The Archive Project

Latest Episodes:

Rachel Kushner & Danzy Senna (Rebroadcast) Jul 21, 2025

Show notes

This week’s episode features one of the most highly anticipated conversations from the 2024 Portland Book Festival. Author Rachel Kushner joined the festival with her most recent novel, the Booker Prize finalist Creation Lake, her take on a noir spy thriller. We paired her with Danzy Senna, whose new novel is Colored Television, the story of a struggling novelist attempting to break into Hollywood. We invited Oregon-based writer Mat Johnson, whose most recent book is the fantastic Invisible Things, to moderate their conversation.

This conversation was titled “Deceit and Dark Humor.” Both novels featuring protagonists who are knowingly lying to the people around them: Kushner’s narrator is a spy tasked with infiltrating an anarchist cooperative in France and is actively deceiving everyone she encounters, while Senna’s protagonist, Jane, spirals into more and more lies as she tries to create a television show with a big-shot Hollywood producer.

We have a special treat at the end of the episode. Another feature of Portland Book Festival is the annual launch of our Writers in the Schools anthology, featuring creative writing from Portland-area public high school students. We’ll hear from two students:

William Nobles, Franklin HS, short story Ceiling Man

Ari Romero, junior at Lincoln HS, piece called Missing the Mark

Rachel Kushner is the author of Creation Lake, her latest novel, The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection, and the internationally bestselling novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books are translated into twenty-seven languages.

Danzy Senna is the author of four previous works of fiction, including the bestselling Caucasia and, most recently, Colored Television, as well as a memoir. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.

Mat Johnson is a Philip H. Knight Chair of the Humanities at the University of Oregon. His publications include the novels Invisible Things, Loving Day, and Pym, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the graphic novel Incognegro. Johnson is the recipient of the American Book Award, the United States Artists James Baldwin Fellowship, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.

Salman Rushdie (Rebroadcast) Jul 17, 2025

Show notes

This episode of The Archive Project features author Salman Rushdie reading from and discussing his 1999 New York Times bestseller The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Just one year after almost a decade in hiding from the Iranian government, Rushdie made his first public appearance in Portland, discussing the ideas, both mythical and musical, that inspired this New York Times bestseller. In his remaking of the myth of Orpheus, Rushdie tells the story of Vina Apsara, a pop star, and Ormus Cama, an extraordinary songwriter and musician, who captivate and change the world through their music and their romance. Beginning in Bombay in the fifties, moving to London in the sixties, and New York for the last quarter century, the novel pulsates with a half-century of music and celebrates the power of rock ‘n’ roll. In this episode, Rushdie discusses the musical and mythological influences that inspired this ambitious work of magical realism.

“The thing that I wanted to do most of all was to write a love story. And to find a way of writing a contemporary love story that was neither gushily sentimental nor fashionably cynical, but which could face up to great passion and try and make sense of it. And so, in my usual perverse way, while trying to write a modern story I found myself thinking about an ancient myth.”

Salman Rushdie is the author of several novels, including Grimus, Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and Shalimar the Clown. He has written collections of short stories, including East, West, and co-edited with Elizabeth West a collection of Indian literature in English, Mirrorwork. He has also published several works of nonfiction, among them The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, and Joseph Anton, a memoir of his life under the fatwa issued after the publication of The Satanic Verses. His fourteenth novel, Victory City, released in 2023.

Paul Auster & Siri Hustvedt (Rebroadcast) Jul 10, 2025

Show notes

This week we have a conversation between one of the ultimate literary power couples: Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt.

Paul Auster passed away in April of 2024. The New York Times obituary called him the “patron saint of literary Brooklyn.” He wrote screenplays, poetry, and nonfiction, but is probably best known as a novelist, and as an novelist his best known work is the New York Trilogy—City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, all published in the mid-1980s–which he discusses in this conversation, along with his early career as a translator of poems from the French.

Siri Hustvedt is a novelist and essayist; her essays include the collections A Pleas for Eros and the memoir The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. Her novels include The Summer Without Men and The Blazing World. In this conversation she talks about the book she was writing at the time, The Sorrows of an American.

Auster and Hustvedt were married in 1982. They came to Portland in January of 2006 and interviewed each other. At times it feels as if you are eavesdropping on an especially intelligent dinner table conversation. Their respect for each other’s work is delightful to hear – and several of the questions they remark they’ve never asked the other! It’s a rare opportunity to listen in on two great minds in conversation.

Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Bloodbath Nation, Baumgartner, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. Among his other honors are the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, and the Premio Napoli for Sunset Park. In 2012, he was the first recipient of the NYC Literary Honors in the category of fiction. He was also a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions), the PEN/Faulkner Award (The Music of Chance), the Edgar Award (City of Glass), and the Man Booker Prize (4 3 2 1). Auster was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He died at age seventy-seven in 2024.

Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, three collections of essays, a work of non-fiction, and six novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her most recent novel The Blazing World was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won The Los Angeles Book Prize for fiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.

Connie Chung (Rebroadcast) Jun 16, 2025

Show notes

This week’s episode features the trailblazing, legendary journalist: Connie Chung, in conversation about her new memoir, CONNIE. In her book, Chung shares the story of her decades-long career as an Asian woman in the white-male-dominated world of broadcast journalism, when she relentlessly pursued stories and fought hard for scoops. Her hard work – her schedule for many years was truly unbelievable, with six days of work on multiple programs at her own request — Her hard work, which she connects to her Chinese family tradition, catapulted her onto the co-anchor chair on the CBS Evening News and made her a household name.

Chung relates her battles and her victories with wit and humor and doesn’t hold back from calling out the sexism and racism she endured throughout her career. The book is also a portrait of an era in broadcast news where the lines between serious investigative journalism and tabloid fodder became blurred, a line Chung was often forced to walk against her will.

Journalist Lisa Ling, of CBS News, said, “For generations of Asian Americans, Connie Chung will always be our superhero. Someone who looked like us who, on a national stage, held our most important political leaders accountable. She was bold, aggressive, and unafraid. So many of us pursued broadcast journalism because she singularly showed us it was possible. I didn’t think I could respect her any more than I already do, but this most candid account of her journey reminds us that Connie Chung is nothing short of a true American icon.”

Connie Chung was interviewed by Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor, in front of a live audience in September 2024.

Connie Chung, pioneer news anchor and reporter was the first woman to co-anchor the CBS Evening News, the flagship news broadcast on CBS. Connie was only the second woman to anchor any network evening broadcast in television history.

Renée Watson, I See My Light Shining (Rebroadcast) Jun 09, 2025

Show notes

This episode features readings and conversations from an event entitled “I See My Light Shining.” The event was a part of the Elders Project, which is sponsored by Columbia University and features interviews with African Americans from across the country. Here in Portland, acclaimed writer Renée Watson interviewed dozens of Portlanders about their lives for the project.

Through the episode, we’ll take you through the event and hear the stories of some of the elders Watson interviewed. In this episode, we interview Watson about growing up in a predominantly black neighborhood in Northeast Portland, and how that community shaped her as a person.

The event was hosted by Watson, and our guide for the episode is The Archive Project producer Matthew Workman.

Renée Watson is a #1 New York Times Bestselling author. Her young adult novel, Piecing Me Together, received a Coretta Scott King Award and Newbery Honor. Her children’s picture books and novels for teens have received several awards and international recognition. Many of her books are inspired by her experiences growing up as a Black girl in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry and fiction center around the experiences of Black girls and explore themes of home, identity, body image, and the intersections of race, class, and gender.

Watson was a writer-in-residence for over twenty years teaching creative writing and theater in public schools and community centers throughout the nation. She founded I, Too Arts Collective, a nonprofit that was housed in the Harlem brownstone where Langston Hughes lived the last twenty years of his life. The organization hosted poetry workshops for youth and literary events for the community from 2016-2019. Watson is on the Council of Writers for the National Writing Project and is a member of the Academy of American Poets’ Education Advisory Council.

Watson grew up in Portland, Oregon, and splits her time between Portland and New York City.

Malcolm Gladwell in Conversation (Rebroadcast) Jun 02, 2025

Show notes

This episode features Malcolm Gladwell in conversation about his newest book, Revenge of The Tipping Point. He spoke with Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor in front of a live audience in downtown Portland in October 2024.

The Tipping Point hit shelves in 2000 and became a true cultural phenomenon, spending a whopping 334 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and turning everyone—from your priest to your barista—into budding social scientists. Multiple New York Times bestsellers followed, including Blink and Outliers, and in 2018, Gladwell co-founded Pushkin Industries, which that seeks to “expand the possibilities of spoken word audio,” and launched his wildly popular podcast, Revisionist History.

In both his books and his podcasts, Gladwell reveals a world of hidden connections, everyday illusions, and overlooked details. He illuminates patterns in our policy and culture, and identifies the tiny tics that drive group behavior, introducing terms like, the Law of the Few, and the 10,000-hour rule into the larger cultural lexicon.

Now, twenty-five years after The Tipping Point, Gladwell has returned to the ideas that first made him a household name. His new book, Revenge of The Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering, finds him once again exploring epidemics and viral behavior. This time, he is driven by a somewhat darker inquiry. We see the consequences of contagious phenomena and rethink the two most significant epidemics of our time: the opioid crises and Covid. Don’t worry, we are still treated Gladwell’s tremendous curiosity and humor, delving into such topics such as cheetah reproduction and the world’s most successful bank robbers.

It is his most serious and personal book to date. With Revenge of The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell again proves himself one our finest storytellers. But more importantly: He helps us reimagine the stories that we tell about ourselves.

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.

National Book Foundation Presents: Awards & Activism May 27, 2025

Show notes

We have been proud to partner with the National Book Foundation to present conversations featuring National Book Award finalists as part of the annual Literary Arts Portland Book Festival. The 2024 event was on the theme of awards and activism. National Book Foundation executive director Ruth Dickey led a conversation between journalist Robert Samuels, co-author of His Name Is George Floyd, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and poet m.s. RedCherries, author of Mother, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award in poetry.

RedCherries’s Mother is a multidisciplinary work of poetry and prose about Indigenous identity; the narrator has been adopted out of her tribe and raised by a non-Indian family, and is now an adult seeking to connect with her origins. RedCherries brings in oral testimony, family lore, and more exploring pasts and futures both real and imaginary. She explains some of the research that she did for the project, and how it came to be in the form it took in Mother.

Likewise, in His Name Is George Floyd, Robert Samuels and his co-author conducted hundreds of interviews with his family and friends in order to understand George Floyd’s singular life, as well as reporting and research into the history of institutional racism in the United States to place that life in the context of the systems this one man was up against. The result is a portrait of a man as well as that man’s America.

The day this episode airs on the radio is May 25, 2025, which marks five years since George Floyd’s death – the book, His Name Is George Floyd, reckons with that day and its aftermath, but is, crucially, also the story of his life.

Both books are deeply personal stories that offer insight into wider histories, drawing together both individual and shared past, present, and future. As m.s. RedCherries says, “storytelling is an act of sovereignty;” telling stories ensure survival.

Robert Samuels is a national enterprise reporter for The Washington Post who focuses on politics, policy and the changing American identity. He is also the co-author of His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction and finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Nonfiction. Samuels has covered social issues in the District of Columbia, national politics and also serves as the newsroom’s analyst for figure skating. He grew up in the Bronx and is an alumnus of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, where he was editor in chief of the school newspaper, the Daily Northwestern. He has also worked as a staff writer at The Miami Herald and the New Yorker.

m.s. RedCherries received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a JD from Arizona State University College of Law. She is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and lives in Brooklyn.

M. Gessen May 19, 2025

Show notes

Every once in a while, a writer arrives in a historic moment who can explain it, even while it is still actually occurring. M. Gessen is one of these writers. They are a part of the lineage of other incredible writers of their moments, like George Orwell, and Hannah Arendt.

Gessen is the author of eleven books and has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2014, and is a columnist for the New York Times. They won the National Book award in 2017 for The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, and became a household name with their bestselling book Surviving Autocracy, which was published in 2020 and written as both a warning and a call to action in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election.

Gessen’s talk is a rare glimpse into their childhood and early professional life – growing up in the Soviet Union and emigrating at the age of 14; their early experience in Boston and how it shaped their life personally and professionally; their return to Moscow as a journalist and a rare and strange meeting with Vladimir Putin, and how their grandmothers’ life stories shaped their work.

Gessen is one of the rare contemporary commentators on authoritarianism who has lived under such a regime, and in a democracy – and they have an urgent warning for us all.

“I’ve always thought that I was very lucky to know when I had to leave (Russia) because one of the hardest decisions that somebody has to make…is figuring out when your home is no longer your home. It was kind of a great favor that Putin did to me.”

M. Gessen is a Russian American author, translator, and journalist. They’ve written 11 books, including Surviving Autocracy, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction), and an award-winning account of the Boston Marathon bombers titled The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy. They spent years covering Putin’s regime in Russia and was famously dismissed as the editor of the Russian popular science magazine Vokrug sveta for refusing to cover a Putin event they felt was propaganda. Gessen received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, an Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. They’ve written for many US publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. Gessen is a distinguished professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College. They live in New York with their wife and children.

First Generation Food: Kristina Cho, Jolyn Chen & Louis Lin May 12, 2025

Show notes

This week we have a conversation from the 2024 Portland Book Festival on first-generation American food: cooking that combines tradition and lineage with evolution and personal stories. The conversation features a cookbook author and home chef, restaurant co-owners, and a writer and food editor.

We’ll hear from Kristina Cho, author of the cookbook Chinese Enough, which blends the flavors of traditional Cantonese cooking with California ingredients, reflecting her current home, and a midwestern sensibility drawn from her upbringing in Ohio. Kristina is joined by Jolyn Chen and Louis Lin, co-owners of the Portland restaurant Xiao Ye, which bills itself as “first-generation American food.” Jolyn is the general manager of Xiao Ye, and Louis is the chef – they’re both business and life partners. They grew up in California, and each worked in hospitality for years before embarking on their own restaurant, where Jolyn designed the space and Louis designed the menu. Our moderator is novelist Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans, who was the editor of the esteemed food magazine Lucky Peach, and also grew up in California.

Kristina, Jolyn, Louis, and Rachel discuss the intersections between their Asian-ness, their American-ness, and their Asian-American-ness, and how that all plays out in their relationships to food. They also talk about how where they grew up shapes their understanding of both food and family, and how the cooking and food they were drawn to comes from what was accessible or not to them early on. This relates to a conversation about the idea of authenticity, which is often misunderstood as being about tradition, but Louis eloquently describes as being true to oneself and where you are – Kristina gives an example of one of the women in her family using Bisquick in her steamed cupcakes.

One thing I loved about this conversation is how clear it is that making food, and, crucially, feeding people – which is the ultimate goal, after all, of both home cooks and restauranteurs – is about nourishment but also about making art, and art that is reflective of both where you came from and where you are now.

Let’s get into the conversation about what it means to make first-generation American food. Here are Jolyn Chen, Louis Lin, and Kristina Cho in conversation with moderator Rachel Khong.

Kristina Cho is an award-winning cookbook author, recipe developer, home cook, baker, food stylist, and photographer. Her groundbreaking debut cookbook, Mooncakes and Milk Bread, won two James Beard awards and was described as an instant classic by The New York Times. Her latest cookbook is titled Chinese Enough.

Jolyn Chen has worn many hats and lived many lives; born and raised in a small suburb of Los Angeles, she attended Cal Poly Pomona’s renowned Collins College and received her Bachelor’s in Hospitality Management. She spent her early years in the industry working in Washington, DC, soaking up all that the burgeoning food scene had to offer. Most notably was her time at Rose’s Luxury, where she really began to foster her own sense of hospitality. In true Jolyn fashion, while working two part-time jobs, she took a third at El Camino Travel, a start-up boutique travel company specializing in small, curated trips to emerging destinations. It was through that experience that she discovered her passion for design.

Jolyn would move back to LA to pursue a career in Interior Design, completing the UCLA Extension program for Interior Architecture while working at Croft House & Ginny Macdonald Design. A few years later, she and Louis would begin their chapter in Portland, where she worked as a designer at Jessica Helgerson Interior Design before embarking on their own personal project, Xiao Ye.

Louis Lin is a child of Taiwanese immigrants and was born and raised in that same suburb outside of LA. Unlike Jolyn, Louis always knew where his path would take him. After getting his degree in Business Economics and Accounting at UC Santa Barbara, he enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone. From there, his career in kitchens began; Louis spent his externship working behind Nancy Silverton at her fine dining Osteria Mozza. Upon graduating from culinary school, at the behest of his best friend, Louis moved to Washington, DC to work for James Beard winner Aaron Silverman at his first restaurant, Rose’s Luxury. Rose’s would go on to receive numerous accolades- Bon Appetit’s best new restaurant in 2014 and a Michelin Star, amongst others. When Silverman opened his second venture, Pineapple and Pearls, Louis would follow him as an opening line cook and help the tasting-menu restaurant earn 2 Michelin Stars in its inaugural year.

In 2017, Louis moved back to Los Angeles and began working at Evan Funke’s Felix Trattoria. It was there that he found his footing; working his way up from line cook to Chef de Cuisine, running day to day operations and overseeing the restaurant that has become the standard bearer for handmade pasta in the country.

Rachel Khong is the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction, and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR; O, The Oprah Magazine; Vogue; and Esquire. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Cut, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and Tin House. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission District. She lives in California, and her latest novel is titled Real Americans.

Emily Wilson May 05, 2025

Show notes

Emily Wilson was cast as Athena in a stage production of The Odyssey at the age of eight. It turned out to be a defining moment in her life, that ultimately set her on a course of decades of passionate and devoted study.

Her 2018 translation of The Odyssey garnered overwhelming critical acclaim, became a bestseller, and is defining how a generation reads Homer, and by extension understands the relevance of classical literature in general. She followed up, in 2023, with her translation of The Iliad.  

Her genius has been to render these ancient stories in swift, unpretentious, contemporary language, allowing us to see that despite the rise and fall of empires, despite dramatic cultural shifts and technological progress, there are some essential truths about human nature—we are creatures of hubris and humility, of conflict and collaboration, of profound selfishness and of profound sacrifice.  

It is not hard to see in Homer’s Greece a startling similarity to our present-day world. Wilson assures us this is embedded in the text, writing in her introduction to The Iliad, “For a twenty-first-century reader, there is nothing unfamiliar about a partisan society riven by constant striving for celebrity dominance and attention.” 

“Tell me about a complicated man,” begins The Odyssey.  From this first line, Wilson establishes herself as one of the most astute translators working in the English language, a translator both of Ancient Greek and of human complexity.  

“A translation, just like an original work of art, needs to have its own vision. And you need to have the humility to know that you can’t do everything. You have to commit to your own vision.”

Emily Wilson is a classicist, translator, professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of the bestselling translations of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad (winner of the 2024 Audie Award for Best Literary Fiction and Classics). In addition to Wilson’s Odyssey and Iliad, she has also published several other translated works, including translations of four tragedies of Euripides published in The Greek Plays: Bacchae, Helen, Electra, and Trojan Women, and translations of Six Tragedies by Seneca. Her other books include The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca, The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint, and Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton. Wilson was named a fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Wilson is a Professor of classical studies and chair of the program in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Wilson lives in Philadelphia with her family and pets.

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