The Archive Project

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.

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.

We collaborated with Portland Center Stage to bring you this episode celebrating the Afro-futurist sci-fi audio thriller, PROTOCOL. Portland Center Stage produced PROTOCOL for its PCS Remix season. We’ll hear a segment of the pilot episode of PROTOCOL and then dive into a conversation between Chip Miller, the associate artistic director of Portland Center Stage, with lead artist on the project Phil Johnson, and dramaturg and literary manager Kamilah Bush. They discuss the process of writing collaboratively during a pandemic, creating science fiction worlds, breaking down barriers in the arts, and the state of theatre right now.

About PROTOCOL: When an unexpected tragedy befalls the crew aboard space cruiser Elegua IV, they are thrust into a thrilling mystery which threatens their mission to preserve humanity. Conceived by Portland artist Phil Johnson, this science fiction audio experience traverses multiple times, dimensions, and galaxies to explore how the systems we trust may not always be on our side. PROTOCOL was written by Bobby Bermea, Tyharra Cozier, Phil Johnson, and Ashley Song Mellinger. Visit the Portland Center Stage website to listen to full episodes of PROTOCOL and access additional content.

“One thing that I would love, as an Afro-futurist, to do is to break down these barriers of what is theatre and theatricality. My intention with this piece is to show that you can create an art piece that is cinematic in one way or theatrical in another way, but is neither of those things. It’s showing you that those terms are more malleable than you think.” – Phil Johnson

Kamilah Bush is a dramaturg, playwright, and educator originally from North Carolina. She holds a B.F.A. in Theater Education from UNC-Greensboro. Most recently, she served as the artistic assistant at Two River Theater in Red Bank, NJ, and formerly spent several seasons at Asolo Repertory Theater in Sarasota, FL, and Triad Stage in Greensboro, NC.

Phil Johnson is a visual and theatrical artist based in Portland and the host of the Radical Listening Podcast. Phil is a self-proclaimed futurist and surrealist who focuses on the realities of the human condition, especially as it relates to his experience as an African American male. Phil is also highly concerned with the effect that technology plays on our mental and emotional health, and he expresses that through his work, whether it is storytelling, painting, or sound design. Phil Has a B.F.A. and M.A. from Ohio University.

Before joining Portland Center Stage, Chip Miller held the role of artistic associate/resident director at Kansas City Repertory Theatre for seven years, where their directing credits included School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, Welcome to Fear City, Sex with Strangers, and A Raisin in the Sun. Beyond KCRep stages, directing credits include Becoming Martin by Kevin Willmott (world premiere, The Coterie Theatre), dwb: driving while black (Lawrence Arts Center), and 4:48 Psychosis (The Buffalo Room). Chip has developed work with playwrights including Kevin Willmott, Kara Lee Corthron, Brittany K. Allen, Catherine Trieschmann, Darren Canady, Andrew Rosendorf, Michelle T. Johnson, and Michael Finke. They has developed work at The William Inge Theater Festival, NYU Steinhardt’s New Plays for Young Audiences, Orlando Shakes’ Playfest, Midwest Dramatists Center, Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s OriginKC: New Works Festival, and Portland Center Stage’s JAW Festival. Chip has a B.F.A. from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

“What’s so exciting about being a theatre artist at this time is that we are adaptable. …The only way we survive is to embrace different mediums, to embrace the future.” – Kamilah Bush

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 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 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’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, 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 novelist Madeline Miller. When we hosted Miller in January 2021, she had not one but two books on the New York Times Best Seller list: The Song of Achilles and Circe. Both books are retellings, in novel form, of ancient Greek myths. But they are also more than simply retellings. Her books are the reinterpreting of myths that reveal new truths from these ancient stories.

Miller’s work matters because of the way it is iconoclastic. It’s easy to think that Greek myths, and their received interpretations, are immutable and fixed in the history of literature, but Miller reminds us that these stories have always had multiple versions depending on who is doing the telling and what agenda might be behind a particular version. She questions who is centered in the story and who is not, what details are left out and what is embellished. This notion that a storyteller makes choices is important to really understanding, as readers, the mechanics of all stories. Her work also speaks to the power of these Greek myths. For millennia, these myths have been retold, reinterpreted, and remain vibrant and relevant stories for each generation. You only need to look to the incredible popularity of Miller’s work for evidence of this today.

In the second part of the episode, Miller is joined in conversation by Oregon Book Award-winning writer Omar El Akkad.

“I’m always thinking: This is the story I know, but what is the story I haven’t been told?”

Madeline Miller is the author of The Song of Achilles, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012, was shortlisted for the Stonewall Writer of the Year 2012, and was translated into twenty-five languages, and Circe, which won the 2019 Indie Choice Award, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was named on numerous Best Books of 2018 lists. Madeline holds an MA in Classics from Brown University, and she taught Latin, Greek and Shakespeare to high school students for over a decade. She has also studied at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, and at Yale School of Drama, where she focused on the adaptation of classical texts to modern forms. Her essays have appeared in publications including the Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Lapham’s Quarterly and NPR.org. She lives outside Philadelphia.

Omar El Akkad is an author and a journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work earned Canada’s National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.

“Part of what I wanted to do in writing these stories is I really wanted to strip away the part that sometimes makes people feel alienated. or that they feel is very elitist or not relevant. I wanted to make these novels the type of thing that have ‘goodies’ for the people who know these stories, but are really meant to invite everyone in.”