In this episode of The Archive Project, we’re reaching back more than 30 years into the archive to feature the prolific novelist Jane Smiley from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in 1991. This period was an inflection point in her career. At that time, she had established herself as an important and respected American writer, but had yet to find a large audience—to this day, many believe The Greenlanders, published just three years before this talk in 1988, to be a significantly underappreciated novel. Just six months after this talk, Smiley would published her breakout novel A Thousand Acres and would win the 1992 Pulitzer Prize which catapulted her to literary fame.

The title of the talk is, provocatively, “Can Mother’s Think?” The irony here, of course, is that Smiley is both a brilliant artist and a mother. But as a young writer she could not find literature that rendered the experience of motherhood with the depth, nuance, and power she felt it deserved. She discusses the paternal nature of the books that dominate the so-called canon, the relationship of feminism to motherhood, and challenges the notion of unconditional love, a notion that she believes contributed to the dearth of complex mothers in literature. She also talks about a crop of new writers emerging at the time who were changing the very definition of literature by writing about motherhood in new and profound ways.

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and the Last Hundred Years Trilogy: Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age. She is the author as well of several works of nonfiction and books for young adults. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has also received the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. She lives in Northern California.