The Archive Project

In this episode of The Archive Project, we are celebrating the kickoff of National Poetry Month with a special event, recorded in front of a live audience at Literary Arts event space in downtown Portland on September 17, 2022. This event was part of a partnership with the Alano Club of Portland and their Artists in Recovery series, about the intersections of mental health and substance use recovery, creativity, and building community. Learn more at PortlandAlano.org.

Alano Club director of development and community engagement Kasey Anderson emceed an evening with writers Leslie Jamison, Kaveh Akbar, and Hanif Abdurraqib, who shared recent and brand-new work with the audience, a multi-genre mix of prose and poetry. As they share their own work, talk about each other’s work and their relationship to Alano Club, it’s clear from the fact that they felt comfortable enough to share brand-new writing that these three writers deeply admire and respect each other.

Many of our episodes feature writers in conversation, but this week we have a trio of readings for you. First, we’ll hear from Kasey Anderson, of the Alano Club, and our first writer of the evening is Leslie Jamison, award-winning essayist and author of The Empathy Exams, reads from her memoir The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, as well a new work-in-progress.

Then Kaveh Akbar reads from his most recent book of poetry, Pilgrim Bell, and a novel-in-progress.

We also hear from poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib, author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America, his most recent poetry collection is A Fortune for Your Disaster. Abdurraqib reads from his poetry and a nonfiction project to close out the event.

A quick note: This conversation touches on mature themes of subsctance abuse and recovery that may not be suitable for all listeners.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His most recent book, A Little Devil in America, was the winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burns Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Award. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much , was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize and nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us was named a book of the year by NPR, Esquire, BuzzFeed, O: The Oprah Magazine, Pitchfork, Chicago Tribune, among others. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist, and longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune for Your Disaster, won the Lenore Marshall Prize. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Kaveh Akbar is the author of Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, and has received honors such as a Levis Reading Prize and multiple Pushcart Prizes. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in low-residency programs at Warren Wilson and Randolph Colleges.

Leslie Jamison is the author of The Empathy Exams. Her essays have appeared in the Believer, Harper’s, Oxford American, A Public Space, Tin House, and The Best American Essays. She is a regular columnist for the New York Times Book Review and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature journalist Patrick Radden Keefe from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in February 2023. Keefe is the author of five books of nonfiction, most recently Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Rebels, and Crooks, a collection of essays from his work as a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. NPR called Rogues “a wonderful book, not only because Keefe’s prose is masterful, but because he has a preternatural gift for reading people. He recognizes that we’re all unreliable narrators of our own lives, and writes about his subjects with a keen sense of understanding.”

He is also the author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Mystery in Northern Ireland, as well as Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.

In this talk, Keefe speaks to his writing process of what his editor termed “investigative melodrama.” He is drawn in by fascinating real-life characters like Arthur Sackler of Empire of Pain and Dolours Price of Say Nothing as way to explore, as he says, “the arbitrary lines we draw between what’s legal and illegal, what society sanctions and celebrates and what it condemns and punishes.”

We’re including the full event intro and Q&A in this extended version of this episode, since many subscribers couldn’t make it to the concert hall due to the extraordinary weather–Portland experienced an unexpected and historic, record-setting snowstorm the evening of the event.

As a special feature, we start the episode with a short reading from Oregon-based writer, Stephan Nance. Nance was awarded the Edna L. Holmes Fellowship in Young Readers from Literary Arts in 2023. Their reading is a selection from their Young Adult novel-in-progress, A Bird in the Heart, which they describe as a “very birdy young adult novel set in Eastern Oregon”.

Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the decade by Entertainment Weekly. His previous books are The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Lauren Groff from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in early 2023 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Groff is the author of six books of fiction, the last three of which, Fates and Furies, Florida, and Matrix were all national bestsellers and all finalists for the National Book Award.

One of the many delights in reading Groff’s books is the dramatic shift in time, place, and focus from title to title. She is not an artist writing the same book over and over. From a multi-century saga of a town and its secrets, to a boy at a hippie commune in upstate New York, to look at a modern Greek tragedy, to the wild country that is the state of Florida, and life in a medieval nunnery during the twelfth century–every time you pick up one of her books you are transported. It’s thrilling as a reader, and it speaks to Groff’s immense talent that there are thematic through-lines moving across such a diverse body of work.

In her talk, Groff reveals the deeper undercurrents of her work and her unusual process of writing. While she professes to be “profoundly secular,” the core of her talk revolves around God, poetry, love and sexuality. She weaves in discussion of the biblical Song of Solomon, to her own biography and her spiritual journey, and the universal themes found in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins. She manages to do all this with an incredible sense of humor and a light touch which feels, like her fiction, somehow slightly magical.

Lauren Groff is the New York Times bestselling author of four novels and two short story collections. Her 2021 novel Matrix, which Esquire described as “Incandescent… a radiant work of imagination and accomplishment,” was a National Book Award finalist and was selected by President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year. Her works have won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, and France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne. Groff is a three-time finalist for the National Book Award and twice for the Kirkus Prize, and has been shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. She lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband and two sons.

This week on The Archive Project, we bring you a lecture from the 2003/2004 season of Portland Arts & Lectures, featuring renowned memoirist and short story writer Tobias Wolff. Best known for his memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, Wolff has also published award-winning fiction, mostly short stories, and in this lecture is discussing his 2003 novel, Old School, which was a finalist for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

In his lecture, Wolff explores the balance and conflict between writing memoir and writing fiction, that push and pull between autobiography and imagination, or as he says, “the pressure of the personal life on the imagined life that we write.” It’s a humorous lecture with an inviting mix of personal anecdotes and some more professorial analysis of influences like Leo Tolstoy and Flannery O’Connor–and ideal something-for-everyone kind of talk.

Wolff went on to publish Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories in 2008, and in 2014, Wolff was awarded the Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement from Oregon State University, and in 2015 President Barack Obama presented him with the National Medal of the Arts for his contributions as an author and educator.

“A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.” – Old School

Tobias Wolff lives in Northern California and teaches at Stanford University. He has received the Rea Award for excellence in the short story, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a discussion on late writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s legacy of pacifism and environmentalism. Our moderator is Theo Downes-Le Guin, Ursula’s son and literary executor. Theo is in conversation with Oregon-based writers Juhea Kim, author of the novel Beasts of a Little Land, a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Michelle Ruiz Keil, author most recently of the young adult novel Summer in the City of Roses, which was a finalist for the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

In her speech at the 2014 National Book Awards, accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Ursula said: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.”

Juhea Kim and Michelle Ruiz Keil are two of those voices that we need now. In this conversation, Juhea and Michelle discuss how they came—and returned—to Le Guin’s work, her influence on their writing, and how they are carrying her legacy forward, including the responsibility of the artist as a humanitarian.

This conversation was recorded in front of a live audience at Literary Arts on July 15, 2022.

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was a celebrated author whose body of work includes 23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA’s Grand Master, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.

Michelle Ruiz Keil is an author, playwright, and tarot reader with an eye for the enchanted and way with animals. She is the author of the critically acclaimed young adult novels All of Us With Wings and Summer In The City of Roses. Her writing for adults can be found most recently in Bitch, Cosmonauts Avenue, and the anthology Dispatches From Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin. She is a 2021 Tin House Scholar and the recipient of residencies from Hedgebrook, The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and the Bloedel Reserve. Born in San Francisco, Michelle has lived in Portland, Oregon for many years where she curates the fairytale reading series All Kinds of Fur and lives with her family in a cottage where the forest meets the city.

Juhea Kim is a writer, artist, and advocate based in Portland, Oregon. Her bestselling debut novel Beasts of a Little Land was named a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a Best Book of 2021 by Harper’s Bazaar, Real Simple, Ms., and Portland Monthly. Her writing has been published in Granta, Slice, The Massachusetts Review, Zyzzyva, Guernica, Catapult, Times Literary Supplement, The Independent, Sierra Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the founder and editor ofPeaceful Dumpling, an online magazine at the intersection of sustainable lifestyle and ecological literature. She has received fellowship support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, and Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She earned her BA in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we reach back to the year 2000 to highlight one of the best conversations about writing found in our archives: A special event with Amy Bloom and Michael Cunningham.

Amy Bloom had just published a collection of stories entitled, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, and Cunningham had published one his most important and bestselling novels, The Hours, just two years earlier. The Hours went on to become a movie that received nine Academy Award nominations and just last year was made into an opera that was performed in Philadelphia and New York, among other cities.

These two old friends are among the best fiction writers at work in this county. At the time of this conversation they were both at the height of their powers, making their talk both intimate and profound. There’s not an ounce of pretension or snobbery between them; they express nothing but humility and respect for the difficulties of writing fiction. In fact, the opening question of the conversation challenges the very the reason their work even exists when Cunningham and Bloom struggle to answer: Why write? They seem to forget that there is an audience of more than 2,000 watching them, as they discuss their art and what it means to them, and what the art form might mean in the larger world.

Amy Bloom is the author of four novels: White Houses, Lucky Us, Away, and Love Invents Us; and three collections of short stories: Where the God Of Love Hangs Out, Come to Me (finalist for the National Book Award), and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). Her first book of nonfiction, Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops and Hermaphrodites with Attitudes, is a staple of university sociology and biology courses. Her most recent book is the widely acclaimed New York Times bestselling memoir, In Love. She has written for magazines such as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Elle, The Atlantic, Slate, and Salon, and her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She is the Director of the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University.

Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, and The Snow Queen, as well as the collection A Wild Swan and Other Tales, and the nonfiction book Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories. The Hours was a New York Times bestseller, and the winner of both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Raised in Los Angeles, Michael Cunningham lives in New York City, and is a senior lecturer at Yale University.

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.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Scottish novelist Douglas Stuart, winner of the Booker Prize for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain. He speaks about his new novel, Young Mungo, with Portland-based author and Oregon Book Award winner Omar El Akkad. They discuss the desire and longing at the heart of the story of the love between two working class young men from different religious backgrounds in Glasgow. A highlight is Stuart’s description of how his previous career in the textile industry relates to his work as a writer.

The conversation between Douglas Stuart and Omar El Akkad was recorded in front of a live audience at Powell’s City of Books in Portland on May 5th, 2022. For a complete lineup of Powell’s upcoming in-person and virtual author event programming, please visit them at powells.com/events.

We’ll join Douglas and Omar at the beginning of the event, with a moving introduction from Powell’s employee Nick Yandell.

Douglas Stuart is a Scottish-American author. His New York Times-bestselling debut novel Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker Prize and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was the winner of two British Book Awards, including Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, Kirkus Prize, as well as several other literary awards. Stuart’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker and Literary Hub.

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.

On this episode of The Archive Project, we feature multi-genre bestselling poet and author of thirty-eight books, Kwame Alexander, who discusses his memoir Why Fathers Cry at Night with James Beard award-winning chef of Portland’s Kann, and author of the cookbook Everybody’s Table, Gregory Gourdet. Their conversation was recorded at Powell’s Books in downtown Portland.

Alexander is best-known for his children’s books, including The Door of No Return and The Crossover, which was recently made into a TV series. Last month he published a memoir, Why Fathers Cry at Night: A Memoir in Love Poems, Letters, Recipes, and Remembrances. Alexander said that he started the book as love poems for his daughters, not knowing it would become the memoir and a mix of poetry, prose, recipes, and more as he explored his past and his present.

The conversation is remarkably open and honest, as Alexander shares stories ranging from learning to cook his mother’s fried chicken—an especially challenging project while living in buttermilk-less London—in order to connect not only with his late mother but with his daughter; growing up with a strict, book-loving father and how that affected his relationship to books and literature; and actively working to become a better father, partner, and friend by pushing himself to be more vulnerable with the people in his life. Although the word “father” is in the title, the book and the conversation touch on all kinds of friend and family relationships, beyond father-child.

Kwame Alexander is the New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty books, including his Newbery Medal-winning novel The Crossover and The Undefeated, winner of the Caldecott Medal and Newbery Honor. He is the founding editor of Versify, which aims to change the world one word at a time.

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. Gregory ran the kitchen at Portland’s Departure Restaurant + Lounge for 10 years, leaving in 2019 to focus on opening Kann. 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, which was a national bestseller and won the James Beard Award for Best General Cookbook.