The Archive Project

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 feature a talk by Amor Towles from a Literary Arts special event on February 1, 2023.

Towles is the author of three novels including the huge, international bestseller, A Gentleman in Moscow. He joined us to talk about his latest work The Lincoln Highway, also a bestselling novel, which began for Towles a full twenty years before its publication with a simple initial image: A warden driving a young man home for a juvenile detention center. From this jumping off point, Towles dives into describing his writing process and how he brings to life the large cast of characters that populate his books, and the complex plots that are so satisfying. There are few writers who talk with such clarity about their own process.

Towles also takes time to dwell in the historic context of the novel, the American mid-century, by talking about the extraordinary life of Carl Fisher, an entrepreneur who, among many other accomplishments, developed the first transcontinental highway (called The Lincoln Highway). Towles showed some slides during the talk so you’ll hear the audience react to some visuals, but you won’t miss anything as he does a wonderful job talking through the images. After his talk, Towles and sat down for an extend conversation.

Amor Towles is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Rules of Civility. His novels have collectively sold millions of copies and have been translated into more than thirty languages. Towles lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Leslie Marmon Silko in conversation with Molly Gloss from a special event in 2010, at Portland State University’s Lincoln Hall.

While Leslie Marmon Silko had begun to publish poems and short stories in the 1960s, it was her iconic and ground-breaking novel, Ceremony, published in 1978, that established her as one our greatest living writers. Since then, Silko has gone on to publish widely and across genres with a distinct voice, deeply rooted in the landscapes and culture of the American Southwest.

She joined us in 2010 as part of the launch of her first book of nonfiction, The Turquoise Ledge, which was a highly anticipated release in part because it was her first book in more than a decade. The Turquoise Ledge has been called a “highly original self-portrait” and is written in fragments that blends nature writing, memoir, history, parables and legends. When asked by an interviewer about the book’s fluid structure and movement between memory and reality, Silko said, “Linear time is itself a fiction which I find tedious and simpleminded.” And as she says in this conversation, linear time can also be very dangerous.

Silko is in conversation with writer Molly Gloss, a celebrated writer of many novels, including the acclaimed The Hearts of Horses, and the winner many prestigious prizes including the Oregon Book Award.

Leslie Marmon Silko was born in New Mexico in 1948 to a family whose ancestry includes Mexican, Laguna Indian, and European forebears. She is the author of ten books of fiction, poetry, and memoir, including Ceremony, Storyteller, Almanac of the Dead, Gardens in the Dunes, and The Turquoise Ledge. Considered by many as one of the most important contemporary Native American writers, Silko’s honors include a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” fellowship, the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for significant contribution to American literature, and the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime achievement by a writer whose work focuses on the American West. She has been named a Living Cultural Treasure by the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities Council, and has also received the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award.

Molly Gloss is a fourth-generation Oregonian who now lives in Portland on the west side of the Tualatin Hills. She is the author of five novels: The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, Wild Life, The Hearts of Horses, and Falling from Horses, and one collection of stories, Unforseen. Her awards include the Oregon Book Award, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the PEN West Fiction Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and a Whiting Writers Award; and her short story, “Lambing Season” was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Her work often concerns the landscape, literature, mythology, and life of the American West.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul from a visit he made to Portland, Oregon in 1991.

The storied career of Naipaul spans more than a half century. In his lifetime, he was compared to Conrad, Dickens, and Tolstoy. Born in Trinidad to an Indo-Trinidadian family, he lived a peripatetic life, travelling the world constantly, though ultimately based in England. He often stirred controversy with strong opinions, and was sometimes accused of being an apologist for colonialism who yet, to quote his obituary in The New York Times, “exempted neither colonizer nor colonized from his scrutiny.” He scoffed at multiculturalism, yet celebrate diverse societies.  His temper was famous. He declared novels a 19th century relic, and yet continued to write them.  He infuriated and delighted critics and readers. What more can we ask of our writers and public intellectuals but for the compelling and intelligent stories that spark our own discussions?

Naipaul came to Portland on the occasion of the publication of India: A Million Mutinies Now. The book was the third installment of travelogues about his ancestral India, at time when the nation was in the midst of a massive transformation. The tribology was important for being part of a new and pioneering category of nonfiction that documented the lives of “regular” people in a style more like a novel, a style we are now so familiar with. In writing about India and its people Naipaul is both outside and insider and this is what gives him a unique perspective. And in this episode, he gives us an intimate look at the lives of both the wealthy upper caste, and also their servants. The stories take us from palaces to slums, to the homes of the burgeoning middle class, and his writing is attentive to the details, and sympathetic to his subjects.

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. His novels include A House for Mr. Biswas, The Mimic Men, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. In 1971, he was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, The Masque of Africa, and a trio of books about India: An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now. In 1990, Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He lived with his wife Nadira and cat Augustus in Wiltshire, and died in 2018.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we take you behind the scenes at the 2023 Portland Book Festival, which we hosted in downtown Portland on November 4, 2023. The festival featured over 100 writers in more than 50 events throughout the day.

One of the best things about book festivals is the magic of having that particular group of authors all together at the same place at the same time. It might be the only time some of them are at the same event. This makes for great on-stage conversations and connections, but it also means that authors get to connect with each other off stage – in the green room, at the post-fest party, and even going to each other’s events.

Thinking about that magic and that opportunity, we asked six of the festival authors to recommend a book by another author in the festival. The ask resulted in some wonderful cross genre action: A young adult novelist recommends a science journalist and essayist; an adult novelist shares her love for a poet; and a cultural essayist shouts out a memoir; and more.

We’ll hear from:

Given the holiday season, we thought you might get some gift-giving inspiration from their recommendations. And you will get a peek behind the scenes at the festival, where authors geek out about their fellow authors.

Each author will share their recommendation and why they chose it, and we’ll hear a bit from the author of book they are recommending. The Archive Project editor and producer Matthew Workman narrates our journey, taking us from the author green room out to the festival stages and finally to the author party – your only chance to join this exclusive festival event.

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.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we’re reaching back into the archive to 2020, to a virtual conversation with Colson Whitehead from Portland Arts & Lectures. It was, in fact, our very first virtual event of the pandemic and while we are so glad to be back live, it is fascinating to hear again from that time period. We’ve chosen to broadcast this conversation now because Whitehead has just published a new novel called Crook Manifesto.

There are few writers who are both as versatile and accomplished as Colson Whitehead. His subjects have ranged from elevator inspectors, to middle-class Black American suburbia, to the World Series of Poker; he has written noir, a zombie thriller, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel, and historical fiction. At the same time, he has won dozens of awards and accolades, most recently culminating in two Pulitzer Prizes—one for The Underground Railroad, and the other for the novel The Nickel Boys.

Whitehead’s significant contributions to literature come about not only because of his mastery of the craft, but also because he has range—he deploys pop culture, history, and a variety of literary techniques. And by doing so, he gives his stories new life, helping readers see sometimes familiar subjects in a new light. His interview here with Mitchell S. Jackson explores Whitehead’s writing craft, inspirations, and thoughts on current events in America.

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad, which in 2016 won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, as well as The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. He is also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. He lives in New York City.

Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. Jackson is the critically acclaimed author of The Residue Years, Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family, Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion,and John of Watts (to be published soon). His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Time, Esquire, and Marie Claire, as well as in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Jackson’s nonfiction book Survival Math was published in 2019 and named a best book of the year by fifteen publications, including NPR, Time, The Paris Review, The Root, Kirkus Reviews, and Buzzfeed. Jackson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, covers race and culture as the first Black columnist in the history of Esquire, and serves as the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor in the English Department of Arizona State University.

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 about 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 feature Zadie Smith in conversation with New Yorker staff writer Parul Sehgal.

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.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we share a conversation about something you probably never think about, unless you think about it all of the time: disabled parenting. We’ll hear from Eliza Hull, a contemporary musician, disability advocate, and writer based in regional Victoria, Australia, and the editor of a new anthology, We’ve Got This: Essays By Disabled Parents, which features stories from parents who identify as Deaf, disabled, neurodiverse, or chronically ill. Eliza is joined by one of the anthology contributors, Rebekah Taussig, a writer, educator, and consultant with a PhD in nonfiction and disability studies based in Kansas City. Rebekah shares her story on her Instagram and in her book Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body.

We were so interested in this conversation for many of the same reasons that Eliza put this anthology together: There seem to be a decent number of resources for the parents of disabled children, but really none for disabled parents. And it seems because a lot of people don’t even conceive of the possibility of a disabled parent, but disabled people ARE parents and have as much right to parent as anyone else – and they are good at it.

Eliza and Rebekah are joined by moderator Annie Carl, who owns and runs The Neverending Bookshop in Edmonds, Washington.

Eliza Hull is a musical artist, writer, journalist, and disability advocate based in Victoria, Australia. Her podcast series on parenting with a disability, We’ve Got This, was one of Radio National’s and ABC Life’s most successful series of all time.

Rebecca Taussig, PH.D. is a Kansas City writer and teacher with her doctorate in Creative Nonfiction and Disability Studies. She has led workshops and presentations at the University of Michigan, University of Kansas, and Davidson College on disability representation, identity, and community. She also runs the Instagram platform @sitting_pretty where she crafts “mini-memoirs” to contribute nuance to the collective narratives being told about disability in our culture. She lives with two cranky orange cats and one angsty-tender human.