The Archive Project

In this episode, we launch a special collaboration with Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Throughout this season of The Archive Project, we will feature a series of conversations about OSF’s work, exploring storytelling in the intersections of playwriting, theatre production and performance, and literature.

This episode features a conversation between Nataki Garrett, OSF artistic director, and Scarlett Kim, the associate artistic director of innovation and strategy. They discuss The Cymbeline Project, an upcoming OSF hybrid production: part theatre, part film, part visual art. As Nataki and Scarlett point out in their conversation, Shakespeare is built to be open to interpretation–to “do” Shakespeare is to experiment; to be true to the text is to break it apart.

In the episode, you will hear a scene from The Cymbeline Project, featuring actors Carolyn Zeller, Jessica Ko, and Shyla Lefner.

View more information about The Cymbeline Project on OSF’s website here: https://www.osfashland.org/en/productions/2022-Digital/cymbeline-project.aspx

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.

Scarlett Kim is a diasporic Korean director, artist, and producer who uses participatory performance and mixed-reality technology to enact social change. She serves as the Associate Artistic Director and Director of Innovation & Strategy at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Scarlett originates, directs, and collaborates on multimedia projects across theatre, visual art, and new media contexts internationally. She is passionate about creating unclassifiable spaces and uplifting underrepresented voices at the intersection of art, technology, and community through rhizomatic collaboration. Scarlett received her MFA in Theatre Directing from California Institute of the Arts and a BA in Theatre & Performance Studies and Visual Arts from the University of Chicago. Full bio here.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk by Russell Banks from 1999. Banks was the author twenty-one books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He was twice a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, first in 1985 for his seminal work of fiction Continental Drift, and then again in 1998 for Cloudsplitter. The New York Times lauded his “vivid portrayals of working-class Americans grappling with issues of poverty, race, and class” and placed him “among the first ranks of contemporary novelists.”

Banks also worked extensively in Hollywood, beginning when two of his novels—The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction—were made into feature-length movies.

In this talk, Banks talks about the uneasy and sometimes downright hostile history between authors and Hollywood with some hilarious anecdotes. And while this tension continues today, there’s also another fascinating contemporary resonance in his talk. At the time, the digital transition in filmmaking was dramatically lowering the cost of production, allowing serious films to be made from literary fiction and nonfiction. A blossoming of these so-called indie films resulted in the late-90s and the aughts. Today, another revolution has taken hold: streaming.  It too has brought us another wave of incredible novelistic narratives on the screen, but this time on what we traditionally have called TV.

Banks’ career was long and varied and he made an incredible and enduring contribution to our national culture. Russell Banks died on January 8, 2023 at the age of 82.

“Writing and reading literary fiction and poetry are activities almost too intimate to talk about. Literature is intimate behavior between strangers.”

Russell Banks, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Common Wealth Award for Literature. Banks passed away in January 2023 at the age of 82.

In this episode, we feature a conversation with Stephen Sondheim. Considered “one of the greatest songwriters in the history of musical theater,” Sondheim died at the age of 91 on November 26, 2021.

Sondhiem’s storied career includes mentorship by another icon of musical theater from a previous generation, Oscar Hammerstein. The first show for which Sondhiem would write the music and lyrics was Saturday Night in 1954 and from there he would go on to collaborate on some of the most influential musicals ever made including West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, and Into The Woods. Sondheim won every conceivable award, including the Pulitzer Prize, eight Grammys and eight Tonys, as well as an Academy Award. His work has stood the test of time, with current revivals of his shows on and off Broadway, and a movie version of West Side Story, directed by Stephen Spielberg.

In this episode we feature Sondhiem in a conversation with Frank Rich who was the drama critic of the New York Times from 1980 to 1993, and then an Op-Ed columnist from 1994 to 2011.  It was during his time as drama critic that Rich became friends with Sondhiem. What makes this conversation so incredible is the intimacy and rapport these two writers have with each other. Rich asks Sondheim about the evolution of his career, touching on the stories behind his best-known works and their adaptations.

Their appearance for Portland Arts & Lectures in 2008 was one of only a very few appearances the two ever made together.

“If you’re doing a musical that tells a story through song, then you’ve got to find a way of translating one medium into another.”

Stephen Sondheim was a composer and lyricist who collaborated on more than a dozen landmark shows (from which have come many standard songs) and who was the single most influential force in bringing the Broadway musical into the modern age. Beginning in his twenties, Sondheim contributed the lyrics to two classic collaborations with the playwright Arthur Laurents and the director-choreographer Jerome Robbins: West Side Story (1957; music by Leonard Bernstein) and Gypsy (1959; music by Jule Styne). The first Broadway show he produced as both composer and lyricist, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), had an even longer run than its predecessors. As Sondheim’s lyrics have entered the American language—from “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” to “The Ladies Who Lunch”—so too has his music liberated Broadway from traditional songwriting conventions. It is impossible to find a new musical of artistic ambition today that hasn’t been influenced by his breakthroughs in remaking the rules that once governed the traditional Broadway musical. Many of his musicals have been made into movies, including the Tim Burton-directed adaptation of Sweeney Todd. Sondheim won every conceivable award, including the Pulitzer Prize, two Grammys, an Oscar, and eight Tonys. He also won a special award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theater, The Kennedy Center Honors, the MacDowell Medal, the President’s Medal for the Arts, and the Praemium Imperiale (referred to as the “Nobel Prize of the Arts”). Sondheim passed away on November 26, 2021.

Frank Rich started as a Times Op-Ed columnist in January 1994. From 1999 to 2003, he was also a senior writer for The New York Times Magazine, a dual title that was a first for The Times. Rich joined New York magazine in June 2011 as writer-at-large, writing monthly on politics and culture and editing a special monthly section anchored by his essay. Among other honors, Mr. Rich received the George Polk Award for commentary in 2005. He has also written The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush’s America (2006), and his drama reviews were collected in Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993. Since 2008, Rich has also been a creative consultant at HBO and is an executive producer of Veep and Six by Sondheim, the Peabody Award-winning documentary about Stephen Sondheim.

“There has to be an emotional action in a song. I’ve always had very specific ideas as to what should happen in the number, either physically, or emotionally, or in terms of the other characters.”

“Many songs are just static. I try to write non-static songs.”

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Paul Theroux. Theroux is an iconic writer of over fifty books of fiction and nonfiction. Most of his work takes the form of travel writing–a genre he has helped define for the 20th and 21st centuries, as he traveled alone to some of the most remote parts of the world, writing about them with sensitivity, insight, wit, and wonder. He was a global citizen long before such a term existed.

It was his 1975 travelogue The Great Railway Bazaar, which recounted his passage by train from London to Southeast Asia by way of the Middle East and India, and back again on the Trans-Siberian Railway, which brought him to international prominence. In 1986 his novel The Mosquito Coast was adapted for a film starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren. His most recent book is the 2021 novel Under the Wave at Waimea.

In this lecture from 1994, Theroux talks about the role of travel writing and how it differs from journalism. He describes how great travel books are imprinted with the author’s world view and offer us a time stamp of a given place at specific time. This last note struck us about this show (The Archive Project) itself, in the way it reveals authors at a particular moment in their career in the context of a particular time.

“Travel writing is a kind of biography of a place. It is a portrait of a place.”

“A [travel book] is not about the place as much as it is about the person who’s writing about the place.”

Paul Theroux is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Lower River, Jungle Lovers, and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

This episode of The Archive Project features highlights from the 2021 Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America. Listen to excerpts from longer discussions between novelist Brandon Taylor and Genevieve Hudson, cartoonist Aminder Dhaliwal and OPB’s Tiffany Camhi, and legendary poet Rita Dove and Mary Szybist.

The Portland Book Festival presents a diverse range of writers who have recently published novels, story collections, works of nonfiction and poetry. There are over 50 writers in the festival this year and they hail from all over the country. Some are among our most famous writers at work today, and some publishing their first book. All are accomplished artists with powerful ideas and stories that can illuminate our understanding of ourselves and our world.

To listen to full discussions from this episode, and the rest of the Festival, visit PDXBookFest.org.

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.

Aminder Dhaliwal is a native of Brampton, Ontario and received a Bachelors of Animation from Sheridan College. She now lives in Los Angeles, where she is the Director at Disney TV Animation. Previously, she worked as a Storyboard Director at Cartoon Network and Storyboard Director on the Nickelodeon show Sanjay and Craig. She has serialized Woman World biweekly on instagram since March 2017 and has garnered over 120,000 followers. Woman World was nominated for an Ignatz Award for Outstanding Online Comic. Her most recent graphic novel is Cyclopedia Exotica.

Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate, is the only poet honored with both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts. Her recent works include Playlist for the Apocalypse, Sonata Mulattica, and the National Book Award–shortlisted Collected Poems: 1974–2004. In 2021 she was awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Charlottesville, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia.

Originally from Alabama, Genevieve Hudson earned an MFA from Portland State University and has received Fulbright, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center fellowships. She is the author of Pretend We Live Here: Stories, and lives in Portland, Oregon. Boys of Alabama is her debut novel.

Mary Szybist is most recently the author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award in Poetry. She is the Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis & Clark College.

Brandon Taylor is the author of the acclaimed novel Real Life, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction. His latest book is Filthy Animals.

Grace Bonney, author of the bestselling books In the Company of Women and Design*Sponge at Home, leads this conversation with three of the women from her newest book, Collective Wisdom: Lessons, Wisdom, and Advice from Women Over 50. Lisa Congdon, Ngọc Minh Ngo, and Sonoko Sakai discuss their sources of creativity, what makes them feel empowered, and how they view common misconceptions about aging.

Grace Bonney is the author of the bestselling books In the Company of Women and Design*Sponge at Home. She is passionate about equity, inclusivity, and supporting all members of the creative community: She founded Design*Sponge, a daily website dedicated to the creative community, which reached nearly 2 million readers per day for 15 years and is now officially archived in the Library of Congress; Good Company, a print magazine and podcast about creative entrepreneurs; and After the Jump, a podcast about creatives that has reached over 500,000 listeners per episode. Bonney lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her wife and their pets. She is currently working toward a graduate degree in marriage and family therapy at Syracuse University. Her latest book, Collective Wisdom, was published in October 2021.

Lisa Congdon is an artist and illustrator known for her colorful paintings, drawings, hand lettering, and pattern designs. Her books include Find Your Artistic Voice, Whatever You Are, Be a Good One, and Art, Inc., and most recently, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Elements. Lisa lives in Portland, Oregon.

Ngoc Minh Ngo is a celebrated photographer and the author of two books. Ngoc’s images have been published in publications such as T Magazine, Architectural Digest, Cabana, and House & Garden UK.

Sonoko Sakai’s cooking reflects her rich cultural upbringing. Born in New York and raised by Japanese parents, she lived in many places as a child, including San Francisco, Kamakura, Mexico City, and Tokyo. She is the author of two books, Rice Craft (Chronicle, 2016) and The Poetical Pursuit of Food (Potter, 1986). She has worked as a recipe developer, producer, creative director, cooking teacher, and lecturer. She is also a grain activist. Sonoko currently lives in Los Angeles and Tehachapi, California, with her sculptor husband, Katsuhisa Sakai.

This special podcast-only episode of Literary Arts’ The Archive Project, features a reunion of a panel discussion from the 2017 Portland Book Festival. (In fact, you can hear the original event on The Archive Project here.) Join poet Kaveh Akbar (Pilgrim Bell), memoirist and essayist Melissa Febos (Girlhood), and essayist Megan Stielstra (Once I Was Cool) and moderator Marisa Siegel (The Rumpus) as they revisit their 2017 discussion and share their new books and projects.

Kaveh Akbar’s second full-length volume of poetry, Pilgrim Bell, was published by Graywolf in August 2021. His debut, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is out now with Alice James in the US and Penguin in the UK. He is also the author of the chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, published in 2016 by Sibling Rivalry Press. In 2022, Penguin Classics will publish a new anthology edited by Kaveh: The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine. His poems appear in the New Yorker, New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. In 2020 Kaveh was named Poetry Editor of The Nation. The recipient of honors including multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Levis Reading Prize, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart and two essay collections: Abandon Me, a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist and Publishing Triangle Award finalist, and Girlhood, a national bestseller. Catapult will publish a collection of her craft essays, Body Work, on March 15, 2022. A recipient of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary and of fellowships from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The BAU Institute at The Camargo Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Foundation, and others; her essays have appeared in the Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Granta, The Yale Review, Tin House, The Sun, and the New York Times Magazine. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.

Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections: Everyone Remain Calm, Once I Was Cool, and The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, winner of the 2017 Book of the Year Award from the Chicago Review of Books. Her work appears in Best American Essays, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Believer, Poets & Writers, Tin House, and elsewhere. A longtime company member with 2nd Story, she has told stories for National Public Radio, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and theatres, festivals, and classrooms across the country. She teaches creative nonfiction at Northwestern University and weird, wonderful Zoom spaces in your living room.

Marisa Siegel lives, writes, and edits near NYC. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Mills College in Oakland, CA. Her essay “Inherited Anger” appears in the anthology Burn It Down (Seal Press, 2019) and her debut poetry chapbook, Fixed Stars, is forthcoming from Burrow Press in March 2022. She is senior acquiring editor for trade at Northwestern University Press, and owner/publisher of The Rumpus.

Historical fiction often blurs the lines between truth and story.

Authors A. K. Blakemore and Rivka Galchen each have new books out that explore the very real witch trials of the 17th century. But their approach to the subject matter and the characters at the center of each story feel like opposite sides of the same coin.

Blakemore’s The Manningtree Witches is set in 1643 and follows the young, single, and naïve Rebecca West, who is being pursued by the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General. Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch centers around elderly, illiterate widow Katharina, who is accused of witchcraft in 1618 in the German territory of Württemberg.

As part of Portland Book Festival, OPB host Crystal Ligori sat down with the writers to discuss the process of basing fiction on historical events, how individual experiences can be wrapped up in national and global circumstances, and what it really means to be a witch.

A. K. BLAKEMORE is the author of two collections of poetry: Humbert Summer and Fondue. She has also translated the work of Sichuanese poet Yu Yoyo. Her poetry and prose writing have been widely published and anthologized, appearing in the London Review of Books, Poetry, The Poetry Review, and The White Review, among other publications. The Manningtree Witches is is her debut novel. She lives in London, England.

Rivka Galchen received her MD from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, having spent a year in South America working on public health issues. Galchen completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham Fellow. Her essay on the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics was published in The Believer, and she is the recipient of a 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Galchen lives in New York City. She is the author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances.

Crystal Ligori is the Producer and News Anchor for OPB’s All Things Considered and produces the weekly radio program Literary Arts: The Archive Project. She also narrates the digital food series Superabundant. Before joining OPB, she spent six years on-air across the Pacific Northwest as a host and producer at KUFO in Portland, KZZU in Spokane, WA and at KBGA in Missoula, MT. Her work has also been heard on National Public Radio Newscasts, PRX’s Living on Earth, and NPR’s All Things Considered. Crystal is an alumni of the School of Journalism at the University of Montana and she shares a regional Emmy nomination for the documentary “Testing Times: Montana’s Struggle to Leave No Child Behind”, for which she was a segment producer and narrator.

This special podcast-only episode of Literary Arts’ The Archive Project, features John Freeman, editor of Freeman’s, in conversation with French author and translator Jakuta Alikavazovic; Yugoslav-born writer Lana Bastašić; and novelists and memoirist Aleksandar Hemon. All three possess one connection or another to Bosnia. In this conversation, they discuss the Bosnian diaspora, writing works in translation, and the power of language and memory to create “home.”

“I’m still creating this language that I need to tell the story of myself.” – Lana Bastašić

Jakuta Alikavazovic is a French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins. She was born in Paris, where she studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure and where she now lives. Her first novel, Corps Volatils (2008) won the Goncourt Prize for Best First Novel and her second and third novels, Le Londres-Luxor (2010) and La Blonde et Le Bunker (2012) won prizes in France and Italy.  Her new novel, Night as it Falls (L’Avancee de la Nuit), was published by Faber in 2020. She is also the translator of Anna Burns and Ben Lerner amongst others and teaches at la Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Lana Bastašić is a Yugoslav-born writer. Her first novel Catch the Rabbit (Restless Books) won the European Union Prize in Literature in 2020 and has been translated into fifteen languages. Her last book is Milk Teeth, a collection of short stories published in Serbo-Croatian in 2020. She is one of the founders of Escola Bloom School of Literature in Barcelona. She’s based in Belgrade, but spends most of her time on the road.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, The Lazarus Project, Love and Obstacles, The Making of Zombie Wars, The Book of My Lives and My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You (memoir, May 2019). He is the winner of the 2020 Dos Passos Prize. Hemon co-wrote the script for The Matrix 4, with David Mitchell and Lana Wachowski. He is at work on How Did You Get Here?: Tales of Displacement (oral histories) forthcoming from FSG. How Did You Get Here? was the recipient of a PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History in 2017. His next novel, The World and All That It Holds will be published by FSG in 2022.

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary annual published by Grove Press, and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. He has written several books of nonfiction including, How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as three collections of poems, Maps , The Park, and the forthcoming Wind, Trees. Between 2014 and 2020, he edited a series of anthologies on inequality, concluding with Tales of Two Planets, which focuses on the climate crisis and global inequality. His latest books are The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story and, with Tracy K. Smith, There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love, in which poets, novelists and essayists create a space to respond to catastrophes and racialized violence of 2020. Freeman’s work has been translated into more than 20 languages and appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Zyzzyva. He lives in London.

In this episode, we feature an event from the 2021 Portland Book Festival, moderated by author and editor, John Freeman. The event title keyed off of Freeman’s anthology of the same name: Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World. Freeman sat down with authors Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Kawai Strong Washburn to talk about writing and the environment, and the conversation naturally turns to language and its relationship to history, connection, identity and the natural world. How and why do we write about a natural world in crisis? What are the ethics of doing so? What lesson can we draw on from biodiversity for our own cultures?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an acclaimed poet and author of the illustrated essay collection World of Wonders. It’s a book about the natural world and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us.  Kawai Strong Washburn’s debut novel Sharks in the Time of Saviors is about the supernatural events that force a family to reckon with the meaning of heritage and the cost of survival.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author World of Wonders, an illustrated essay collection, as well as of four books of poetry, most recently, Oceanic, winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Other awards for her writing include fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Mississippi Arts Council, and MacDowell. Her writing appears in Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, ESPN, and Tin House. She serves as poetry faculty for the Writing Workshops in Greece and is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.

Kawai Strong Washburn was born and raised on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. His work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other outlets. He was a 2015 Tin House Summer Scholar and 2015 Bread Loaf work-study scholar. Today, he lives with his wife and daughters in Minneapolis. Sharks in the Time of Saviors is his first novel.

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary annual published by Grove Press, and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. He has written several books of nonfiction including, How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as three collections of poems, Maps , The Park, and the forthcoming Wind, Trees. Between 2014 and 2020, he edited a series of anthologies on inequality, concluding with Tales of Two Planets, which focuses on the climate crisis and global inequality. His latest books are The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story and, with Tracy K. Smith, There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love, in which poets, novelists and essayists create a space to respond to catastrophes and racialized violence of 2020. Freeman’s work has been translated into more than 20 languages and appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Zyzzyva. He lives in London.