The Archive Project

In this episode, we feature a conversation between Louise Erdrich and Portland-based writer Trevino Brings Plenty from the 2021 Portland Book Festival. Louise Erdrich joined us virtually from Minneapolis for an event in front of a live audience at the Newmark Theater. She is on our most celebrated and writers alive. Her novels include The Night Watchman, which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, The Round House, which won the National Book Award for Fiction, Love Medicine, and LaRose received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. She joined us on the occasion of the publication of her most recent novel, The Sentence.

Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. Love Medicine and LaRose received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. Her most recent book, The Night Watchman, won the Pulitzer Prize. A ghost lives in her creaky old house.

Trevino L. Brings Plenty is a poet and musician who lives, works, and writes in Portland, OR. Trevino is an American and Native American; a Lakota Indian born on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, South Dakota, USA. Some of his work explores the American Indian identity in American culture and how it has through genealogical history affected indigenous peoples in the 21st century. He writes of urban Indian life; it’s his subject. His works include Wakpá Wanáǧi, Ghost River (2015); Real Indian Junk Jewelry (2012); and Shedding Skins: Four Sioux Poets (2008).

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Abdulzarak Gurnah from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in September 2022.  He joined us as part of the American launch of his most recent novel Afterlives. He had just won the Nobel prize for literature, after a long and distinguished career as a novelist in Britain, thought he was relatively unknown here in the United States.

In his talk, Gurnah describes the rich layers of cultural influence that formed his native Zanzibar, now known as Tanzania, as an international trading hub through the centuries, and his formative decision to move to England as a young man, a decision that would shape his life and his writing.

Afterlives is a novel set in on the west coast of Africa during World War I that centers the lives of Africans, not their European colonizers, and their struggles to survive the war and then make sense of their lives in its immediate aftermath.

Encountering the work of a writer for the first time can be thrilling. For most readers here in the United States, the Nobel Prize brought to light not only a writer few of us knew, but one that has been writing profound novels about colonialism and migration for decades. Gurnah’s work is both beautiful and important, giving important and fresh perspective on the recent past, and today.

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in Zanzibar in 1948 and teaches at the University of Kent. He is the author of six novels, including Paradise, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, and By the Sea, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a Portland Book Festival event with two prominent young adult novelists whose work appeals to readers of any age.

Ellen Hagan’s novel in verse, Don’t Call Me a Hurricane, explores the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy on a New Jersey shore community through the perspective of Eliza, who is fighting to protect her home from development while navigating the lingering trauma of the storm and the climate crisis—plus the additional crisis of having a crush on her should-be enemy, a rich summer tourist.

In Meet Me In Mumbai, Sabina Khan interweaves the stories of Ayesha, who finds herself eighteen years old, far from her home in India, in love for the first time… while pregnant and facing a huge decision. Seventeen years later, Ayesha’s daughter Mira, is searching for information about her history when she finds a box of letters from her birth mother. Mira yearns for more connection to her Indian heritage, but must decide if she’s ready to learn the whole truth about her past.

Both novels feature young characters making big decisions and grappling with the consequences their own choices—as well as the aftermath of the world they are born into—as they find their way. The past is present in both storylines, in ways that ring true for readers of all ages.

Our panel moderator is Portland writer and editor Megan Savage.

Ellen Hagan is a writer, performer, and educator. She is the author of Reckless, Glorious, Girl and the co-author with Renée Watson of Watch Us Rise. Her poetry collections include Blooming Fiascoes, Hemisphere, and Crowned. Her work can be found in ESPN Magazine, She Walks in Beauty, and Southern Sin. Ellen is the Director of the Poetry & Theatre Departments at the DreamYard Project and directs their International Poetry Exchange Program with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. She co-leads the Alice Hoffman Young Writer’s Retreat at Adelphi University. Raised in Kentucky, she now lives in New York City with her family.

Sabina Khan is the author of the YA novels Meet Me in Mumbai, Zara Hossain is Here, and The Love & Lies of Rukhsana Ali. She is an educational consultant and a karaoke enthusiast. After living in Germany, Bangladesh, Macao, Illinois and Texas, she has finally settled down in beautiful British Columbia, Canada, with her husband, two daughters and the best puppy in the world.

Megan Savage is a multi-genre writer who has taught courses including Creative Writing, Editing & Publishing, and Children’s Literature at Portland Community College since 2008. At PCC, she serves on the Steering Committee for the new Carolyn Moore Writing Residency. She holds an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing and an M.A. in English from Indiana University where she was Fiction Editor of Indiana Review. Her own writing is influenced by themes and images from children’s literature, fairy tales, and folklore, and can be found in such places as the Routledge anthology, Pandemic of Perspectives: Creative Re-Imagining, the More Devotedly podcast, FE: A Fonograf Editions Magazine, and Hunger Mountain #25: Art Saves.

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 a talk from Edwidge Danticat from Portland Arts & Lectures on May 12, 2022.

Danticat became nationally recognized with her debut novel published in 1994 Breath, Eyes, Memory which was an Oprah Book Club selection and national bestseller. Since then, she has gone on to publish more than a dozen books in multiple genres—novels, short fiction, memoir, literary criticism, young adult, and children’s books—many which were bestsellers including the Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, and Claire of the Sea of Light.

In her talk, Danticat gives an intimate picture of her life, from her childhood in Haiti to her immigration as a young adult to Brooklyn. The talk is structured around her mother’s diagnosis and treatment of cancer. It explores Danticat’s life growing up in an extended family in two countries and the beauty and struggles this life brought her. She offers us a portrait of Haitian culture that reveals it beauty, joy and strength rather than centering the tragedies that nation has suffered as is so often the case. In all, this an inspirational talk about intergenerational and international families, migration, and holding multiple cultures within oneself. It gives a deeper understanding of Danticat as a writer, and sheds important light on a culture often misunderstood here in the United States.

Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including The Art of Death, a National Book Critics Circle finalist; Claire of the Sea Light, a New York Times Notable Book; Brother, I’m Dying, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist; The Dew Breaker, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the inaugural Story Prize; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah’s Book Club selection; and Krik? Krak!, also a National Book Award finalist. A 2018 Neustadt International Prize for Literature winner and the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” grant, she has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere.

On this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a conversation between Kiese Laymon and Imbolo Mbue on storytelling, environmental racism, and activism, recorded at the 2023 AWP Conference in Seattle, Washington.

Set in a fictional African village being polluted by an oil company, Imbolo Mbue’s latest novel, How Beautiful We Were, confronts environmental devastation, corporate colonialism and activism. Kiese Laymon, author of the memoir Heavy, has multigenerational roots in Mississippi have led him to consider climate justice and the ways that extractive agriculture, corporate interests, and the legacy of slavery impact communities of color in the US.

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the Libby Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. Laymon is the author of Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times critics. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. Laymon is at work on the books, Good God, and City Summer, Country Summer, and a number of other film and television projects. He is the founder of “The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative,” a program based out of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, aimed at aiding young people in Jackson get more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing on their on their own terms, in their own communities. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.

Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. The novel has been adapted into an opera and a stage play, and optioned for a miniseries. Her second novel, How Beautiful We Were, about a fictional African village’s fight against an against American oil company, was named by the New York Times as “One of the 10 Best Books” of 2021. Her works have been translated into eighteen languages and published in dozens of countries. A native of Limbe, Cameroon, and a graduate of Rutgers and Columbia Universities, Mbue lives in New York.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Ada Limón from the closing night of the 2022-23 Portland Arts & Lectures series.

Limón is the author of six books of poetry and a finalist for numerous prizes for her work. In 2022, Limon published a collection of new poems The Hurting Kind and was also named the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, at the age of 46. Of this recognition Limón said, “Again and again, I have been witness to poetry’s immense power to reconnect us to the world, to allow us to heal, to love, to grieve, to remind us of the full spectrum of human emotion… I am humbled by this opportunity to work in the service of poetry and to amplify poetry’s ability to restore our humanity and our relationship to the world around us.”

In her talk, Limón takes us back to her lonely childhood in Sonoma, California where she first connects with nature, begins to discover the power of what she calls “paying attention,” and first falls in love with language. Throughout her talk, and throughout her work, Limón calls on us to slow down and really look at the world, and our lives, as a way to make sense of them. To actually take a moment to breathe. She demonstrates over and over again how poetry, with its attention to details, its structure of line breaks, calls the world’s details into greater focus, providing as she says, no answers but that rather provides an “unclaimed space for human fullness.” In making her case for poetry, Limón is unpretentious, accessible, funny, dark, insightful and ironic.

“Read poetry, and you will feel as if the doors of the world are opening.”

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was the host of the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes and teaches remotely. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is out now from Milkweed Editions. She is the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States.

On this episode of The Archive Project, we have a conversation recorded exclusively for our show. We are featuring Portland Youth Philharmonic, the nation’s oldest youth orchestra, and we’ve brought together a conductor, a composer, a poet, and a vocalist to discuss their cross-disciplinary collaboration on a poetry-inspired piece titled Because I Will Not Despair.

The piece is based on the poetry of Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient and Oregon Book Award finalist Alicia Jo Rabins. Composer Jessica Meyer has adapted Rabins’s poetry to music, and vocalist Anna Song and the In Mulieribus vocal choir will join Portland Youth Philharmonic’s chamber orchestra, conducted by David Hattner to perform this new piece in Portland on May 5, 2023.

It’s especially interesting to hear these four collaborators–Alicia, Jessica, Anna, and David–discuss work that is ongoing, as the piece is still being shaped. We also hear how different it is for a composer or a conductor to put their work into the world, versus a poet. Rabins phrases it well, saying: “As artists, we are part of one massive human conversation, and we put as much as we can into the piece or the performance, and the people interacting with it are what make that a complete process, whether that’s the audience or the reader or another artist you’re collaborating with.”

Most music requires collaboration and interpretation, and hearing how inspiring it is for the musical artists on this piece to work with, in their words, a “living” poet and poetry and text makes this conversation a pleasurable listen.

David Hattner is the Musical Director of the highly acclaimed Portland Youth Philharmonic (Oregon), the nation’s oldest youth orchestra. The fifth music director in its distinguished 93-year history, he is the first to be born in the United States. Known for his encyclopedic knowledge of American repertoire, Hattner’s programming is relevant, thoughtful, and “especially attractive.” (The Chicago Tribune). Hattner received rave reviews following his debut with PYP in November 2008: “The Portland Youth Philharmonic roared like a Maserati on Saturday in its first concert under music director David Hattner. The route was challenging, the execution distinguished and the ride delightful,” wrote David Stabler for The Oregonian.

With playing that is “fierce and lyrical” and works that are “other-worldly” (The Strad) and “evocative” (New York Times), Jessica Meyer is an award-winning composer and violist whose passionate musicianship radiates accessibility and emotional clarity.  Recent premieres include works for the St. Lawrence String Quartet as the composer in residence at Spoleto Festival USA, musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra, Bangor Symphony as the winner of the 2nd Annual Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Composer’s Award, and the Argus Quartet as a winner of Chamber Music America’s Commissioning Program Award. Her first Symphonic Band piece recently had its NY premiere in Carnegie Hall by the President’s Own Marine Band, and her orchestral works have been performed by the Phoenix, North Carolina, Charlotte, and Vermont Symphonies, and all around the country as part of Carnegie Hall’s nationwide Link Up Program. This season brings the premiere of “GAEA”, a concerto for herself and orchestra, as well as works for the Dorian Wind Quintet and Hub New Music.

Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician, performer and feminist Jewish educator. She is the author of two books of poetry, Divinity School and Fruit Geode, and a recent collection of personal essays. Rabins is the creator and performer of Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about women in Torah, as well as the independent feature film, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. She lives in Portland and was a 2021 Literary Arts Fellow in poetry.

Anna Song is the Director of Choral Activities at Willamette University and directs Chamber Choir and Voce, in addition to teaching courses in musicianship and aural skills. She is the co-founding artistic director of In Mulieribus, a professional women’s vocal ensemble that specializes in works written before 1750 and new music for women’s voices. Under her direction, the ensemble has presented a highly acclaimed annual concert series in Portland since 2007, released recordings that have garnered praise from the American Record Guide and Early Music America, and is regularly broadcast on regionally and nationally syndicated Classical music radio programs.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Charles Simic from a Poetry Downtown event in 2007. Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1938, and some of his earliest memories are of German bombs falling on the city. Later the Russian army would arrive. In 1954, Simic was brought to the United States by his family and, at the age fifteen, he began to learn English.

It’s remarkable that nearly half a century later, Simic would be named Poet Laureate of the United States, the same year of this recording. Over the course of his career, Simic has won nearly every prize for poetry, including the Pulitzer, and has published essays, edited anthologies and translated poetry from French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian.

In this recording, Simic reads from work that spans his career, from his violent and also tender childhood, to his early life in Chicago and New York, and then later about New Hampshire where he taught for decades. One reviewer’s comments seem to sum up the experience of reading and hearing his work: “There are few poets writing in America today who share his lavish appetite for the bizarre, his inexhaustible repertoire of indelible characters and gestures… Simic is perhaps our most disquieting muse.”

And in the contrasts among his poems, as he leapfrogs around the decades, a strange resonance can be found with our world today, both here in the US and abroad, at this very strange and particular moment.

Charles Simic died on January 9, 2023 at the age of 84.

Charles Simic, poet, essayist, and translator, was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. Since 1967, he published twenty books of his own poetry, in addition to a memoir; the essay collection The Life of Images; and numerous books of translations for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. Simic was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and in 2007 was chosen as poet laureate of the United States. He was emeritus professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught since 1973, and was distinguished visiting writer at New York University. Simic passed away in January 2023 at the age of 84.

Paulann Petersen‘s collections of poetry include The Wild Awake (2002), Blood-Silk (2004), A Bride of Narrow Escape (2005), Kindle (2008), and The Voluptuary (2010). Her work has appeared widely in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Calyx, Poetry Northwest, and Poetry. A former Wallace Stegner fellow and recipient of two Carolyn Kizer Awards, Petersen has also received the Stewart Holbrook Award for Outstanding Contributions to Oregon’s Literary Life. She is on the board of the Friends of William Stafford, and helps organize events and celebrations of the poet across the country. In 2010, she was elected the state of Oregon’s sixth Poet Laureate.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature some of the incredible slam poets who performed as part of Verselandia!—the annual, city-wide youth poetry slam championship event, presented by Literary Arts—in 2022.

Each year, youth spend months writing and competing in slams on high school campuses across the city. Then, each April, about twenty student finalists compete for the title of city-wide Portland slam champ.

What is important about this episode is that these young poets are thrilling to hear. They will give you the chills, make you laugh, and perhaps bring tears to your eyes. And what’s more, 2022 was the first time we’d been able to present the competition live since 2019, and it was an especially emotional evening. So, at this moment when it feels our society is cleaved with deep divisions—race, geography, economics and age—it is so important to take the time to really listen to young voices, who are, after all the future. These young writers come from all walks of life in Portland, and have incredible stories to tell.

The 2023 Verselandia! competition returns to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Thursday, April 27 at 7:00 p.m. For more information and tickets visit our website literary-arts.org.

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.