for The Nation, Vanity Fair, and Slate.

Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor, and co-editor of over thirty books, including five collections of essays. His own books, several of which were scathing critiques of public figures, include The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish (1990), The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995) and No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (1999). He has a reputation as an outspoken polemicist, and was perhaps best known for his 2008 book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, a finalist for the National Book Award. He was on book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22: Some Confessions and Contradictions, in 2010 when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Hitchens passed away in 2011.

Frank McCourt Jan 23, 2015

Show notes

Frank McCourt blends satire with honesty as he tells his audience about what led him to becoming a teacher. He begins by discussing the jobs he had before being admitted into New York University, noting that his experience training attack dogs in Germany for the US Army was particularly helpful for his career as a teacher. McCourt also talks extensively about his education in Ireland while he was growing up there, and explains how Catholicism and sin occupied most of his education. By the time he became a teacher, he says, he had stopped going to Confession, but explaining Catholic beliefs became one of the things that engaged his students the most. He also discusses his difficulties with teaching, especially with learning how to control the classroom. He gives a passionate argument that teachers in America are undervalued, and that it will be impossible to fix the American education system without a higher regard for teachers.

“You’re looking at a man who has a very strong sense of sin. It gives you something to write about.”

“In the high school classroom you’re a drill sergeant, a Rabbi, a shoulder to cry on, a disciplinarian, a singer, a low level scholar, a clerk, a referee, a clown, a counselor, a dress code enforcer, a conductor, an apologist, a philosopher, a collaborator, a tap dancer, a politician, a therapist, a fool, a traffic cop, a Priest, a mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, a bookkeeper, a critic, a psychologist—you’re everything.”

[Advice to emerging writers] “The best thing to do is get a notebook and start scribbling, scribbling, scribbling; just like a sculptor with the marble, something will emerge from it later on. It’s like training for the marathon: if you don’t use it every day, you lose it. Writing a book is similar, mentally and psychologically, to training for a marathon.”

Frank McCourt (1930-2009) was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a family with seven children. His family returned to Ireland due to the Depression, but they continued to struggle with poverty. His father abandoned them when McCourt was in his early teens. At nineteen, he returned to the U.S., served in the Korean War, and graduated from Brooklyn College. He wrote the bestselling memoir Angela’s Ashes, which won a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Award. McCourt taught high school English for thirty years, and he received the Ellis Island Family Heritage Award for Exemplary Service in the Field of the Arts and the United Federation of Teachers John Dewey Award for Excellence in Education.

Elizabeth Strout Jan 14, 2015

Show notes

Elizabeth Strout describes this lecture as “Why I think fiction matters.” She declares that in good fiction, a reader finds “the truest things,” and says that she wants to talk about what that phrase means and why it is important to discover. Strout goes on to describe the human experience as necessarily lonely, and she explains how fiction gives us access to the experiences of others; she believes that in this way, fiction facilitates the compassion necessary for understanding ourselves and others. Throughout this discussion of fiction, Strout provides illustrative and humorous anecdotes about her youth and her development as a writer.

“My point is this: we think we know our neighbors; we really think we know our loved ones, our children, our best friends who share confidences with us. But I think my mother was right: we never really do know. It’s always made me very sad and very frustrated. So, basically, I’ve spent my life being plagued ceaselessly with the question, ‘What does it feel like to be another person?’ And I think fiction is one of the places that we come closest to knowing what it might feel like be another person.”

“Reading is celebration of the mystery of ourselves.”

Elizabeth Strout was born in Portland, Maine, and grew up in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire. From a young age, she was drawn to writing things down, keeping notebooks that recorded the quotidian details of her days. She was also drawn to books and spent hours of her youth in the local library lingering among the stacks of fiction. During the summer months of her childhood, Strout played outdoors, either with her brother, or, more often, alone, and this is where she developed her deep and abiding love of the physical world: the seaweed covered rocks along the coast of Maine and the woods of New Hampshire with its hidden wildflowers.

During her adolescent years, Strout continued writing avidly, having conceived of herself as a writer from early on. She read biographies of writers and was already studying—on her own—the way American writers, in particular, told their stories. Poetry was something she read and memorized; by the age of sixteen, Strout was sending out stories to magazines. Her first story was published when she was twenty-six.

Strout attended Bates College, graduating with a degree in English in 1977. Two years later, she went to Syracuse University College of Law, where she received a law degree along with a Certificate in Gerontology. She worked briefly for Legal Services before moving to New York City, where she became an adjunct in the English Department of Borough of Manhattan Community College. By this time, Strout was publishing more stories in literary magazines as well as Redbook and Seventeen. Juggling the needs that came with raising a family and her teaching schedule, she found a few hours each day to work on her writing. (source: www.elizabethstrout.com/about/)

“Fiction is there to let us know we’re not alone. Whatever we’ve thought and felt has probably been thought and felt before.”

“What I try to do when I work is find that sentence that can resonate with the dignity that the human experience deserves, a sentence of muscularity that can hold both the gravity and the felicity of returning us to those more primitive emotions. For me, it means finding the right sound that conveys the combination of truth and compassion.”

A.L. Kennedy Jan 14, 2015

Show notes

A.L. Kennedy gives an amusing lecture about her journey to becoming a writer, beginning with an anecdote about learning to read as a child and how excited she was: instead of telling anyone at school that she could read, Kennedy kept it to herself and therefore only read books that she wanted to read. She also talks about the “oral culture” in Scotland and how big of a role storytelling plays there. Throughout her speech, Kennedy reads excerpts from other writers (such as C.S Lewis) when she wants to show examples of new worlds being created. Her writing began because she wanted to invent her own realities, and she talks extensively about discovering her ability to be a writer and how that changed her life and perception of language.

A.L. Kennedy was born in Dundee in 1965. She is the author of fifteen books: six novels, six short story collections, and three works of nonfiction. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her new book All The Rage—a collection of short stories—was published by Jonathan Cape in spring 2014. It will soon appear in the US and Canada. She is also a dramatist for the stage, radio, TV, and film. She writes for a number of UK and overseas publications and has a blog with The Guardian Online. (source: https://www.a-l-kennedy.co.uk/)

“I’ve gone through a strange couple of years, which has made me reevaluate why I started writing—because I never intended to write, because frankly it’s a ludicrous thing to want to do all the time.”

James McBride Dec 23, 2014

Show notes

In an off-the-cuff lecture, McBride strolls through his childhood in a busy household of twelve to his time at Oberlin College as an undergrad and Columbia as a budding journalist. His vibrant writing career placed him at People magazine, where his sole job was to cover Michael Jackson. Later, he moved on to The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. McBride explains why he left the journalism world to tour the country as a professional musician and composer for nearly eight years. During this time he began to revisit his roots and write about his mother, a venture that turned into his first novel The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother. During his lecture, McBride weaves in his opinion on racial issues in America’s past and present, leading to share his inspiration for researching John Brown, the hero of his latest novel The Good Lord Bird.

James McBride grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, New York. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Music Composition and a Master’s degree in Journalism from Columbia University. He has worked as a staff writer for People, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post before quitting his writing career to spend eight years as a professional musician and composer. His first book, The Color of Water, is a memoir in which the narrative alternates between his own story and exploration of his racial identity and his white mother’s story. McBride explained that this work took fourteen years to write, as his mother slowly revealed herself to him. The memoir has sold over two million copies and was on The New York Times bestseller list for over two years. He went on to write two more novels, and his third, The Good Lord Bird, won the 2013 National Book Award. McBride holds several honorary doctorates and is Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected