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 share a conversation from the 2022 Portland Book Festival. Actress Selma Blair discusses her debut memoir, Mean Baby, with Esmé Weijun Wang, author of the novel The Border of Paradise and the best-selling essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias.

March is National Disability Awareness Month. Much of Selma’s memoir describes her life with a litany of symptoms that were diagnosed as the autoimmune disorder multiple sclerosis, or MS, in 2018 when Blair was in her forties. She has since emerged as an advocate for disability awareness and inclusion. Blair told Variety that, after her diagnosis, “I started thinking more about the power of storytelling and why representation in media matters. If I had seen and heard from people who were like me, maybe I wouldn’t have felt so alone. Perhaps if I’d had more diverse representation to look up to, I would have learned about my diagnosis earlier on.”

Selma and Esmé talk about the importance and comfort of seeing other people’s stories, from social media to books and movies. As Selma says, “It’s the little stories that are actually the big stories that shape your life.” In telling her own story in her book, Mean Baby, Selma also reaches a new self-understanding through the process of writing and sharing. It’s a wonderful conversation, full of insight, honesty, and humor. A note that you’ll hear Wang and Blair reference Scout, who is Blair’s service dog, who joined them on stage.

Selma Blair, on growing up: “I was always by myself–really a loner–and books were my friends.”

Selma Blair is an actress best known for her roles in Legally Blonde, Cruel Intentions, The Sweetest Thing, and Hellboy. Her memoir, released in 2022, is Mean Baby. Blair was named a Time Person of the Year in 2017 as one of their Silence Breakers, and she was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for her narration of The Diary of Anne Frank. She is the subject of the documentary Introducing, Selma Blair, which reveals Blair’s intimate and raw journey with multiple sclerosis. Blair lives with her son in Los Angeles.

Esmé Weijun Wang is a novelist and essayist. She is the author of the New York Times-bestselling essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019), and a debut novel, The Border of Paradise. She was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” on its decennial list in 2017 and won the Whiting Award for nonfiction in 2018. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she is the founder of The Unexpected Shape™ Writing Academy for ambitious writers living with limitations.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we bring you a talk from Mira Jacob, which was the culminating event of the 2022 Everybody Read’s program.

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

This year, the Library selected Mira Jacob’s graphic memoir Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations.

In 2017, Jacob started posting comics to Instagram, featuring conversations with her young son. He had a lot of questions, many of them about Michael Jackson, and she did her best to answer them honestly. That project became Good Talk. The book is about her immediate and extended family, and it’s about coming of age and living in America as a woman, as a person of color, and as an artist. It asks more questions than it answers. Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere, said, “By turns hilarious and heart-rending, it’s exactly the book America needs at this moment.”

The talk you are about to hear is remarkable not only for its depth of insight, but also for its range. Jacob is by turns tender, hilarious, sarcastic and sincere. Jacob talks about the deeply personal creative journey to creating Good Talk, and also explores the national context in which it was created—the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson or the political rise of Donald Trump, for example—and how they challenged her understanding of herself, her family, and the narrative about America she’s heard her whole life.

“The thing I love about us is that we are the animals that will [talk to each other] again and again and again with this brazen hope that this time we will be understood. And sometimes we really are understood. Sometimes we really do hear each other. Sometimes it really is a good talk.”

Mira Jacob is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, and the graphic memoir Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations. Her recent work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Vogue, Glamour, Tin House, Electric Literature and Literary Hub. She lives in Brooklyn.

“[Art is] something that no one has asked you for, and yet you feel compelled to create it.”

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature one of the highlights of the 2022 Portland Book Festival. It’s a conversation between two of our most accomplished fiction writers, George Saunders and Jess Walter. Their conversation is by turns hilarious, caustic, tender, and profound.  Our interviewer for the event was OPB’s own Geoff Norcross, who does his usual masterful job moderating.

George Saunders is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eleven books, including A Swim in a Pond in the Rain; Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the Way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the inaugural Folio Award; The Braindead Megaphone; and the critically acclaimed collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. His most recent book is Liberation Day. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

Jess Walter is the author of ten books, most recently the short story collection The Angel of Rome. His other nine include the national bestseller The Cold Millions and the #1 New York Times bestseller, Beautiful Ruins; The Zero, the finalist for the National Book Award; and Citizen Vince, winner of the Edgar Award. His work has been published in 35 languages and his short fiction has appeared three times in Best American Short Stories.

Geoff Norcross is the Morning Edition host at Oregon Public Broadcasting. Before coming to Oregon, he was the program director at the NPR-affiliate KNAU in Flagstaff, Arizona. A 25-year radio veteran, Geoff has been on air in New York, Florida, Missouri, Illinois, and West Virginia. He joined OPB in 2008. Geoff has received awards from the Public Radio News Directors Inc. for best interview, the Edward R. Murrow Award for best feature reporting, and the Florida Associated Press Award for the best newscast. Geoff graduated from Bradley University with a degree in communications. Geoff lives in Portland with his wife. When he’s not on the air, you can find him rowing on the Willamette River or running and biking around the southwest hills. If you get up early enough, you might catch him hiking the nearby mountains.

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’s episode of The Archive Project features a conversation from the 2022 Portland Book Festival. Portland-born writer Mitchell S. Jackson interviewed Leila Mottley about her debut novel, Nightcrawling.

Jackson is the author of the novel The Residue Years and the nonfiction book Survival Math. He is the winner of a Whiting Award and he received the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for his piece on Ahmaud Arbery. Leila Mottley is the former youth poet laureate of Oakland, California. Nightcrawling is her first book, and she was just nineteen years old when it was published last year.

We paired Mitchell with Leila because despite their generational differences—there are thirty years between them and they are, of course, at very different points in their careers—they’ve both written novels about the beauty and the darkness that exist side-by-side in their complicated hometowns: Portland and Oakland, respectively. Leila says in the conversation about Oakland, “There is no where I feel more at home and nowhere I feel less safe,” and that those two feelings can exist at once.

A quick note for listeners: Parts of this conversation touch on mature themes of police brutality and sexual assault that may not be suitable for all listeners.

Leila Mottley is the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and Oprah Daily. She was born and raised in Oakland, where she continues to live. Nightcrawling is her first novel.

Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years received wide critical praise. Jackson is the winner of a Whiting Award. His novel also won The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for The Center for Fiction Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN / Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. His honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Lannan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, PEN America, TED, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Center for Fiction. His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Time Magazine, and Esquire Magazine, as well as in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere. His nonfiction book Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family was published in the spring of 2019 and named a best book of the year by fifteen publications, including NPR, Time Magazine, The Paris Review, The Root, Kirkus Reviews, and Buzzfeed. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at the University of Chicago.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we bring you an event from the 2022 Portland Book Festival, which took place on Saturday, November 5, 2022. The hour is split into two halves of thematically related conversations. Up first, OPB’s Tiffany Camhi interviews writer Melissa Febos about her essay collection, Girlhood; in the second half of the show, OPB’s Jenn Chavez speaks with music critic and New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu about his memoir, Stay True. 

We paired Melissa and Hua for this festival event because their books share themes of adolescence and coming of age, of exploring identity through art-making and finding your voice, and of searching for and finding your people, finding belonging and a community. Melissa and Hua each speak about how processing the large and small events and emotions of their lives through writing has been a way they understand their lives and a way to find meaning.

They also both talk about how writing about events or traumas in their past, including revisiting writing from their younger selves, has helped them realize how their relationship to that event or trauma changes over time. I think that you hear in these conversations that for Melissa and Hua, writing about their experiences created a new compassion for their younger, messier, angrier, selves.

Melissa Febos is the bestselling author of four books, including Girlhood—LAMBDA Award finalist and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. Her fifth book, The Dry Season, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf. Her awards and fellowships include those from the Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The British Library, The Black Mountain Institute, MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has recently appeared in The Paris Review, The Sun, The New York Times Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Best American Essays, Vogue, and New York Review of Books. Febos is an associate professor at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and an associate professor of English at Vassar College. Hsu serves on the executive board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He was formerly a fellow at the New American foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his family.

Tiffany Camhi is a multimedia journalist focusing on arts, culture and environment reporting. You can hear her throughout the state of Oregon on OPB. She spent six years at KQED Public Radio in the San Francisco Bay Area as a host, producer, reporter and all-around audio gopher. Tiffany is an alumni of the City University of New York, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. When Tiffany’s not on the radio you can usually find her riding a motorcycle…or trying to figure out a way to talk about motorcycles on the radio.

Jenn Chávez is a radio host, announcer and producer with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Jenn has been making radio in Portland for over a decade. Prior to joining OPB in 2017, she hosted and produced the local news radio show “The Five Quadrants of Portland” on XRAY-FM, reporting on issues impacting underrepresented communities. She has a BA in literature and writing from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She spent her younger days as a film-nerdy video store clerk, and remains a source of unsolicited movie recommendations.

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.