The Archive Project

Latest Episodes:

Madeline Miller, in conversation with Omar El Akkad (Rebroadcast) Dec 02, 2024

Show notes

“I’m always thinking: This is the story I know, but what is the story I haven’t been told?”

In this episode, we revisit a 2021 Portland Arts & Lectures conversation with novelist Madeline Miller. When we hosted Miller in January 2021, she had not one but two books on the New York Times Best Seller list: The Song of Achilles and Circe. Both books are retellings, in novel form, of ancient Greek myths. But they are also more than simply retellings. Her books are the reinterpreting of myths that reveal new truths from these ancient stories.

Of Circe: “This is the story of a woman finding her power, finding her voice, finding her art. And I love that her art [her witchcraft] was such a significant part of her growth as a character.”

Miller’s work matters because of the way it is iconoclastic. It’s easy to think that Greek myths, and their received interpretations, are immutable and fixed in the history of literature. But Miller reminds us that these stories have always had multiple versions depending on who is doing the telling and what agenda might be behind a particular version. She questions who is centered in the story and who is not, what details are left out and what is embellished? This notion that a storyteller makes choices is important to really understanding, as readers, the mechanics of all stories. Her work also speaks to the power of these Greek myths. For millennia, these myths have been retold, reinterpreted, and remain vibrant and relevant stories for each generation. You only need to look to the incredible popularity of Miller’s work for evidence of this today.

In the second part of the episode, Miller is joined in conversation by Oregon Book Award-winning writer Omar El Akkad.

“Part of what I wanted to do in writing these stories is I really wanted to strip away the part that sometimes makes people feel alienated. or that they feel is very elitist or not relevant. I wanted to make these novels the type of thing that have ‘goodies’ for the people who know these stories, but are really meant to invite everyone in.”

Madeline Miller is the author of The Song of Achilles, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012, was shortlisted for the Stonewall Writer of the Year 2012, and was translated into twenty-five languages, and Circe, which won the 2019 Indie Choice Award, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was named on numerous Best Books of 2018 lists. Madeline holds an MA in Classics from Brown University, and she taught Latin, Greek and Shakespeare to high school students for over a decade. She has also studied at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, and at Yale School of Drama, where she focused on the adaptation of classical texts to modern forms. Her essays have appeared in publications including the Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Lapham’s Quarterly and NPR.org. She lives outside Philadelphia.

Omar El Akkad is an author and a journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work earned Canada’s National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. His latest novel, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, is set to release in early 2025.

Phil Knight (REBROADCAST) Nov 25, 2024

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, we revisit a rare public appearance by one of Oregon’s greatest entrepreneurs, Phil Knight, for the release of his 2016 memoir, Shoe Dog. In this candid and riveting memoir, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company’s early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world’s most iconic and profitable brands.

“I think one of the things that is unique about Nike is that when we go to work on Monday morning and one of our athletes has performed at a high level, everybody in the company—from clerks to the CEO—is lifted by that.”

In 1962, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed $50 from his father and created a company with a simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost athletic shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his lime green Plymouth Valiant, Knight grossed $8,000 his first year. Today, Nike’s annual sales top $30 billion, and the Nike swoosh has become one of the most ubiquitous and recognizable symbols in the world today. But the man behind the swoosh has long remained a mystery. Now, for the first time ever, Knight tells his story, interviewed on stage by New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik. Hear first hand from Knight as he shares his journey toward building one of the world’s most iconic brands.

“A lot of people say, ‘Well, you created a culture’—but it wasn’t me. Basically, it kind of bubbles up from the people. You can’t dictate a culture…it comes from within. I’ve got fingerprints on the culture, but it is by no means dictated by me.”

Special thank you to Nike Inc., Oregon Health & Science University, Weiden + Kennedy, and The University of Oregon for supporting this event.

Phil Knight, cofounder of shoe giant Nike, retired as chairman in 2016 after 52 years at the company. Mr. Knight earned an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Oregon. During his tenure as CEO (1964–2004), Nike became one of the most successful companies in the world. He lives in Oregon with his wife Penny.

Amy Tan (REBROADCAST) Nov 18, 2024

Show notes

In 1989, an unknown writer named Amy Tan published a novel entitled The Joy Club, and the career of a major American writer was born.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we are reaching deep into the archive to 1991, when we hosted Tan because there’s something very special about hearing from a writer at the very beginning of their career. At the time, The Joy Luck Club had been on the New York Times bestseller list for two full years and the movie of the book was in development, with Tan as the writer and producer. There was lots of anticipation about what this writer would do next. Of course, Tan has gone on to have an incredible literary career, publishing half a dozen novels, including the bestseller The Bonesetter’s Daughter, books for children, nonfiction, and most recently a memoir called Where the Past Begins.

In this talk, Tan takes us back through her life to talk about her parents who immigrated from China in 1949, how Mandarin influenced the ways she wrote—and writes—in English, and how she “found her voice by not finding it.” She also talks about her early days first as a freelancer and novice fiction writer when someone told her, upon hearing the premise of the short story that would become The Joy Luck Club, that “no one wants to read about Chinese mothers.” Of course, we now know that millions of readers in 35 counties actually did.

Amy Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life, Saving Fish from Drowning, and two children’s books, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat, which was adapted into a PBS television series. Tan was also a co-producer and co-screenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club. Her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and her work has been translated into thirty-five languages. She lives with her husband in San Francisco and New York.

Malcolm Gladwell in Conversation Nov 11, 2024

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.

Renée Watson, I See My Light Shining Nov 04, 2024

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.

Erica Berry & Sabrina Imbler (REBROADCAST) Oct 28, 2024

Show notes

This episode features a great event from the 2023 Portland Book Festival on the relationships between humans and animals, and on our ideas about the meaning of animals. 

Erica Berry is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, winner of the 2024 Oregon Book Award in creative nonfiction. Erica is based in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, and teaches in Literary Arts Writers in the schools program. 

Sabrina Imbler is the author of How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, which was the winner of the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology. Sabrina writes about creatures and the natural world for Defector. Like me, you might have first encountered Sabrina’s work when their New York Times article “When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid from a Clamp, That’s a Moray” went viral in 2021. 

 As curious and insightful non-scientists writing about the natural world, Sabrina and Erica each fully embrace their subjectivity in their nonfiction, their own personal perspectives. Both writers explore the human tendency to see ourselves in the natural world: We must accept our own animal-ness to know ourselves. 

Our moderator is Elena Passarello, whom you might know as the announcer on Live Wire Radio, and who is also “on the animal beat” thanks to her book of essays, Animals Strike Curious Poses, which won the 2018 Oregon Book Award in creative nonfiction. 

Erica Berry is a writer based in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. She has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, where she was a College of Liberal Arts Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The Yale Review, Outside Magazine, Catapult, The Atlantic, Guernica, and elsewhere. Winner of the Steinberg Essay Prize and the Kurt Brown Prize in Nonfiction, she has received fellowships and funding from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Tin House, the Ucross Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. A former Writer-in-Residence with the National Writers Series in Traverse City, Michigan, she is currently a Writer-in-the-Schools with Literary Arts in Portland. Wolfish is her first book.

Sabrina Imbler is a writer for Defector, a sports and culture site, where they write about creatures and the natural world. Their first full-length book, How Far the Light Reaches, won a 2022 LA Times Book Prize. Their chapbook Dyke (geology) was selected for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature program. Sabrina lives in Brooklyn with their partner, a school of fish, and their cats, Sesame and Melon

Elena Passarello is an actor, essayist, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018, and has been translated into German, Italian, French, and Mandarin. She is the author of the essay collections Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses, the latter of which won the 2018 Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction and made the Best Books of 2017 lists in the New York Times, Guardian, and Publisher’s Weekly. Passarello teaches creative writing at Oregon State University and appears weekly on the PRX radio variety show Live Wire.

The Future: Naomi Alderman (REBROADCAST) Oct 21, 2024

Show notes

This week we have a conversation featuring Naomi Alderman, who joined us for Portland Book Festival in November 2023 for the very first event for her new novel, The Future. Alderman is the author of the mega best-seller, Barack Obama-endorsed, Margaret Atwood-mentored novel The Power. She talks with interviewer Omar El Akkad about the pressure she felt writing this follow-up, about a handful of friends who plot a daring heist to save the world from the tech billionaires who are threatening it. Bookpage called it “A daring, sexy, thrilling novel that may be the most wryly funny book about the end of civilization you’ll ever read.”

The conversation explores different modes of storytelling, from novel writing, of course, and Alderman also shares her experience working on the TV adaptation of The Power and having to approach her own story in a different way once more people became involved. Alderman is also a successful video game designer, and she and El Akkad make a great case about the storytelling in video games.

“Hillary Mantel said, “A novel brings the news.” I love that thought. I’m very interested in novels that speak to what’s happening now.”

Naomi Alderman is the bestselling author of The Power, which was the winner of the 2017 Baileys’ Women’s Prize for Fiction. It was longlisted for the 2017 Orwell Prize and chosen as one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, Entertainment Weekly and the San Francisco Chronicle. The Power topped Barack Obama’s list of his favorite books from 2017 and has been translated into more than thirty languages. Naomi grew up in London and attended Oxford University and UEA. Her latest book, The Future, was released in November 2023.

Omar El Akkad is an author and a journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work earned Canada’s National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. His latest novel is What Strange Paradise, which won the 2022 Ken Kesey Award for Fiction

Viet Thanh Nguyen, in conversation with Tommy Orange (REBROADCAST) Oct 14, 2024

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation with author Tommy Orange from the 2023 Portland Book Festival. Viet Than Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his debut novel The Sympathizer, which sold more than one million copies worldwide, catapulted him to national fame. Since then, Nguyen has gone on to publish two more books of fiction, and a work of nonfiction, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.

He joined us for the Festival on the occasion of the publication of his debut memoir A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. He was joined on stage by novelist Tommy Orange, who wrote the celebrated novel There, There. The two dive into a discussion about Nguyen’s new book, which is formally inventive and unusual in the sense it’s a mix of history, personal memoir, and a biography of his parents–telling an intergenerational story of a family’s forced migration from Vietnam to the United States and the deeply personal impacts this journey. With a wry and ironic sense of humor, Nguyen offers us a tender view into his family’s history; the truth, ironies, and lies behind the so-called American Dream; and how he has come to understand his role as a writer at this specific moment in American life.

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Committed, which continues the story of The Sympathizer, awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, alongside seven other prizes. He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees; the nonfiction books Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award, and his memoir A Man of Two Faces. He is also the editor of an anthology of refugee writing The Displaced. He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles.

Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California. His first book, There There, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the 2019 American Book Award. He lives in Oakland, California.

Tom Spanbauer Oct 07, 2024

Show notes

This episode is a celebration of the life of writer and teacher Tom Spanbauer, who passed away on September 21, 2024.    

Born in rural Idaho in 1946, Spanbauer spent time in Kenya in the Peace Corps after attending Idaho State University. He returned to the United States in 1978 and moved several times before landing in New York City, where he earned an MFA from Columbia University 1988. He published his first novel Faraway Places a year later at the age of 43.     

In 1991, Spanbauer moved to Portland, where he was part of a collection of writers and artists sho shaped the cultural identity and life of the city for decades to come. He did this through his five critically acclaimed novels, and through his radically influential teaching, a critic group he led for nearly three decades called Dangerous Writers, which birthed the careers of dozens of writers. 

The episode features two sperate recordings of and about Tom Spanbauer. The first is a conversation with Suzy Vitello, one of his students, from the 2015 Portland Book Festival, then called Wordstock, and the second is from that same year when he won Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award at the Oregon Book Awards. 

Tom Spanbauer was the critically acclaimed author and founder of Dangerous Writing. His five published novels Faraway Places, The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon, In The City Of Shy Hunters, Now Is The Hour, and I Loved You More (Hawthorne Books, April 2014), are notable for their combination of a fresh and lyrical prose style with solid storytelling. His introductory workshop is an underground legend among emerging writers in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Spanbauer passed away in September 2024.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil (REBROADCAST) Sep 30, 2024

Show notes

To close out the celebration of National Poetry Month, this episode featured poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil at the final event of the 2023-24 season of Portland Arts & Lectures. 

 Nezhukumatathil is an accomplished poet: Literally every one of her four published poetry collections is prize-winning, and she is the first-ever poetry editor of Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of the Sierra Club.   

  In 2020, she turned to prose with a book of essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments, which combines personal memoir with reflections on the natural world. World of Wonders was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in non-fiction and was named Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year. It’s one of those books that will change the way that you see the world around you – the animals, the plants, and the human animals. And who could argue against approaching our own lives, and the lives of others, with a little more wonder?   

  The San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “The nature writing we have been exposed to has been overwhelmingly male and white, which is just one reason that Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s latest essay collection is a breath of fresh air. What makes her work shine is its joyful embrace of difference, revealing that true beauty resides only in diversity.”

The lecture is followed by an audience Q&A moderated by Amanda Bullock, Literary Arts’s Senior Artistic Director.

Nezhukumatathil published a new essay collection, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Other Jamborees, on April 30, 2024.

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