The Archive Project

In this episode, we feature two conversations from the 2020 Portland Book Festival that both wrestle with the question of how we look after each other when mental and physical health have been compromised. What do we owe each other, and when do we walk away?

In the first segment of the show we feature Robert Kolker who joined us to talk about his new work of nonfiction Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of An American Family. The book is the heartrending story of a midcentury American family, the Galvins, with twelve children, six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia. It is a story of immense trauma and also genuine hope. Kolker is in conversation with journalist Eli Saslow.

In the second segment of the show we feature Dr. Michele Harper who is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir The Beauty in Breaking, about her experiences as a female, African American emergency room physician and her own journey to self-healing. Dr. Harper is in conversation with author Ruth Dickey, who has just this month (March 2021) been appointed the Director of the National Book Foundation.

Ruth E. Dickey is the Director of the National Book Foundation. Dickey has spent 25 years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art. The recipient of a Mayor’s Arts Award from Washington DC, and an individual artist grant from the DC Commission and Arts and Humanities, Ruth’s poems and essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won three Larry Neal Writing Awards. She is the author of the chapbook, Paper Houses, Sky Ceilings (Pudding House Press 2006), and her work has appeared widely, including in Alimentum, The Baltimore Review, Cincinnati Review, Ocean State Review, The Potomac Review, and Sonora Review. Ruth holds an MFA in poetry from UNC-Greensboro, and a BS in Foreign Service and an MA in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University, and was a 2017 fellow with the National Arts Strategies Chief Executive Program.

Michele Harper has worked as an emergency room physician for more than a decade at various institutions, including as chief resident at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx and in the emergency department at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Philadelphia. She is a graduate of Harvard University and the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. The Beauty in Breaking is her first book.

Robert Kolker is the author of Hidden Valley Road, an instant #1 New York Times nonfiction best-seller and official selection of Oprah’s Book Club. His previous book, Lost Girls, was also a New York Times best-seller and one of the Times‘s 100 Notable Books of 2013, as well as one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Top Ten Books of the Year, one of Time’s best true crime books ever, and one of Slate’s best nonfiction books of the last 25 years. Kolker’s journalism has appeared in New York Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wired, GQ, O Magazine, and The Marshall Project. He is a National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of the 2011 Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Eli Saslow is a Washington Post staff writer and author of Ten Letters: The Stories Americans Tell Their President and Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2014 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2013, 2016 and 2017. He lives in Oregon with his wife and children.

In this episode, we feature a conversation between novelists Rumaan Alam and Jonathan Lethem from the 2020 Portland Book Festival.

There is a rich tradition of the apocalyptic novel. As Alam and Lethem touch on, the urgency in this tradition allows writers to explore what really matters to their characters, and asks what we will keep and what we will forget when push comes to shove. The scope of these works range from, as Lethem says, “wide screen” narratives of entire societies being transformed, to the more intimate stories of how individuals, relationships, and families are shaped by these tragedies. The latter is the primary preoccupation of both these writers in their most recent novels.

In Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, which was a finalist for the Nation Book Award, a blackout on the Eastern seaboard forces two families together in an isolated rural house, cut off from the outside world. In award-winning author Jonathan Lethem’s The Arrest, two siblings find themselves in a world where most of what we take for granted—cars, computers, airplanes—have quit working and their lives are further upended by a man with a nuclear-powered super car.

Rumaan Alam is the author of Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and Leave the World Behind. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Elle, New York Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, The Rumpus, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. He studied at Oberlin College, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of twelve novels, including The Feral Detective, The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Arrest is his twelfth novel.  He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.

In this episode, we feature a conversation with Brit Bennett and Bryan Washington, moderated by Jennifer Baker, at the Portland Book Festival in November 2020.

In the New York Times best-selling The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett weaves together multiple strands and generations of a family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990’s. It’s a story that considers the lasting influence of the past as it shares her character’s decisions, desires, and expectations. In Bryan Washington’s Memorial, Mike and Benson are young men whose world is turned inside out as they find themselves living apart and forced to discover their own truths.

Jennifer Baker guides the conversation both into questions of craft—such as how and why these writers created novels with multiple narrators and just how much of their books are discovered in the writing—and she into the central themes of both these books: race, love, family, inheritance, choice, consequence, and how the dynamics of relationships are shaped by them.

“That was the sort of book that I wanted to write: Where characters are free to make mistakes, but also free to attempt to come back together to one another. It comes back to the idea for me that every character should have the capacity to love.” – Bryan Washington

Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction. In 2014, she received the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller. Her second novel The Vanishing Half was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.

Bryan Washington is a National Book Award 5 Under 35 honoree, and winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His first book, the story collection Lot, was a finalist for the NBCC’s John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Lot was a New York Times Notable Book, one of Dwight Garner’s top ten books of the year, and on best-of-the-year lists from Time, NPR, Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed, and many more. Washington’s debut novel is Memorial. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, BuzzFeed, Vulture, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appétit, GQ, The Awl, and Catapult. He lives in Houston.

Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, creator/host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, and contributing editor to Electric Literature. Jennifer is also the editor of the all PoC-short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life. Her fiction, nonfiction, and criticism has appeared in various print and online publications.

In this episode, we feature Isabel Wilkerson, interviewed by Viet Thanh Nguyen, from the 2020 Portland Book Festival. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Isabel Wilkerson the National Humanities Medal for “her masterful combination of intimate human narratives with broader societal trends” and for “championing an unsung history.” This was for her first book The Warmth of Other Suns, which chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: The decades-long migration of Black citizens who fled the south for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. It went on to spend months on The New York Times Best Sellers list and has been hailed as a modern classic.

Wilkerson joined us at the Portland Book Festival to talk about her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. It is an astonishing re-framing of American history and our founding myths that is vital to understanding what is happening in the country today – socially and politically. Wilkerson is in conversation with writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer.

“We can’t fix what we don’t know. We can’t fix what we cannot name. We can’t repair what we have not yet fully understood. We can’t heal what we haven’t diagnosed.”

“‘Caste’ as an idea, as a phenomenon, is thousands upon thousands of years old. It pre-dates the idea of ‘race’. And any hierarchy that’s set up could choose any number of metrics in order to apportion, to divide, and to rank people. In this country, this fairly new concept known as ‘race,’ which only goes back four or five hundred years, was the metric that was used in order to identify, characterize, apportion, and assign people to a fixed place in what was ultimately going to become the United States. We live with the after-effects of that to the current day.”

“These are longstanding assumptions, stereotypes, and power relationships that transcend any one election, any one campaign, any one politician. This hierarchy, this caste system… is part of the foundation of what we have inherited as Americans. It’s about the enduring legacy that we’ve inherited, and the ways it manifests itself. Many of the things we might be seeing [today] are merely manifestations of the inheritance that has not been dealt with up until now.”

“People who are from the historically subjugated group in this country—who have to bear the brunt of this caste system on a daily basis—are not the group that the [United States] should be leaning on now. The people who were born to the subjugated group already bear the brunt and have born the burden for far too long. It is up to others in this country to do the work.”

Isabel Wilkerson’s first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lynton History Prize, the Heartland Award and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. It was named one of the 10 best books of the year by The New York Times, USA Today, O: The Oprah Magazine, The New Yorker, The Washington Post and many others. In 2019, Time Magazine named The Warmth of Other Suns to its list of the 10 best nonfiction books of the decade. Wilkerson is the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism and the first African-American to win for individual reporting.  In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal for “her masterful combination of intimate human narratives with broader societal trends” and for “championing an unsung history.” Her most recent book is Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He has written the novels The Refugees and The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as five other awards. He is also the author of the nonfiction books The Displaced, Nothing Ever Dies, and Race and Resistance. He has also released the children’s book Chicken of the Sea, co-written with his son, Ellison Nguyen. The Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, he lives in Los Angeles.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk and conversation with novelist Yaa Gyasi. In 2016, Gyasi’s first novel, Homegoing, was published and immediately became a New York Times’ bestseller, was awarded numerous prizes, and was praised by Zadie Smith as “spectacular,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates as “an inspiration,” and widely hailed as one of the best books of that year. This spring, Gyasi joined us for Portland Arts & Lectures to talk about her second book, Transcendent Kingdom, published in 2020. Like Homegoing, the book explores the constant presence of the past. But, where that book spanned centuries and continents, Transcendent Kingdom unfolds on a more granular, intimate scale.

In many ways, this talk is less about writing than it is the power of reading, an act that is so powerful that people died so that others might experience it, so powerful that it can force the reader to contend with the humanity of someone they do not know and will never meet, from another place or time. We learn of the profound impact of Toni Morrison on Gyasi, her journey to becoming a writer, and how she grapples in her fiction with what she calls the “afterlife of slavery,” asking the question, “Is slavery even over?”

In the second half of the episode, she is joined by Andrew Proctor for a conversation about both her books, and the influences that shaped them.

“My work is largely concerned with the ways that the ancestors walk with us; the ways history, familial and societal, continues to show up in our lives.”

Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She holds a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held a Dean’s Graduate Research Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn.

Andrew Proctor has been the director of Literary Arts since 2009. Born and raised in Canada, Proctor, earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Music at Concordia University in Montreal, and later worked in London for the Cultural Attaché to the Canadian High Commission. In the UK, he also earned an MA in English Literature at the University of East Anglia under the supervision of England’s then Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. From 2000-2004 Proctor worked as an editor for HarperCollins in New York City and then as the Membership and Operations Director of the PEN American Center, a global literary and human rights organization focused on the welfare of writers and editors. In total, Proctor has worked in the literary world for over twenty years in the governmental, for profit, and nonprofit sectors.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature poet Joy Harjo. Harjo became the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States when she was appointed in 2019, and is currently serving her third term in that post.

She joined us as part of Portland Arts & Lectures from her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma. During her Laureateship, she edited two landmark anthologies: When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, and Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry.  Harjo uses these two projects as a basis to structure her talk, which takes us deep into the history of Native American poetry, from periods when it was an oral tradition, to the first appearance of written poetry in the seventeenth century, all the way to the current day. These anthologies gather together work from hundreds of languages, nations and tribes to present to the reader the breadth and depth of a tradition that continues to flourish, but that was left out, erased, or otherwise made invisible by editors, publishers, and academics over the centuries.  Harjo’s work re-surfacing these poems and poets is vital to our understanding of ourselves as a nation because, as Harjo says, a nation is defined by its literature.

In the second half of this episode, Harjo will be in conversation with Oregon’s Poet Laurate and Literary Arts Board Member, Anis Mojgani.  Mojgani is an international poetry slam champion, and the author of five books of poetry, most recently In the Pockets of Small Gods. His first children’s book is forthcoming from Chronicle Books, and his poem “Closer” was included in the recently published anthology, African American Poetry, edited by Kevin Young.

“Words are living beings.”

“Those of us who read and listen to poetry want our ears and perception bent for unique insight, and want to see how the impossible becomes momentarily possible in the arrangement of language and meaning.”

Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently An American Sunrise, and one previous memoir, Crazy Brave. She edited the anthologies When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through and Living Nations, Living Words. Named poet laureate of the United States in 2019, she lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she is a Tulsa Artist Fellow.

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.

“I’m holding the door open and saying ‘Look at all these poets.’ We have so many poets, and this is the time that we go to the poets. This is the time we need the poets and poetry, because the poets are the truth tellers.”

In this episode, we feature Alison Bechdel in conversation with Oregon’s own Cheryl Strayed. Strayed talks with Bechdel about her newest book The Secret to Superhuman Strength. The graphic memoir is ostensibly about Bechdel’s lifelong pursuit of exercise in one form or another. But like so much of Bechdel’s work, the book is not necessarily about what it’s about. Bechdel’s obsession with exercise is driven by her desire to be physically strong and resilient, but it is also a tool to clear her mind and fuel her creativity, and it is rebuke of the misogyny she was surrounded by her whole life.

Their conversation also takes us down fascinating side trips including a tour of literary history from English Romantics, to the American Transcendentalists right though the Beat Poets of the 1950s–all radical in their time, who perused enlightenment in the outdoors, and who, though separated by hundreds of years, are also dealing with remarkably similar ideas. Strayed and Bechdel are also both candid and humble in this conversation which concludes with a discussion about creativity and anxiety, and their struggles to produce new work under the spotlight of their incredible successes.

This event was originally presented by WestxMidwest, a collaboration between Black Mountain Institute, Literary Arts, The Loft’s Wordplay and the Wisconsin Book Festival.

“That’s what I love about memoir: This puzzle of trying to find a story in the randomness of our lives.”

Alison Bechdel is the author of the bestselling memoir FUN HOME: A Family Tragicomic, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, New York Times, People, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, and San Francisco Chronicle, among others. For 25 years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life—queer and otherwise—considered “one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period.” Bechdel was guest editor of Best American Comics 2011 and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney’s, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and the New York Times Book Review.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times–bestselling memoir Wild, the New York Times–bestsellers Tiny Beautiful Things and Brave Enough, and the novel Torch. Strayed is the host of the New York Times hit podcast “Sugar Calling” and also “Dear Sugars,” which she co-hosted with Steve Almond. Her essays have been published in the Best American Essays, the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Salon, the Sun, Tin House, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. Strayed holds an MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Maxine Hong Kingston was born in Stockton, California. Her debut book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among the Ghosts, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976 and gained her worldwide attention. Her follow-up book, China Men, won the 1981 National Book Award, and Kingston has said she considers these books two halves of a whole. In all, she has published over a half dozen books of nonfiction, poetry, and fiction and won many additional awards including the National Humanities Medal in 2014.

Kingston delivered this lecture in January 1992, just two months after her home had burned down in the Oakland firestorm and three months after her father had died. She had been working for months on a new novel which was entirely lost in that fire. She recounts this harrowing day, and in doing so talks about the role of destruction in creativity, and of re-discovering the book she would ultimately complete and publish, entitled The Fifth Book of Peace, an homage to the Books of Peace that appeared in China hundreds of years ago that were deliberately burned because of how threatening they were to the reigning powers.

All of these subjects and themes seemed to us here at Literary Arts as particularly relevant right now here in the Pacific Northwest — and they seemed so to our listeners as well. This lecture was selected in a poll of our audience as the “listeners’ choice” from our deep backlist of episodes.

“If a woman is going to write a book of peace, it is given her to know devastation.”

Maxine Hong Kingston is the author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, and The Fifth Book of Peace, among other works. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award. She worked for many years as a senior lecturer in creative writing at UC Berkeley. Kingston lives in Oakland, California.

“Turning the bend, I looked up and saw that my house was gone. It was not that I recognized the place that it had stood or any familiar piece of it or its neighbors, but that the landscape was everywhere utterly changed. I had come to the ash moon of a planet that passes through the sun.”

“Ideas have an invisible existence that protects them, pervious to fire and bombs. If the fire had killed me, do my ideas live without me thinking and breathing?

In this episode of The Archive Project, we bring you poet and dramatist Cornelius Eady, from a Poetry Downtown event in 2002. Cornelius Eady published his first book of poetry, Kartunes, in 1980, at the age of 26. He went on to publish seven more books of poetry over the next 20 years, winning numerous prizes and being nominated as a finalist for a National Book Award. In the 1990s and early 2000’s, Eady also wrote for the stage, collaborating in several projects that resulted in several more national awards and the distinction of being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1996, Eady co-founded, with Toi Derricote, Cave Canem: A nonprofit organization serving Black poets to remedy  “the under-representation and isolation of African-American poets in the literary landscape”. This organization has played a crucial role in fostering several generations of black poets over the course of nearly thirty years. In 1996, for this work as convener, educator, and mentor, the National Book Foundation gave him an Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

In this episode, Eady reads and discusses selections from different works, and from different parts of his career. But despite the varied selections, his reading presents a devastating arc. He moves from stories and poems centered in the innocence of childhood, to work that portrays and meditates on violent racist acts–physical, emotional, legal–and how those acts affect, and that they mean for, his characters and those they love.

“Today we learn about poetry…The word just has that sound about it—like vegetables—that makes us want to shove our hands in our pockets and pout. It’s a grown up word, a suck-the-fun-from-the-room word—like behave. Every kid whines as if the lips of a dreaded aunt were upon them.”

Cornelius Eady is the author of eight books of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather (Putnam 2008). His second book, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, won the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1985. In 2001, Brutal Imagination was a finalist for the National Book Award. His work in theater includes the libretto for an opera, “Running Man,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999. His play “Brutal Imagination” won Newsday’s Oppenheimer award in 2002. Eady has been a teacher for more than 20 years and is now a professor at Notre Dame University.

“Both churches have an organ, but while the white church whispers, the black church growls. It pulls well-dressed women up into a sweat and men in mohair to lose their jackets and silk ties…The church rocks with a noise we have never heard before. Why are they acting like this? Something in their dancing makes us worry if this is something that we should be seeing, if someone is going to break in and catch us. This JESUS! they scream for is not the one our mother has been sending us away to visit.”

“One day my mother pointed up at the sky. I saw a sparrow being snatched up by a hawk. ‘Someday,’ she said, ‘you’re going to grow up to be just like him.’ She was speaking of the hawk, but I was thinking about the sparrow.”