The Archive Project

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

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.

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. 

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. 

This week, we continue to celebrate National Poetry Month with a conversation from the 2023 Portland Book Festival.

Jane Hirshfield is one of our most important living poets, and last year she released The Asking, a new and selected volume. Hirshfield has published ten volumes of poetry, two now-classic essay collections on the craft of poetry, and she has co-translated four books presenting world poets from the deep past.

Hirshfield is in conversation with her friend and fellow poet, Major Jackson, host of The Slowdown podcast and newsletter, who also released a new and selected, titled Razzle Dazzle, which collects two decades of his work. Hirshfield and Jackson share a send of the global and the personal, and a love of language.

Our moderator is a celebrated poet himself, Matthew Zapruder, whose most recent book is the memoir Story of a Poem.

They talk about the experience of revising the past to create these overviews of their work, and their excitement about the new poems. Hirshfield talks honestly about how emotional it was to revisit her past work and therefore a version of her past self, which Jackson described as a kind of time travel. They also talk about our present moment, and the role of art when there is so much urgency in the world at large—the importance of poetry, of art, to bear witness to that urgency.

Writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections and is one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. Hirshfield’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s also the author of two now-classic collections of essays on the craft of poetry, and edited and co-translated four books presenting world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield’s work, which has been translated into seventeen languages, appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019.

Major Jackson is the author of six volumes of poetry. His honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The poetry editor of the Harvard Review and the host of the podcast The Slowdown, Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently I Love Hearing Your Dreams, forthcoming from Scribner in September 2024, as well as two books of prose: Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine, and was the Editor of Best American Poetry 2022. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.

As part of 2023 Portland Book Festival Cover to Cover, a weeklong event series with bookish events happening all over the Portland area, local bookstore Broadway Books hosted an evening honoring the late Oregon writer Barry Lopez. Broadway declared 2023 the “year of reading Barry Lopez,” and we gathered three writers to share their memories of Barry and what his work meant to them, centered on his posthumous essay collection, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World.

Barry Lopez passed away in December 2020. He was known as a nature writer and was awarded the National Book Award and the Oregon Book Award. For many years he made his home in the woods of Oregon, and longtime listeners will have heard him on this program before as Literary Arts hosted him many times, including the book launch for his final publication, Horizon.

To remember Barry as part of Broadway’s celebration of his work, his widow, Debra Gwartney; celebrated poet and his friend Jane Hirshfield; and his editor and friend John Freeman came together to read from the new essay collection and talk about his life and legacy.

Barry Lopez is the author of Arctic Dreams, for which he received a National Book Award and an Oregon Book Award; Of Wolves and Men, a National Book Award finalist; and eight works of fiction, including Light Action in the Caribbean and Resistance, which also won Oregon Book Awards.

We continue to celebrate National Poetry Month with a deep dive into Verselandia!, the annual city-wide high school poetry slam championship. In this week’s episode of The Archive Project, we’ll hear from some of the 2023 competitors, and we’ll follow a few 2024 hopefuls as they compete in their school slams.   

Verselandia! was founded by a visionary team of Portland public high school librarians and educators who ran individual poetry slams at their schools. As the competitions grew, Literary Arts became a partner and the producer of the championship event in April 2012. Now, during the last week of April, National Poetry Month, our annual Verselandia! Youth Poetry Slam Championships draws 1,000 people to cheer on youth poets at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.  

We’ll hear from some of those youth poets over the next hour.   

A quick note to listeners: Portions of this episode contain mature themes that may not be suitable for all audiences.  

Our guide on the road to Verselandia! is our Archive Project producer and editor, Matthew Workman.  

Click here to learn more about Verselandia! 2025.

On this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Barbara Kingsolver in conversation with Jess Walter. Barbara Kingsovler is the author of seventeen books, including nonfiction, short stories, poetry, and novels. Her novels include modern classics like The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna. Kingsolver is known for socially engaged writing that embraces the psychological and emotional. As she has said, “A good book should be trouble and delight the reader.” And few do that as well as Kingsolver.

Her latest novel is Demon Copperhead, set in rural Appalachia, where Kingsolver was raised and lives today. In the book, she remaps Charles Dickens’ Victorian classic David Copperfield onto her real-life community, to illuminate the poverty, broken social and education systems, the influence of industrial agriculture, and the targeting of Appalachians by Big Pharma, and the consequent pervasive and destructive opioid epidemic.

Like Dickens, she tells the story of a resilient kid caught in the crosshairs. The novel is, in the words of The Times UK, “Like Dickens directed by the Coen brothers.” Indeed, despite the subject matter, this novel is a delight to read from the first line, thanks to Kingsolver’s inventiveness and Demon’s distinctive voice. Many critics praise it as her best book yet.

Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts, as well as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.

Jess Walter is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of the Poets, the National Book Award finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, the winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.

This episode features Charles Yu at Portland Arts & Lectures on February 29, 2024.  

Charles Yu first rose to national prominence in 2007 when his debut collection, Third Class Superhero was recognized by the National Book Foundation’s prestigious “Five under 35” program.    

Yu has published three more books of fiction, including Interior Chinatown, which won the National Book Award in 2020. He has forged a diverse writing career that not only includes award winning books, and publishing in places like the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Wired, but also writing for television including shows on HBO and FX.  His work is considered profoundly original, both genre-busting, formally experimental, and also accessible and laugh-out-loud funny, earning him comparisons to Douglas Adams and Philip K Dick.  

In his talk, Yu does what he does best: With his signature self-deprecating, ironic and playful humor, Yu deconstructs the “lecture” genre and by doing so reveals profound insights into what it means to be human and to try to make meaning out of our lives.  

Hailed for his sharp wit and incisive social commentary, Charles Yu is an acclaimed author and screenwriter whose work is as inventive as it is moving. Interior Chinatown, his fourth and most recent novel, is at once a satirical meditation on immigration, assimilation, and Hollywood stereotyping of Asian Americans and a touching portrait of a family.  

A National Book Award winner and a “Most Anticipated Book” by Entertainment Weekly, TIME, The Rumpus, and others, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, who has been cast in the role of “Generic Asian Man” in the ongoing procedural cop show “Black and White,” as he struggles to transcend the rigid and reductive roles available to those who look like him. Both extensively researched and startlingly original,  Interior Chinatown is a profound and topical exploration of the weight of stereotypes, racism, and assimilation in American culture.  

Charles Yu’s previous novel,  How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, was a New York Times Notable Book and a TIME Top 10 Fiction Book of 2010. In his lectures, Yu speaks passionately about a variety of topics, including writing about characters in the margins, representation in Hollywood, and the role of science fiction in his work. 

Charles Yu is a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, and he was nominated for two Writers Guild of America Awards for his screenwriting work on the HBO series, Westworld. In addition to writing for Westworld, Yu has been on writing staffs for shows on FX and AMC. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications. Together with TaiwaneseAmerican.org, he established the Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Writing Prizes, in honor of his parents. He lives in Southern California. 

In this episode, we bring you a talk from Ruth Ozeki. It was the culminating event of the 2023 Everybody Reads program.

Every year, the Multnomah County Library chooses one book they hope the whole city will read. Between January and April, the Library, and their partner organizations, host events based around the themes of the book, and they distribute thousands of free copies—thanks to the Library Foundation—to readers of all ages from across the county. At Literary Arts, our role is to bring the author to town for a talk in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.

The 2023 Everybody Reads program featured Ruth Ozeki and her novel A Tale for the Time Being.

Ozeki is the author of four novels, several of which have been international bestsellers. She is also a filmmaker, a teacher, and, astonishingly, also an ordain Zen Buddhist Priest. In many ways, all of these facets of her professional and spiritual life can be found shaping and influencing A Tale for the Time Being.

Ozkei’s talk is both fascinating and refreshing for her candor about how hard the work of writing fiction can be— a process for her that is, by her own account, frustrating, time consuming, mysterious, and deeply rewarding. The story of how A Tale for the Time Being was completed— and it almost wasn’t— is a ten-year journey interrupted and upended by personal and world events, and sustained by the voice of Nao, the main character, that kept talking to Ozeki the whole time.

“Here’s a tip for emerging writers […] when a character deigns to speak to you, you must stop whatever it is you are doing and write down what they are saying, otherwise they will go an find another writer to talk to.”

Get your copy of A Tale for the Time Being from Bookshop.org

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the award-winning author of three novels, My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, and A Tale for the Time Being, which was a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and has been published in over thirty countries. The Los Angeles Times called the novel “exquisite,” the Washington Post called it a “dazzling tapestry of metaphor and meaning,” and the Oprah Magazine declared it “masterfully woven.” Her latest novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness. Her nonfiction work includes a memoir, The Face: A Time Code, and the documentary film, Halving the Bones. She is affiliated with the Everyday Zen Foun­dation and teaches creative writing at Smith College, where she is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities.

The 2024 Everybody Reads book is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. For information about how to engage with the program, visit the Multnomah County Library’s web site. Gabrielle Zevin will be in Portland on Thursday, April 4 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall for the culminating event of the 2024 Everybody Reads Program. For information about tickets, visit literary-arts.org.