The Archive Project

This episode is a conversation from the 2023 Portland Book Festival on food, cooking, family, traditions, and storytelling. And like some of the best meals, it just happens to be … vegetarian. 

Portland’s superstar chef Gregory Gourdet, chef/owner at kann, which was awarded “Best New Restaurant 2023” from multiple outlets, including the James Beard Awards, is also the author of a wonderful cookbook, Everyone’s Table. Gourdet led a conversation between fellow Portland chef and restauranteur Aaron Adams of Fermenter, which last year published a Fermenter cookbook co-authored by Portland’s own Liz Crain (Dumplings Equal Love) about vegan fermentation. 

Joining our Portlanders is recipe developer Hetty Lui McKinnon, frequent contributor to New York Times Cooking and author of To Asia, with Love and, most recently, the cookbook Tenderheart. Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, McKinnon is now based in Brooklyn, New York. 

So why are we talking about cookbooks on a literary show? Food is storytelling, and this conversation reveals the rich stories in our recipes, in what we cook and what we eat. Food connects us to our ancestry and personal food traditions, and can open our world to new tastes, much like we can find both reflections of ourselves in stories and doors to new worlds. Food tells a story, and the group talks about how our food connects us not only to the past but to our present community, and even to the future, in creating new traditions. 

“Everything I do has this kind of nostalgia, a kind of homesickness, a longing for what I had growing up.” – Hetty Lui McKinnon

Aaron Adams: Forever curious about all things culinary, Aaron started venturing into fermentation when seeking to expand his repertoire after switching to a vegan diet. Years later, you can find house fermented and cultured foods, from tempeh and koji to sauerkraut and kombucha, finding center focus at his restaurants. Wanting to share his fermentation knowledge in an easy-to-understand way, Aaron worked to create his first book, Fermenter: DIY Fermentation for Vegan Fare. Come say “Hi” to Chef Aaron while he’s working service at Workshop or Fermenter when you’re in Portland, Oregon.

Liz Crain is the author of Food Lover’s Guide to Portland and Dumplings Equal Love, and coauthor of the cookbooks Toro Bravo and Hello! My Name Is Tasty, as well as Grow Your Own: Understanding, Cultivating, and Enjoying Cannabis. Her latest cookbook is Fermenter: DIY Fermentation for Vegan Fare coauthored with chef Aaron Adams. She is a longtime writer on Pacific Northwest food and drink, and her writing has appeared in Lucky Peach, Food & Wine, the Sun magazine, the Progressive, and the Guardian. She is also a seasoned copywriter, fiction writer, as well as co-organizer of the annual Portland Fermentation Festival.

Hetty Lui McKinnon is a Chinese Australian cook and food writer. A James Beard Foundation finalist, she is the author of four other cookbooks, including the much-loved To Asia, With Love (2021), the award-winning Family: New Vegetarian Comfort Food to Nourish Every Day (2019), Neighbourhood: Hearty Salads and Plant-Based Recipes from Home and Abroad (2017), and Community: Salad Recipes from Arthur Street Kitchen (2014). Hetty is also the editor and publisher of multicultural food journal Peddler and the host of the magazine’s podcast The House Specials. She is a regular recipe contributor to The New York Times, Bon Appetit, Epicurious.com, and ABC Everyday; and her recipes have appeared in Food52, the Guardian, The Washington Post and more. Born and raised in Sydney, she now resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Gregory Gourdet is a celebrated chef, best-selling author, and television personality. He is best known for his award-winning cuisine, bevy of TV appearances, and trendsetting role in the culinary boom of Portland. A native of Queens, NY, Gregory ran the kitchen at Portland’s Departure Restaurant + Lounge for 10 years, leaving in 2019 to focus on opening kann. An avid traveler and lifelong student of food and culture, Gregory has made a name for himself by infusing methods and ingredients from all over the world, balanced together with his own Haitian heritage, and creating signature flavors adored for their seasonality, boldness, complexity, and spice. He was named “Chef of the Year” by both Eater Portland and the Oregon Department of Agriculture, and is a James Beard Award nominee and two-time Bravo Top Chef finalist. In 2021, Gregory released his first cookbook, Everyone’s Table: Global Recipes for Modern Health, the ultimate guide to cooking globally-inspired dishes free of gluten, dairy, soy, legumes, and grains.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature renowned author, Mary Beard. Probably the most famous classicist in the world, Mary Beard is best known for her international bestsellers SPQR, about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, and Women & Power: A Manifesto, a study of ancient and modern attitudes toward female speech. She joined us in the fall of 2023 to talk about her latest book Emperor of Rome, which explores the power of the office of Roman emperor.

Given the huge amount that has already written about the classical world, it’s hard to imagine what there’s left to say. And yet, Beard has found a large and eager reading audience precisely because she takes material that is both familiar and remote, often presented with great formality, and humanizes the people depicted therein, be they emperors or their servants. She breathes life into the ancient world and helps us experience it in all its complexity and contradictions with humor, irony, and love for her subject.

Beard was a professor at Cambridge University for more than 40 years and her talk is a rare treat of getting to hear from someone who has spent a lifetime talking about their work, and making it accessible and relevant, to thousands of students.

Mary Beard is the author of the best-selling The Fires of Vesuvius and the National Book Critics Circle Award–nominated Confronting the Classics and SPQR. A popular blogger and television personality, Beard is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. She lives in England.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we reach back deep into the archive for a lecture by Caryl Phillips from Portland Arts and Lectures in 1999. It’s a fascinating talk about the tragic life of singer and songwriter Marvin Gaye. 

Caryl Phillips was born on the Caribbean Island of St. Kitts in 1958 and was raised in Leeds, England. His career began in the 1980s British theater and quickly established him as a new and exciting voice. His first novel The Final Passage, published in 1985, was a breakout success and revealed a writer who would forge a long career writing for the stage, and the page, for the radio and the screen. He also became a celebrated teacher, and a successful editor.  

He joined Portland Arts & Lectures at a moment when his career was gaining wider recognition and as he was playing a greater international role advocating for writers, including giving the keynote speech at the PEN International Congress in 1998 in Stockholm. 

In this talk, Phillips takes on the life of Marvin Gaye as his subject, including how racism shaped Gaye’s life and musical career, his troubled relationship to masculinity and sexuality, and his sense of identity on both sides of the Atlantic. It is a tragic life, ultimately, and Phillips explores it with a clear sense of how our history is global, and deeply personal. 

Note: Many of the subjects discussed in this talk many not be suitable for all listeners. 

Caryl Phillips is the award-winning author of eleven novels, four stage plays, and five volumes of nonfiction, in addition to numerous radio plays, scripts, and essays. Identity, migration, and history are among the main themes of his writing, which also stands out for its formal daring.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a conversation with Michael Lewis from the 2023 Portland Book Festival. Lewis is the author of 17 books of nonfiction including Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and Flashboys. His books are about unconventional people doing extraordinary things, usually behind the scenes.

Lewis joined Portland Book Festival to talk about his new book, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon. It’s a book abouset Sam Bankman-Fried and the eventual collapse of his cryptocurrency hedge fund, Alameda Research, and the exchange he also founded, called FTX.  At the time of this conversation, Bankman-Fried had just been found guilty of seven Federal charges, all finance-related, and was awaiting sentencing. It was a trial that many consider the biggest and most important in the world of finance in decades, and was one that was watched closely all across the world.

Lewis had unrestricted access to Bankman-Fried, spending over year reporting as he amassed one of the largest fortunes in the world and then lost everything as his businesses collapsed. The result of that reporting in Going Infinite paints a picture of a Bankman-Fried that is very different than how he was portrayed in the press and by government prosecutors. Lewis offers a perspective on Bankman-Fried and many of his closest colleagues that is rooted in understanding their deeper motives, how they were shaped as a generation, and how and why they made the mistakes they made. His conclusion is both startling and important to reckon with for its consequences in our society, regardless of whether you followed the case closely or not.

Lewis is in conversation with Literary Arts’ Executive Director, Andrew Proctor.

Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Undoing Project, and The Fifth Risk. His most recent book is Going Infinite. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his family.

Andrew Proctor has been the director of Literary Arts since 2009. Born and raised in Canada, Proctor, earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Music at Concordia University in Montreal, and later worked in London for the Cultural Attaché to the Canadian High Commission. In the UK, he also earned an MA in English Literature at the University of East Anglia under the supervision of England’s then Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. From 2000-2004 Proctor worked as an editor for HarperCollins in New York City and then as the Membership and Operations Director of the PEN American Center, a global literary and human rights organization focused on the welfare of writers and editors. In total, Proctor has worked in the literary world for over twenty years in the governmental, for profit and nonprofit sectors.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we have an event from the 2023 Portland Book Festival featuring two wonderful poets, whose friendship and fandom shines through in their conversation. Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle and host of The Slowdown poetry podcast and newsletter interviews fellow poet Tracy K. Smith about her latest book, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul.

To Free the Captives is a personal manifesto on memory, family, and history that explores how we in America might come to a new view of our shared past. In their discussion of the book, Jackson and Smith touch on a multitude of subjects personal, political, and even spiritual, and they keep coming back to the importance and impact of language, and the power language has for liberation, but also for captivity and enforcing hierarchy.

Tracy K. Smith is a librettist, translator, and the author of five acclaimed poetry collections, including Life on Mars, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States. She lives in Massachusetts.

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.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature nonfiction writer David Grann on the release of his new book, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.

Grann’s literary journalism combines archival research with in-person interviews and on-the-ground investigation, and it’s said that he’s obsessed with stories and how they are told. Grann has said, “Stories and narratives are always the way I try to make sense of the world. I think that’s why we all tell stories. …I think it’s interesting how reality can blend into myth and fiction—and how we tell these stories can shape us as people, and shape us as nations.”

Those themes reverberate in his other work, including as a New Yorker staff writer and in the National Book Award finalist and bestseller Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which was recently made into an Oscar-nominated film of the same name, directed by Martin Scorsese. In fact, Grann has been called “the man Hollywood can’t stop reading.” His first book and two of his New Yorker stories have also been adapted, with at least two more of his projects in the works.

New York Magazine declared Grann “one of preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today,” and he was named the inaugural Barnes & Noble Author of the Year in 2023.

David Grann is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z. Killers of the Flower Moon was a finalist for The National Book Award and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award. He is also the author of The White Darkness and the collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. Grann’s storytelling has garnered several honors, including a George Polk Award. He lives with his wife and children in New York.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature legendary actor, filmmaker, and writer, Tom Hanks. Hanks was joined on stage at the Keller auditorium in May 2023 by fiction and screenwriter Jon Raymond.

What’s great about this conversation is that the through line involves Tom Hanks’s longtime make-up artist Danny Stripeke; because in many ways it reveals why Hanks is such an incredible storyteller and a magnetic personality. In the spring of 2023, Hanks had published his second work of fiction and his first novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece. It isn’t a novel about how to make films, nor one about the celebrities who act in them. It’s about the hundreds of people you never see on screen, but are the ones who actually make the film: the gaffers, and electricians, the producers and directors, the prop crew, and yes the make-up artists.

In this conversation, Hanks talks about his childhood and the long journey of his career, one in which he has been actor, producer, director and writer. With humor and reverence, he retells the stories of the incredible cast of characters he has met along the way, while also talking about the chaos and absurdity of shooting a film and the surprises in the process, both thrilling and sometimes disappointing, that come with the massive, collaborative undertaking of making cinema.

Tom Hanks has won Academy Awards for best actor for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. He has starred in, among many other films, Big, Sleepless in Seattle, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile, Cast Away, Catch Me If You Can, Captain Phillips, Bridge of Spies, Sully, Toy Story, The Post, and It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. He is also the author of a best-selling collection of stories, Uncommon Type.

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.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature best-selling, award-winning novelist Ann Patchett, who discusses her latest novel, Tom Lake, with Portland’s own Cheryl Strayed.

Ann Patchett is one of our most beloved contemporary authors. She is the author of two children’s books, four books of nonfiction, and nine novels. The New York Times Book Review has said “expect miracles when you read Ann Patchett’s fiction.” She is masterful at portraying specific moments that shed light on universal truths, and her newest book, Tom Lake, is exemplary. Our narrator is Lara, who is at her husband’s family cherry orchard with their three grown daughters, home because of the pandemic. Lara recounts her time performing at a summer theater company – and keeps to herself some of the details of her steamy summer romance with a future Hollywood heartthrob. In true Patchett fashion, the book is about intimacy, but also about secrets and the nature of the truth; about choices and roads not taken; about how during a global crisis it is okay to be happy that your kids are home. She says of the book that she set out to recreate the sense that, “in a world and a planet that is going to hell, there is still so much beauty and so much joy.”

Ann Patchett is the author of novels, most recently the #1 New York Times bestselling Tom Lake, works of nonfiction, and children’s books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner, the Women’s Prize in the U.K., and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and Time magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. President Biden awarded her the National Humanities Medal in recognition of her contributions to American culture. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the owner of Parnassus Books.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times best seller Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which was the first selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 and became an Oscar-nominated film starring Reese Witherspoon; Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, a national best seller now the basis of the WBUR podcast Dear Sugar Radio, co-hosted with Steve Almond; and Torch, her debut novel. Her books have been translated into forty languages, and her essays and other writings have appeared in numerous publications.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Zadie Smith in conversation with New Yorker staff writer Parul Sehgal from the 2023 Portland Arts & Lectures series.

Smith is one of the preeminent fiction writers of our age. She burst onto the stage in the year 2000 with her debut novel, White Teeth. It was a huge bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, and signaled a bold new talent had entered the literary world. Since then, she has published six novels, two collections of stories, and three collections of essays in addition to dozens of book reviews and criticism in some of the most influential publications in the world, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books. She has become an important public intellectual and a voice for a generation that came of age around the turn of the millennium.

What is special about this episode is Smith does relatively few public appearances; the last time she was on our stage was more than twenty years ago. The occasion for joining us this fall was the publication of The Fraud. Her new book, a historical novel, is particularly notable as it is a big departure from her previous work, which has been primarily preoccupied by contemporary life. The conversation you are about to hear is remarkable for Seghal’s breadth of knowledge of Smith’s work, and for how this brings out a broad conversation about the power of novels to humanize and complicate the small ethical dilemmas we have every day and the big existential issue of our time. Smith also talks about how she was inspired to take on her first work of historical fiction, in part, because of the ways in which she feels history can often be too easily simplified or “flattened” by what she calls the “narcissism of the present.”

Zadie Smith is a critically acclaimed fiction writer, essayist, and playwright, whose work includes the novel White Teeth, winner of the Guardian First Book Prize, and On Beauty, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her nonfiction has appeared widely in publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, and her essay collections include Feel Free, winner of The National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002 and has twice been named a Granta 20 Best Young British Novelist. In 2022, she received The Pen/Audible Literary Service Award for her “unparalleled attention to craft and humane ideals,” and helping to “guide future generations of writers and readers to embrace and explore culture across genres and media.” Her sixth novel, The Fraud, will publish in September 2023. She is a tenured professor of creative writing at New York University and lives in London.

Parul Sehgal is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Previously, she was a book critic at the Times, where she also worked as a senior editor and columnist. She has won awards for her criticism from the New York Press Club, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. She teaches in the graduate creative-writing program at New York University.

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.