In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a conversation from Pickathon 2022. Literary Arts partnered with the Pickathon music festival to program on-stage author readings, and for a live recording of The Archive Project at the Lucky Barn stage. At The Archive Project live, Oregon poet laureate Anis Mojgani led a wide-ranging conversation with Portland-based multidisciplinary writers and artists Dao Strom, author most recently of the music and poetry project Traveler’s Ode/Instrument; and Jon Raymond, author of the recent novel Denial and screenwriter of First Cow and many more projects.

The trio talks about what their processes are like as artists with multiple and often hybrid modes of creativity, how they started as artists and how their genres have changed over the years as they move between music, visual art, filmmaking, fiction, poetry, written versus spoken literary work, and more. It’s interesting to hear how they think about the different pros and cons, as an artist, of more solitary versus collaborative work depending on the kind of art they are making. It’s a wonderfully curious, inquisitive, and open conversation about art and art-making, and we’re grateful to our friends at Pickathon for providing a platform for literary arts at this year’s festival.

Jon Raymond is the author of the novels The Half-Life, Rain Dragon, and Freebird, and the story collection Livability, winner of the Oregon Book Award. He has collaborated on six films with the director Kelly Reichardt, including Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves, First Cow, and the forthcoming Showing Up, numerous of which have been based on his fiction. He also received an Emmy Award nomination for his screenwriting on the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce directed by Todd Haynes and starring Kate Winslet. He was the editor of Plazm Magazine, associate and contributing editor at Tin House magazine, and a member of the Board of Directors at Literary Arts. His writing has appeared in Zoetrope, Playboy, Tin House, The Village Voice, Artforum, Bookforum, and other places. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. Using practices of polyvocality, fragmentation, and (re)assemblage, Strom writes arrangements of poetry, music, image, song and sound, to be experienced as performance, installation, multimedia, recordings, and inside the spaces of a book. Strom is the author of a bilingual poetry/art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, (Hanoi: AJAR, 2018), a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, with song-cycle, East/West, and two books of fiction. She is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital Award and a 2020 Oregon Literary Arts Career Fellowship. She has received support from RACC, Precipice Fund, Oregon Arts Commission, NEA, and others.

Anis Mojgani is Oregon’s current Poet Laureate and the author of five books of poetry. His work has appeared on HBO, NPR, and in journals Bat City Review, Rattle, Buzzfeed Reader, Thrush, and Forklift Ohio, amongst others. A two time National Poetry Slam Champion and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, Anis has done commissioned work for the Getty Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Portland Timbers, and has been awarded artist residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, AIR Serenbe, and the Bloedel Nature Reserve. Originally from New Orleans, Anis currently lives in Portland, OR, where he serves on the Board of Directors for Literary Arts. His latest collection is In the Pockets of Small Gods.