The Archive Project

This episode features novelist Jess Walter in conversation with Andrew Proctor at the 2020 Portland Book Festival. There are few writers with such breadth and accomplishment as Walter. He began his career as a journalist for The Spokesman-Review, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. Since then, he has gone on to publish nonfiction, stories, and novels, and also work as a screenwriter. A closer look at just his body of fiction reveals great range—from crime novels and thrillers, to literary and historical fiction. In addition to his many prizes and awards, nearly all his books have been bestsellers, including Beautiful Ruins, which spent months on the New York Times list.

But despite all the variety found in his writing, there is one consistent thread: His work is imbued with the ethos and perspective of Walter’s blue-collar, working class upbringing in Spokane, Washington. He talks about this cultural aspect of his life with pride, warmth, self-deprecating humor, and sometimes a critical eye.

Walter and Proctor’s conversation here revolves around Walter’s latest work of historical fiction, The Cold Millions. It’s a novel set near the turn of the 20th century and takes as its subject a moment of significant social upheaval and inequality, making it resonate with our present day in ways that are at once obvious, subtle, and eerie.

“We all become our best selves by reading. We learn, we become more empathetic, we cut out the outside world.”

Jess Walter is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Beautiful Ruins, the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets, the National Book Award finalist The Zero, the Edgar Award-winning Citizen Vince, Land of the Blind, the New York Times Notable Book Over Tumbled Graves, and the story collection We Live in Water. He lives in Spokane, Washington, with his family.

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.

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.

For over 50 years, Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction and fantasy books offered hope and inspiration to readers and writers everywhere. Le Guin passed away on January 22, 2018.

This live event, presented in Portland, Oregon on June 13, 2018, featured tributes from writers and friends who represent the wide-ranging influence Le Guin has had on international literature for more than 50 years, including Margaret Atwood (by video), Molly Gloss, Walidah Imarisha, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, China Miéville, and Daniel José Older. Andrea Schulz, Le Guin’s editor at Harcourt, and Julie Phillips, Le Guin’s biographer, also spoke at the tribute. The tribute included rare documentary footage of Le Guin, along with photos and images from her life and work. The full event is available to watch online here.

As a genre-defying writer, Ursula K. Le Guin authored more than 50 works, including novels, poetry collections, and children’s books that explore issues of race, gender, and environmentalism. Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Her many honors include the Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, and PEN-Malamud. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished contribution to American Letters.

While her speculative fiction urged readers to explore new worlds and distant futures, Le Guin was an active guardian of her writing community and her home state of Oregon. She was an ardent supporter for writers and independent publishers and actively used her platform to defend free speech. Le Guin was involved with Literary Arts for 31 years, as a participant, trusted advisor, and ardent supporter. Her dedication helped shape Literary Arts’ programs that serve more than 20,000 readers and writers each year.

Molly Gloss is a fourth-generation Oregonian who lives in Portland. She is the bestselling author of The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, Wild Life, The Hearts of Horses and Falling From Horses. Her work has earned numerous awards, including an Oregon Book Award, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the PEN West Fiction Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award; and a Whiting Writers Award.

Walidah Imarisha is a writer, organizer, educator, and spoken-word artist. She is the author of the poetry collection Scars/Stars, the nonfiction Angels with Dirty Faces, and co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. She has facilitated writing workshops at schools, community centers, youth detention facilities, and women’s prisons.

Jonathan Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works include his début novel Gun with Occasional Music, a finalist for the 1994 Nebula Award; Motherless Brooklyn, winner of both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Macallan Gold Dagger for crime fiction; and The Fortress of Solitude, a New York Times best-seller. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times. Lethem is also a 2005 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Daniel José Older is the New York Times bestselling author of Salsa Nocturna, the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, and the Young Adult novel Shadowshaper, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, which won the International Latino Book Award and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize in Young Readers’ Literature, the Andre Norton Award, the Locus, the Mythopoeic Award, and named one of Esquire’s 80 Books Every Person Should Read.

This episode features a conversation between Margaret Atwood and Portland’s own Karen Russell, which took place during the virtual 2020 Portland Book Festival. With a career spanning decades, genres, and forms, Margaret Atwood is easily one of the most important writers alive today. She has been published in 45 countries, and written seminal works of fiction that have become a part of the cultural fabric and touchstones for millions of readers. But while many are familiar with Atwood’s fiction, she has also been, from the beginning of her career, one of our most significant contemporary poets. We welcomed Atwood to the Portland Book Festival to talk about her first collection of poetry in over a decade, entitled Dearly.

What is so engrossing about this conversation is that it ranges Atwood’s entire career and cuts across her broad sets of interests, from her first book, a collection of poetry called The Circle Game, to the primitive book tours of the 1960s, to vampires, Shakespeare, and the way poetry has evolved through the decades. Atwood gets to all of these subjects and more with incredible insight, humor, and vision.

“If an artform doesn’t reinvent itself, it will die. If it doesn’t keep moving to new kinds of creators and new kinds of audiences, it will die. The arts move. They don’t just sit there being arts.”

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; The MaddAddam Trilogy; The Heart Goes Last; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. In 2019, The Testaments won the Booker Prize and was long-listed for The Giller Prize. She lives in Toronto.

Karen Russell won the 2012 and the 2018 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia! (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has also written Orange World and, most recently, Sleep Donation. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, the “5 under 35” prize from the National Book Foundation, the NYPL Young Lions Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and is a former fellow of the Cullman Center and the American Academy in Berlin. She currently holds the Endowed Chair at Texas State University’s MFA program, and lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and son.

Barry Lopez: 1945–2020

In this episode, one of Oregon’s most celebrated authors, Barry Lopez, discussed his latest nonfiction book, Horizon, with Andrew Proctor, Executive Director of Literary Arts. The two discussed the themes behind the book, including the environmental crisis at hand. A work thirty years in the making, Horizon defies category. It is not merely travel, science, or nature writing. It is not only a memoir, or a book of natural history. Within the book’s nearly 600 pages, Lopez explores the six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to the ice shelves of Antarctica. As he takes us on these myriad travels, Lopez probes the long history of humanity’s quests and explorations.

This work challenged Lopez to answer his own question: “Having seen so many parts of the world, what had I learned about human menace, human triumph, and human failure?” Lopez reads passages from the book while also weaving anecdotes about his decades of fieldwork. He leaves us with an urgent call to take ownership of the health and the future of our world and its inhabitants.

Barry Lopez is the author of Arctic Dreams, for which he received a National Book Award and an Oregon Book Award; Of Wolves and Men, a National Book Award finalist; and eight works of fiction, including Light Action in the Caribbean and Resistance, which also won Oregon Book Awards.

Barry Lopez passed away on December 25, 2020, at the age of 75 after a long battle with cancer. 

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 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 Colson Whitehead interviewed by Mitchell S. Jackson in September 2020. There are few writers who are both as versatile and accomplished as Colson Whitehead. His subjects have ranged from elevator inspectors, to middle-class Black American suburbia, to the World Series of Poker; he has written noir, a zombie thriller, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel, and historical fiction. At the same time, he has won dozens of awards and accolades, most recently culminating in two Pulitzer Prizes—one for The Underground Railroad, and the other for the novel The Nickel Boys.

Whitehead’s significant contributions to literature come about not only because of his mastery of the craft, but also because he has range—he deploys pop culture, history, and a variety of literary techniques. And by doing so, he gives his stories new life, helping readers see sometimes familiar subjects in a new light. His interview here with Mitchell S. Jackson explores Whitehead’s writing craft, inspirations, and thoughts on current events in America.

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad, which in 2016 won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, as well as The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. He is also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. He lives in New York City.

Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His honors include a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, TED, the Lannan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, PEN, NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts), and the Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere. The author of Survival Math, he is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.

In this episode of The Archive Project, journalist and bestselling author, Susan Orlean, talks about what kinds of topics spark her interest and her process of researching and writing The Library Book. Orlean shares the two kinds of stories that she is drawn to as a writer: Stories of new discoveries, and stories that are hiding in plain sight. The Library Book combines both of these qualities. On April 29, 1986, Los Angeles’s Central Library burned in a mysterious fire. 400,000 books were destroyed in the blaze, 700,000 more were damaged, and the library shut down for seven years. The Library Book explores this heartbreaking story and, more broadly, the deep, meaningful impact that libraries have on societies and humanity as a whole. Orlean shares how she stumbled upon this remarkable story and reads a selection from the book.

“There is something about libraries—something about books—that is connected so much more deeply than I ever imagined. I thought, someone should write a book about that.”

“There is some way that we feel connected to books that’s not logical, it’s not rational, but it’s been a feature of human experience since we first began writing.”

Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the author of seven books, including Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation. She lives with her family and her animals in upstate New York.