The Archive Project

In this episode, we feature a talk and reading by Irish poet and Nobel Laureate, the late Seamus Heaney from Portland Arts & Lectures in 2002. Heaney opens with poems from his very first collection and then takes us on a journey through more than four decades of his work that touches on everything from the sounds and smells of his mother baking bread in the 1940s, to his deep knowledge of poetry and its influence on his work, to meditations on the role of the artist in moments of political or national crisis – this last subject is, of course, for Heaney, Ireland’s “The Troubles,” the sectarian violence that erupted in 1965 and lasted more than 30 years in Ireland and the United Kingdom. It was a time when he says, “Everybody knew somebody who had been shot, or blown up, no matter which side you were on.” Heaney is famous for his depictions rural Ireland that can feel ancient and deeply modern all at once, and this is what gives his work power and relevance today.

Heaney begins this talk with his connection to Oregon’s own William Stafford, whose work he was introduced to in his first year of university by a professor who had spent time at Reed College. Heaney says, “So from the beginning, Portland, poetry, and promise have all been linked together.”

Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney was raised in County Derry, and later lived for many years in Dublin. He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, and edited several widely used anthologies. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the “most important Irish poet since Yeats.” Heaney taught at Harvard University (1985-2006) and served as the Oxford Professor of Poetry (1989-1994). He died in 2013.

In this episode we feature a conversation with Heather McGhee. For nearly two decades, McGhee has been involved in the fight against inequality by designing and advocating for polices in the public and private sectors. She has advised presidential candidates and fortune 500 companies, testified in congress, and lead the think tank Demos which argued before the Supreme Court and helped pass pro-voter reforms in five states. In 2021 McGhee published her first book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, which became an instant national bestseller.

In this conversation with author and journalist Anand Giridharadas, McGhee tells a social and political history of the 20th century in America that explains how and why we have arrived at this particular moment in the fight for social justice. Nothing that is happening now should be surprising in light of McGhee’s narrative. At the center of her argument is that racism hurts all of us, and is rooted in a zero-sum psychology in which one person’s gain is another’s loss. She points to alternative ways of community building in which collective contributions uplift all citizens, be that in health care, education, or civic life.

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

“We can’t solve a problem without facing it and naming it.”

Heather McGhee is an expert in economic and social policy. The former president of the inequality-focused think tank Demos, McGhee has drafted legislation, testified before Congress and contributed regularly to news shows including NBC’s Meet the Press. She now chairs the board of Color of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice organization. McGhee holds a BA in American studies from Yale University and a JD from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.

Anand Giridharadas is the author of Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling. He is an editor-at-large for TIME and was a foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times from 2005 to 2016. He has also written for The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. He is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC, a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and a former McKinsey analyst. He has spoken on the main stage of TED. Anand’s writing has been honored by the Society of Publishers in Asia, the Poynter Fellowship at Yale, the 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year award, Harvard University’s Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

“Ultimately, the world that we are making is one where the privileges that we often talk about in terms of white privilege—the privilege to not be afraid of the police, the privilege to have slightly better funded public schools in your neighborhood, the privilege to have slightly higher rates of access to healthcare—are not privileges we want to take away from white people, as in we don’t want them to experience those good things. We just want us to have them, too. It’s not a zero sum.”

In this episode, we’re going back into the archive all the way to 1997 to bring you journalist and author Orville Schell. Since 1970, Schell has been reporting widely on China for mainstream newspapers and magazines like the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic, to more academic publications like China Quarterly and Foreign Affairs.

At the time of this lecture, Schell was at work on a book entitled Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood. That book and this talk are a kind of response to a cultural phenomenon at the time in America: A fascination, an idealization, even, of Tibet. Movies were being made, Hollywood stars were making high profile trips to the country, and public activism was peaking. What Schell saw was not a new phenomenon, but one that periodically returns over and over in the West. His question was, why? And so, Schell takes us into the history of Tibet and its fraught relationship with both China and the West, and attempts to sort out what is fact and what is simply a projection of spiritual and political fantasies about the country. This is the service that great writers can provide. They help us separate the facts of history and the present day from the dangerous tendency to believe simply what we wish were so.

Orville Schell is the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. From 1996 to 2007 he was the dean of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He has written ten nonfiction books on China and contributed to many publications, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, Foreign Affairs, and The New York Review of Books. He is also an Emmy Award-winning producer for PBS, NBC Nightly News, and 60 Minutes. He divides his time between New York City and Berkeley, California.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Helen Macdonald from an online Portland Arts & Lectures event in October 2020. Helen Macdonald is a multitalented naturalist, illustrator, writer, and historian of science at the University of Cambridge. She has worked as a professional falconer and has assisted with raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia. Her 2016 book, H Is for Hawk, much like Macdonald herself, defies any single label. At once memoir, natural history, literary biography, it explores grief and loss, the relationships between humans and animals, obsession, memory, myth, and history.

Macdonald joined us to talk about her most recent book, the essay collection Vesper Flights. In the collection and in this episode, Macdonald moves back and forth through topics ranging from scientists to swans, and into childhood memories and then forward into an ominous future. Macdonald skillfully links her own experiences not only with the natural, wild world but with a very human world. There is grief, but also abundant wonder. Helen Macdonald will change the way you see the world, and all of its creatures—yourself included.

A little later in the show, Macdonald will be joined by the Oregon writer Elena Passarello for a conversation and a few audience questions.

“When you talk about nature, what you’re really doing is talking about yourself. Nature lets us articulate and reinforce stories we tell about the way the world is.”

Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator and naturalist, and an affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of the bestselling H Is for Hawk, as well as a cultural history of falcons, titled Falcon, and three collections of poetry, including Shaler’s Fish. Macdonald was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, has worked as a professional falconer, and has assisted with the management of raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia. She now writes for the New York Times Magazine.

Elena Passarello is an actor, essayist, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018, and has been translated into German, Italian, French, and Mandarin. She is the author of the essay collections Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses, the latter of which won the 2018 Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction and made the Best Books of 2017 lists in the New York Times, Guardian, and Publisher’s Weekly. Passarello teaches creative writing at Oregon State University and appears weekly on the nationally-syndicated PRI radio variety show LiveWire!.

“Animals are always more than we want them to be.”

“These small beasts expanded my home beyond the walls of my house. They made the natural world seem a place of complicated and beautiful safety. I think so many of the myths we have about the natural world are about us testing ourselves against it, setting ourselves against it, defining our humanity against it; but this was nothing like that at all. It was a child’s way of looking at the world.”

In this episode, we feature some of the incredible slam poets who performed as part of Verselandia! 2019: The annual city-wide youth poetry slam, presented by Literary Arts. High school students across the city spend the year writing and competing with their peers, and each April about twenty finalists compete for the title of Portland Slam Champ.

These young poets are a thrill to hear. They will give you the chills and perhaps bring tears to your eyes. And at this moment when it feels like 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 Portland, and have incredible stories to tell.

In addition to hearing some of these stunning performances, we will hear from the emcee of the evening, Mighty Mike McGee, and also directly from students as they talk about their art and connection to slam poetry.

Mighty Mike McGee is a well-traveled “stand-up poet” and storyteller from San José, California. In the world of poetry slam, he is the first to win both the 2003 National Poetry Slam Individual Grand Championship and the 2006 Individual World Poetry Slam Grand Championship. He has toured very extensively throughout United States, Canada and Europe. Since 2002, he’s covered several hundred thousand miles performing his brand of poetry and humor. McGee has been featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, CBC Radio and Television, and NPR’s Snap Judgment. He was one of the first Americans to perform spoken word at the University of Paris, la Sorbonne in 2005. He was appointed Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley) for 2018 & 2019.

In this episode, we feature poet and essayist Adrienne Rich, who visited Portland as a part of our Poetry Downtown series in 2006. Adrienne Rich was one of the most widely read and influential public intellectuals of the late 20th century, and her work often spoke directly to social justice issues. Born in 1929, Rich published over thirty books of poetry and essays. She passed away in 2013.

Judith Barrington—Oregon-based poet, memoirist, and teacher—made the original introduction at the event, which you will hear in this episode. What follows is Rich sharing poems from throughout her career that range in topic from social justice, history, philosophy, to celebrating the simple joys of life.

“As a poet, I’ve felt bound to pay attention to this difficult world. My art depends on that.”

Judith Barrington, award-winning poet, memoirist, and teacher who lives in Oregon, gave the original introduction at the event. Click here to read Barrington’s reflections on Adrienne Rich and that special night.

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major public intellectual of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry, including the National Book Award–winning Diving into the Wreck, and more than a half-dozen of prose.

This episode features award-winning poet and playwright Claudia Rankine in conversation with Jericho Brown at the 2020 Portland Book Festival. This event was presented by West x Midwest, a collaboration between Black Mountain Institute, The Loft’s Wordplay, the Wisconsin Book Festival, and Literary Arts.

Claudia Rankine joined us at the Portland Book Festival to talk about her latest collection Just Us: An American Conversation. The book completes a trilogy that includes Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen. These books speak to the painful mechanics of race in this country and invite us to discover what it takes to build better futures. They also defy categorization—they are arrangements of essays, poems, and images—by disrupting our expectations, throwing new light on a subject as old as the country itself. Each a bestseller, the experimental collections of this trilogy have established Rankine as one of the leading thinkers about race in America.

“What happens when we actually start talking? Our differences will create a broadening in our ability to become intimate with each other.”

Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist, and playwright. Just Us completes her groundbreaking trilogy, following Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen, which was a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Forward Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Rankine is the author of The White Card, a play; three previous books of poetry, Nothing in Nature Is Private, The End of the Alphabet, and Plot; and coeditor of the anthology The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, Rankine cofounded the Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII), “committed to the activation of interdisciplinary work and a democratized exploration of race in our lives.” She is a MacArthur Fellow and the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale.

Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is poetry editor at The Believer magazine and the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

In this episode of The Archive Project, novelist Min Jin Lee discusses her writing craft and inspiring personal journey to become a professional writer. With warm humor, Lee honestly opens up about her struggle to succeed—as a Korean-born American immigrant battling a life-threatening chronic illness—within the publishing industry, and details her perseverance in the face of countless rejection letters. A life-long reader and lover of books, Lee shines as she speaks of the necessity of the arts as a vehicle to empower those who are disempowered.

“I had already failed for such a long time, but I still cared about writing something really beautiful. No matter who I was, and no matter the consequences, it was still within my power to write about the people who fascinated me.”

“I am a great reader. It is that identity that I still cling to today.”

Min Jin Lee’s novel Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017. The San Francisco Chronicle lauds it as “beautiful… Lee’s sweeping four-generation saga of a Korean family is an extraordinary epic.” It was on over 75 best books of the year lists, and will be translated into 27 languages. Her debut novel, 2007’s Free Food for Millionaires, was also a national best seller as well as a Top 10 Books of the Year for The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air, and USA Today. Lee is a recipient of fellowships in fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard.