The Archive Project

This episode of The Archive Project is the third in our partnership with Oregon Shakespeare Festival. This week we’ll explore the work and legacy of August Wilson, centered on OSF’s upcoming production of his one-man play, How I Learned What I Learned.

August Wilson was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American playwright. His work focuses on the joys and struggles of African Americans in the 20th century. He is perhaps most well-known for the ten-play American Century Cycle; each play focuses on African American life in Pittsburgh, his hometown, in a decade of the 20th century. The cycle includes Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which have both been made into recent feature films.

In this conversation, How I Learned What I Learned is described as a prelude or coda to the American Century Cycle. The autobiographical, one-man play is portrait of the playwright as a young man, the story of his coming up in Pittsburgh and his time with a group of poets and artists in his Hill District neighborhood. Hearing how the play came to be is delightful, and this conversation is a wonderful introduction to one of the most important playwrights in the history of American theater, and one whose work remains incredibly relevant.

In our episode, OSF artistic director, Nataki Garrett, leads a conversation with the director, Tim Bond; the one-man play’s star, Steven Anthony Jones; and Constanza Romero, costume designer and creative consultant on the play – and August Wilson’s wife from 1994 until his death in 2005. It’s a real privilege to listen in on this conversation between four people who are not only so deeply engaged with Wilson’s work and legacy, but who actually knew him, and share sweet and funny stories.

View more information about How I Learned What I Learned on OSF’s website here: https://www.osfashland.org/en/productions/2022-plays/how-i-learned-what-i-learned.aspx

Tim Bond is thrilled to return to OSF with How I Learned What I Learned, and has directed 7 of the 10 plays that comprise August Wilson’s American Century Cycle. During his 11 seasons as Associate Artistic Director at OSF he directed 12 productions. Tim was named Artistic Director of TheatreWorks Silicon Valley in July of 2020, where he is directing August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean in April. Past leadership posts include Producing Artistic Director at Syracuse Stage, Artistic Director at Seattle Group Theatre, Artistic Director of The Paul Robeson Theatre, and Head of the Professional Actor Training Program at the University of Washington School of Drama. Tim has guest directed at many theatres nationally and internationally, including The Market Theatre (Johannesburg), Baxter Theatre Centre (Cape Town), The Guthrie Theater, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Milwaukee Rep, Arena Stage, Cleveland Play House, Indiana Rep, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Arizona Theatre Company, Portland Center Stage, Dallas Theater Center, and A Contemporary Theatre (ACT). He is the recipient of two Backstage West Garland Awards, two Syracuse Area Live Theatre (SALT) Awards, and a Dallas-Fort Worth Critics Forum Award.

Nataki Garrett is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s sixth artistic director. Since her appointment in April of 2019, she has guided the organization through numerous transitions and crises, all while building toward a more sustainable producing and fundraising model. Garrett’s forté and passion is fostering and developing new work, including those that adapt and devise new ways of performing the classics. She has directed and produced the world premieres of many well-known and important playwriting voices of our time, including Katori Hall, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Dominique Morriseau and Aziza Barnes. Garrett is a recipient of the first-ever Ammerman Prize for Directing, given by Arena Stage. She also received the National Endowment for the Arts and Theatre Communications Group Career Development Fellowship for Theatre Directors. She is a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society and a member of the board of directors for Theatre Communications Group, a company member at Woolly Mammoth, and an advisory board member for Mixed Blood Theatre. Garrett is a graduate of California Institute of the Arts with an MFA in directing. Full bio here.

Steven Anthony Jones was the artistic director of the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre from 2011 to 2017. He has worked professionally on stage, television, and in film for 42 years. He has performed in the works of Wilson, (Charles) Fuller, Fugard, Stoppard, Gotanda, Beckett, Pinter, Molière, Shakespeare, Chekhov, and others. Most recently, he played Becker in the Broadway tour of August Wilson’s Jitney.

Constanza Romero is a costume designer and creative consultant. She has been the executor of the August Wilson Estate since 2005; has produced Wilson’s works, including: Jitney (Manhattan Theater Club) and Fences (Cort Theatre, with Denzel Washington, 2010); and was a key participant in Q&A’s with the cast for multiple screenings of the 2016 film of Fences at various U.S. cities. Romero is an associate artist for Signature Theatre Company’s August Wilson Series. In five season at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Romero has worked on The Liquid Plain, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Trip to Bountiful, Topdog/Underdog, Richard II, and The Comedy of Errors (OSF, Portland). She has an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, and has taught costume design at the University of Washington and scenic design at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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 2021.

Each year, Portland-area youth spend the year writing and competing with their peers, and each April about twenty student finalists compete for the title of Portland Slam Champ. Because of the pandemic and school closures last year, we had to re-invent the live event to be a virtual competition in which poets submitted videos of their performances for the judges to rank.

What is important about this episode is that these young poets are thrilling to hear. They will give you chills, and perhaps bring tears to your eyes. And at this moment when it feels our society is cleaved with deep divisions, 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 the Portland area, and have incredible stories to tell.

In addition to these stunning performances, we’ll hear an original work from our event’s emcee and Oregon’s Poet Laureate, Anis Mojgani.

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.

As part of our celebration of National Poetry Month, this week on The Archive Project we feature excerpts from three Portland Book Festival virtual events, which took place in November 2021.

We’ll hear three conversations: First, a conversation with Christopher Rose and Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations, which Oprah.com called “a lionhearted odyssey through the self,” in which the poet “offers us the words to create our own destinies.” Then poet and critic David Biespiel interviews Atsuro Riley, author of Heard Hoard, about his inventive, lyrical new collection told in a chorus of voices calling back to his birthplace in the South Carolina low-country. And finally, Devon Walker-Figueroa, author of Philomath, which contemplates, beauty, nature, and the landscape of the eponymous town in Oregon, dives deep into language, with poet Jennifer Perrine.

The three poets joined us remotely, beaming in from Iowa, San Francisco, and Brooklyn, and the interviewers were live from Literary Arts and Powell’s Bookstore as part of an evening of literary programming.

David Biespiel is a contributing writer at the New Republic, The New Yorker, Poetry, Politico, The Rumpus, and Slate. He is the author of six collections of poetry, four books of nonfiction, and is the editor of two anthologies. His most recent books include the memoirs, A Place of Exodus and The Education of a Young Poet, which was selected a Best Books for Writers by Poets & Writers, and a book of poems, Republic Cafe. Recipient of two Oregon Book Awards, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and Lannan, National Endowment for the Arts, and Stegner fellowships, he has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian Award. He is Poet-in-Residence at Oregon State University where he teaches in the graduate Creative Writing Program and founder of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters.

Donika Kelly is the author of Bestiary, winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry, and the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her most recent collection is The Renunciations. She teaches at the University of Iowa.

Jennifer Perrine is the author of four award-winning books of poetry: Again, The Body Is No Machine, In the Human Zoo, and No Confession, No Mass. Their recent poems, stories, and essays appear in New Letters, The Seventh Wave Magazine, JuxtaProse, The Rumpus, Buckman Journal, and The Gay & Lesbian Review. Perrine lives in Portland, Oregon, where they co-host the Incite: Queer Writers Read series, teach creative writing to youth and adults, and serve as a diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) consultant.

Atsuro Riley is the author of Heard-Hoard (University of Chicago Press, 2021), winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Romey’s Order (University of Chicago Press, 2010), winner of the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, The Believer Poetry Award, and the Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress. His work has been honored with the Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, and the Wood Prize given by POETRY magazine.  Brought up in the South Carolina lowcountry, Riley lives in San Francisco.

Christopher Rose is originally from Seattle, Washington, and he teaches poetry, African American Literature, and Science Fiction at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon. His poems have appeared in Fjords Review: Black American Edition, The Pariahs Anthology, Yellow Chair Review, TAYO Literary Magazine, The Hawaii Review, and others. He is a NEH Summer Institute Scholar and a Cave Canem Fellow.

Devon Walker-Figueroa is the author of Philomath (Milkweed Editions, 2021), selected for the National Poetry Series by Sally Keith and of the chapbook, So Lame (Berfrois, 2019). A graduate of Bennington College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the current Jill Davis Fellow in fiction at NYU, her work has appeared in the The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.

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, poet, essayist, and translator, was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. Since 1967, he has 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 is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and in 2007 was chosen as poet laureate of the United States. He is emeritus professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973, and is distinguished visiting writer at New York University.

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 a reading and conversation about the pandemic lockdowns and how people tried to get through them. They contain stories both sad and funny, strange and completely every day. We thought you’d want to hear them as we all begin to reckon with this strange and challenging time.

First up is Katherine D. Morgan, who reads her short essay, Wish You Were Here, at the Portland Art Museum as part of the 2020 Portland Book Festival. Then we hear from the hilarious novelist and essayist Gary Shteyngart, in conversation with Portland-based writer Jon Raymond, from the 2021 Portland Book Festival.

Katherine D. Morgan is the author of the debut chapbook No Self-Respecting Woman (Dorsa Brevia, ‘19). Her essay about the presidential election of Donald Trump will be featured in the upcoming anthology Fury: Women’s Lived Experience During the Trump Era, published by Pact Press in May 2020. Katherine’s work has appeared or is forthcoming at Huffington Post, The Rumpus, Portland Mercury, HelloGiggles, Pass/Fail, Ravishly, JMWW, and The Establishment. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where you can find her snuggling with her cat Ramona, and crying during the series finale of Frasier.

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. His novel Super Sad True Love Story won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and became one of the most iconic novels of the decade. His memoir, Little Failure, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a New York Times bestseller. His most recent novel is Lake Success. His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in thirty countries. His most recent book is Our Country Friends.

Jon Raymond is the author of three novels, Rain Dragon, The Half-Life, and Freebird, and the short-story collection Livability. His work has appeared in Tin House, the Village Voice, Bookforum, and other places. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

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 the novelist Brit Bennett. Brit Bennett exploded onto the literary stage in 2016 with her novel, The Mothers. In her New York Times review, Mira Jacob praised the novel as a “ferociously moving debut.” Critics also noted Bennett’s talent for creating both propulsive, page-turning plots, and enduring, complex characters that stay with the reader long after the final page. Expectations were accordingly high for her second novel, and Bennett delivered in 2020 with The Vanishing Half. It became an immediate bestseller and earned Bennett comparisons to Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Elizabeth Strout.

Both novels share a focus on the complicated dynamics of family, and on the social and political influence of small-town communities. They are also explicitly centered on secrets, on roads not taken and what ifs.

Bennett joined us for Portland Arts and Lectures on February 17, 2022 to talk about The Vanishing Half and how and why she came to write it, and specifically why she wanted to write a novel in which one of the primary characters passes for white. Bennett dives into the literary history of stories about passing from the beginning of the 20th century through the present and provides a fresh perspective on the central American themes in fiction: the creative and destructive power of personal transformation.

Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. Her debut novel, The Mothers, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for both the NBCC John Leonard First Novel Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, The Vanishing Half, was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller, longlisted for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Women’s Prize, and named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times. Bennet has been named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, a NAACP Image Award Finalist, and one of Time’s Next 100 Influential People. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.

In this episode, we feature novelist Ash Davidson in conversation with writer and educator, Jacqueline Fitzgerald. The event took place at the Portland Book Festival in November 2021.

The novel, Damnation Spring, by Davidson was one of the most anticipated and celebrated books of 2021. It takes place in 1977 in the Pacific Northwest, near the end of the era when the timber industry dominated the region, and a nascent environmental movement is just beginning to take root. A fissure runs through the Gunderson family that threatens their way of life and their very identity. And Damnation Spring’s themes and tensions around timber, the environment, the needs of community to have work and to have their health, are so deeply resonant with the recent history here in Oregon and the greater Pacific Northwest.

In this conversation, we hear about Davidson’s ten-year journey writing the novel including the how she synthesized the massive amount of research that went into it, how she approached the political nature of her subject, and about her own background growing up in remote parts of this country.

Ash Davidson was born in Arcata, California, and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has been supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts and MacDowell. Her debut novel is Damnation Spring. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Jacqueline Fitzgerald is a transformation coach, educator, and artist who centers healing, creativity, and embodied equity to cultivate collective belonging. After over a decade of experience as a teacher and facilitator in Portland area public schools, Jacque brings a trauma-informed, joyful, and loving approach to her values re-alignment work. Her writing has been published in The Oregonian, The Learning Network of the New York Times, and Beacon Magazine. Currently she is recording her debut album under the artist name Echo Onda.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we celebrate the twentieth year of Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads program. Each year, the Library chooses one book that they hope everyone in Multnomah County will read and talk about. As part of the program, the Library and their partner organizations host events based on the themes of the book, and they distribute thousands of free copies to readers of all ages thanks to support from The Library Foundation. Literary Arts has been a proud partner of Everybody Reads for over a decade, by bringing the featured author to Portland to culminate the program with a live event at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.

In the episode, we join Vailey Oehlke, who has been director of Multnomah County Library since 2009. Vailey is in conversation with Literary Arts’ executive director, Andrew Proctor. They discuss the inspiration and beginnings of the program at the Library, reflect on the role of public libraries as important and unique cultural resources, share favorite moments from past author visits, and go behind the scenes of how the books are selected. We also hear from previous Everybody Reads authors Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of 2019’s selections Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists; Portland-native Mitchell S. Jackson, author of 2015’s selection The Residue Years; and Ross Gay, author of 2021’s selection The Book of Delights.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature the legendary writer, Stephen King, who appeared at the Newmark Theatre for a Literary Arts Special Event in 2006.

King first published in 1967 and went on to write some of the most iconic pop culture classics of the last half century, many of which were made into Hollywood films, including The Shining, Misery, and The Green Mile. He wrote over seventy-five books of fiction and nonfiction, not to mention countless screenplays. His work is difficult to define; a mixture of psychological horror, fantasy, realism, and occasional whimsical and/or satirical humor. He was certainly one the best-selling author of the second half of the 20th century.

In this talk, King regales the audience with stories, real and imagined, with his signature mastery of plot, suspense, and hilarious punch lines that define his work. He ranges from his early days working at an industrial laundry facility where he made $1.60 an hour, to how the plots of some of his most famous novels where constructed.  Throughout you can hear the tension between King’s pop culture credentials and the judgement of literary establishment, between King’s working-class roots and so-called “high” culture.

When he joined us in 2006, he had just published Lisey’s Story, and both talks about writing it and reads a few pages from the book. Throughout King is self-deprecating, hilarious, and also serious about craft.

“People ask me, ‘Do you have bad dreams?’ and I say to them, ‘Yes. When I don’t write, I have bad dreams.’”

Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, and Doctor Sleep are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.