The Archive Project

This episode of The Archive Project features highlights from the opening day of the 2020 Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America. Listen to excerpts from longer discussions. Novelists Emily Nemens, National Book Award-winner Charles Yu, and moderator Jon Raymond talk about ambition, disappointment, family, and the possibility of a new story. Claire Messud and Lydia Millet get into a cross-genre discussion, moderated by Alexander Chee. And finally, poets Nate Marshall, Jennifer Perrine, and moderator Anis Mojgani discuss language and the ways words shape our collective American cultural consciousness.

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

Each year, the Portland Book Festival presents a diverse range of writers who have recently published novels, story collections, works of nonfiction and poetry. There are over 100 writers in the festival this year and they hail from all over the country. Some are among our most famous writers at work today, and some publishing their first book. All are accomplished artists with powerful ideas and stories that can illuminate our understanding of ourselves and our world.

Alexander Chee is a novelist and essayist and an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic, an editor at large at The Virginia Quarterly Review, and a critic at large at The Los Angeles Times. He has written the books How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, The Queen of the Night, and Edinburgh.

Nate Marshall is an award-winning writer, rapper, educator, and editor. He is the author and editor of numerous works including Wild Hundreds, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Finna. Nate is a member of The Dark Noise Collective and co-directs Crescendo Literary. He is an assistant professor of English at Colorado College. He is from the South Side of Chicago.

Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers The Emperor’s Children and The Burning Girl, which was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her most recent book is the essay collection Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write. A recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.

Lydia Millet has written twelve works of fiction including, most recently, A Children’s Bible. She has won awards from PEN Center USA and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her books have been longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and named as New York Times Notable Books. Her story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She lives outside Tucson, Arizona.

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.

Emily Nemens is the editor of The Paris Review. She was previously the co-editor of The Southern Review. Her work has been published in Esquire, n+1, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart and elsewhere, and she is the author of The Cactus League.

Jennifer Perrine is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Again (Airlie Press, 2020). Their other books include No Confession, No Mass, winner of the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize; In the Human Zoo, which was selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize; and The Body Is No Machine. A recipient of fellowships from Literary Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, Perrine lives in Portland.

Jon Raymond is the author of three novels, Rain Dragon, The Half-Life, and Freebird, and the short-story collection Livability. His work has appeared in Tin House, the Village Voice, Bookforum, and other places. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Charles Yu is the author of three books, including the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (a New York Times Notable Book and a Time magazine best book of the year) and, most recently, Interior Chinatown. He received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and was nominated for two Writers Guild of America Awards for his work on the HBO series, Westworld. He has also written for shows on FX, AMC, and HBO. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications.

This episode of The Archive Project features highlights from the first week of the 2020 Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America. Listen to excerpts from longer discussions. Evette Dionne and Anne Helen Petersen discuss burnout, politics, and the unique pressures on millennials; poets Hafizah Geter, Justin Phillip Reed, and moderator Ashley Toliver explore displacement, violence, myth and memory in their collections; and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Kawai Strong Washburn, with John Freeman talk environmental justice and the inseparableness of the climate crisis and economic inequality.

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

The Portland Book Festival (running now through November 21, 2020) presents a diverse range of writers who have recently published novels, story collections, works of nonfiction and poetry. There are over 100 writers in the festival this year and they hail from all over the country. Some are among our most famous writers at work today, and some publishing their first book. All are accomplished artists with powerful ideas and stories that can illuminate our understanding of ourselves and our world.

Evette Dionne is a journalist, pop culture critic, and magazine editor. She’s the author of Lifting As We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box, and she currently serves as the editor-in-chief of Bitch Media. Evette writes extensively about pop culture through the lenses of race, gender, and size for a number of print and digital publications, including NBC News, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Time, the New York Times, the Guardian, SELF, and Harper’s Bazaar.

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary annual published by Grove Press. He has written several books of nonfiction including, How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as two collections of poems, Maps and The Park. The former editor of Granta, he is now Artist-in-Residence at NYU and executive editor of The Literary Hub. Between 2014 and 2020, he edited a series of anthologies on inequality, concluding with Tales of Two Planets, which focuses on the climate crisis and global inequality. Freeman’s work has been translated into more than 20 languages and appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Zyzzyva. He lives in London.

Born in Zaria, Nigeria, Hafizah Geter is the author of Un-American (Wesleyan University Press, 2020) and an editor whose poetry and prose have appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Longreads, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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

A former senior culture writer for BuzzFeed, Anne Helen Petersen now writes her newsletter, Culture Study, as a full-time venture on Substack. Petersen received her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, where she focused on the history of celebrity gossip. Her previous books, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud and Scandals of Classic Hollywood, were featured in NPR, Elle, and the Atlantic. Her latest book is Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. She lives in Missoula, Montana.

Justin Phillip Reed is an American poet, essayist, and amateur bass guitarist whose preoccupations include horror cinema, poetic form, morphological transgressions, and uses of the grotesque. He is the author of two poetry collections, The Malevolent Volume (2020) and Indecency(2018), both published by Coffee House Press. Born and raised in South Carolina, he participates in vague spirituality and alternative rock music cultures and enjoys smelling like outside. He is the 2019-2021 Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Ashley Toliver is the author of Ideal Machine (Poor Claudia, 2014) and Spectra (Coffee House Press, 2018). A poetry editor at Moss., her work has been supported by fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. She received her MFA from Brown University in 2013.

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

This episode of The Archive Project features highlights from the opening day of the 2020 Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America. Listen to excerpts from longer discussions between short story writers Souvankham Thammavongsa and Lidia Yuknavitch, with moderator Marisa Siegel; novelists Chelsea Bieker and Kelli Jo Ford, with moderator Kesha Ajose Fisher; and memoirist Dr. Michele Harper in conversation with poet Ruth Dickey.

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

The Portland Book Festival (running from November 5-21, 2020) presents a diverse range of writers who have recently published novels, story collections, works of nonfiction and poetry. There are over 100 writers in the festival this year and they hail from all over the country. Some are among our most famous writers at work today, and some publishing their first book. All are accomplished artists with powerful ideas and stories that can illuminate our understanding of ourselves and our world.

Chelsea Bieker is from California’s Central Valley. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award and her fiction and essays have been published in Granta, McSweeney’s, Catapult magazine, Electric Literature, and Joyland, among others. She has been awarded a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and holds an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University. Godshot is her first novel.

Ruth E. 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. Her first full-length collection of poems is titled Mud Blooms.

Kesha Ajose Fisher was born in Chicago and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. She now lives in Oregon with her family. Kesha’s debut collection of fictional stories, No God Like the Mother, focuses on the lives and realities of women who have been tasked with holding up the sky, all while the world whispers “you’re doing it wrong”. Fisher has won the 2020 Oregon Book Award for Fiction and The Phoenix Literary Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award for Short Fiction in both 2011 and 2012. Her writing has been published in several online and print collections, and in such publications as Multicultural Familia Magazine, the Alchemy Literary Magazine, and twice in Beyond Black & White Magazine.

Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, the Everett Southwest Literary Award, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Award at Bread Loaf, a National Artist Fellowship by the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, and the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, among other places. Crooked Hallelujah is her first book.

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.

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

Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand and was raised and educated in Toronto. She is the award-winning author of four books of poetry and her fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Granta, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Best American Non-Required Reading 2018, and the O. Henry Prize Stories 2019. Her most recent book is the short story collection How to Pronounce Knife.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the nationally bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, Dora: A Headcase, and the memoir The Chronology of Water. Her most recent book is Verge. She is the recipient of two Oregon Book Awards and a Willamette Writers Award, and has been a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and the PEN Center Creative Nonfiction Award. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we revisit a panel discussion from the 2019 Portland Book Festival. The panel, titled High Stakes: Rebellion & Resistance, features Young Adult (YA) authors April Henry, Tehlor Kay Mejia, and Renée Watson, with moderator Emily Suvada. The three authors’ books center on young women who find themselves in precarious situations in which they must decide whether or not to take the risk and step up to the fight—be the fight against an active shooter, a corrupt regime, or a high school principal.

The joy of reading these works and listening to these authors in conversation is that they all meet their young characters where they are. This is a conversation about activism and the role of art, the meaning of community and family, and about the sometimes indirect and messy ways we arrive at new levels of awareness of who we are, and who we want to be.

For more information about the books discussed in this episode:

 “You can be an activist and still have flaws and still have some learning to do. That’s an important part of learning how to advocate for people. You don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be willing to learn and open to listening.” – Renée Watson

“I want people who read my books to feel like they could do brave things even if they don’t feel brave. You don’t have to feel brave to act bravely.” – April Henry

“It’s okay to love your culture and love your people but also want your expression of that identity to evolve.” – Tehlor Kay Mejia

April Henry is the New York Times bestselling author of many acclaimed mysteries for adults and young adults, including the YA novels Girl, Stolen,The Night She Disappeared, Face of Betrayal co-authored with Lis Wiehl, and Run, Hide, Fight Back. She is from Oregon.

Tehlor Kay Mejia is an Oregon native and the author of  the YA novels We Set the Dark on Fire and We Unleash the Merciless Storm and the middle grade novel Paola Santiago and the Drowned Palace. Her short fiction has appeared in the All Out and Toil & Trouble anthologies from Harlequin Teen.

Renée Watson is a New York Times-bestselling author, educator, and activist. Her young adult novel, Piecing Me Together received a Coretta Scott King Award and Newbery Honor. Her books include Ways to Make Sunshine, Some Places More Than Others, This Side of Home, What Momma Left Me, Betty Before X, cowritten with Ilyasah Shabazz, and Watch Us Rise, cowritten with Ellen Hagan, as well as two acclaimed picture books: A Place Where Hurricanes Happen and Harlem’s Little Blackbird, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Renée grew up in Portland, Oregon, and splits her time between Portland and New York City.

Emily Suvada was born and raised in Australia, where she went on to earn a degree in mathematics. She previously worked as a data scientist, and still spends hours writing algorithms to perform tasks which would only take her minutes to complete on her own. When not writing, she can be found hiking, cycling, and conducting chemistry experiments in her kitchen. The third book in her This Mortal Coil series, This Vicious Cure, was released in winter 2020. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and son.

Deadly Magic: Vengeance, Justice, and Destiny – a discussion on fantasy writing and craft from the 2018 Portland Book Festival. Secrets, magic, and extraordinary powers run through two fantastical YA series. Marissa Meyer, author of the Lunar Chronicles, presents a new world in the Renegades series. Book two, Archenemies, finds Nova, our heroine, confronted with the possible destruction of Gatlon City and the world as she knows it. In Tochi Onyebuchi’s debut series, Beasts Made of Night, a young man, Taj, finds himself at the center of a dark conspiracy. The sequel, Crown of Thunder, has Taj on the run and questioning his true identity. Moderated by Alicia Tate of Multnomah County Library.

I would read a lot of science fiction and fantasy growing up, but I didn’t see anybody who looked like me having these adventures, or falling in love, or saving the day. And to be able to see that in a book now, I think, is part of that relief [found in reading fantasy]. Because you’re living in this world that’s taking every opportunity to tell you that you don’t matter, but then you can crack open this book and you can see that you’re the love interest, like somebody who looks like you is the love interest, somebody who looks like you is the hero. That’s a very important element [of writing] for me.

Onyebuchi

Marissa Meyer is the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lunar Chronicles series, as well as the Wires and Nerve graphic novels and The Lunar Chronicles Coloring Book. Her first stand-alone novel, Heartless, was also a #1 New York Times bestseller. She visited the Portland Book Festival with Archenemies, the fiercely awaited second installment of her Renegade Trilogy, after the New York Times-bestselling Renegades.

Tochi Onyebuchi holds a BA from Yale, an MFA in screenwriting from Tisch, a master’s degree in global economic law from L’institut d’études politiques, and a JD from Columbia Law School. His writing has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction and Ideomancer, among other places. His most recent book is Crown of Thunder (Beasts Made of Night #2). Tochi resides in Connecticut, where he works in the tech industry.

Alicia Tate is a Multnomah County librarian with a focus on teen librarianship. Alicia graduated from the Information School at the University of Washington. As a member of the My Librarian service at the Multnomah County Library, she offers reading recommendations focused on YA fiction and graphic novels, especially in the genres of horror and scientific fiction.

In this episode of The Archive Project we revisit an event that took place at the 2019 Portland Book Festival. The panel, titled Look Closer: Poetry & Myth Remaking, features poets Sally Wen Mao, Paisley Rekdal, and Jake Skeets, with moderator Dao Strom.

Myths come in many forms. There are the formal myths of different cultures such as gods and heroes, the creation of the world; there are national myths that define countries; and also childhood myths, family myths and personal myths. All are stories that attempt to explain some aspect of the world, and can come to guide our beliefs about who we are.

In this conversation, these three poets question who is given voice in our myths and why. What has been left out? Their work questions the received interpretation, and wisdom, of these stories. In some case re-writes them from a different perspective to reveal new meanings. And in this way, these poets are doing the important work of re-interpreting our assumptions about our past, to help us understand the present.

For more information about the books discussed in this episode:

Sally Wen Mao is the author of a previous poetry collection, Mad Honey Symposium. Her work has won a Pushcart Prize and fellowships at Kundiman, George Washington University, and the New York Public Library Cullman Center.

Paisley Rekdal is the author of six collections of poetry, in addition to three nonfiction and hybrid-genre books. Her honors include being named Utah’s Poet Laureate.

Jake Skeets is Black Streak Wood, born for Water’s Edge. He is Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Skeets is a winner of the 2018 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Skeets edits an online publication called Cloudthroat and organizes a poetry salon and reading series called Pollentongue, based in the Southwest. He is a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ́: A Diné Writers’ Collective and currently teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona.

Dao Strom is the author/musician of two books of fiction and the hybrid-forms memoir We Were Meant to Be a Gentle People plus music album East/West. She is also the author of a bilingual poetry book You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else. Dao’s work has received support from RACC, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Precipice Fund, and the Creative Capital Foundation. She is the editor of diaCRITICS and co-founder of the collective She Who Has No Master(s).

In this episode of The Archive Project, Colson Whitehead and Yaa Gyasi discuss the intersection of race and fiction. In his novel, The Underground Railroad, Whitehead explores a world in which the infamous Underground Railroad is not a euphemism, but a reality—a subterranean railroad system connecting alternate versions of America in each state along its route. In Homegoing, Gyasi tells the story of one family, spread over 250 years and split by the slave trade across two continents. Both Whitehead and Gyasi use fiction as a tool to get at larger truths about race, slavery, and their legacies in America and abroad. This discussion is moderated by Rukaiyah Adams.

“I didn’t have to force comparisons between law enforcement in 1850 and 2015; the language that I would use to describe my experience is the same way a slave would describe his or her experience with a slave patroller.” –Colson Whitehead

“For me, this book is so much about the fact that a lot of these things, a lot of these issues that we are dealing with in the present, particularly issues around racial justice…they don’t appear out of nowhere. There has been groundwork laid for them over the course of many, many, many years. And it’s important to kind of not take things out of context and just start to believe that we’re living kind of divorced from history. Because we aren’t.” –Yaa Gyasi

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.

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.

Rukaiyah Adams is an avid reader and lover of American History. For work, she is the Chief Investment Officer at Meyer Memorial Trust. She is responsible for leading all investment activities to ensure the long-term financial strength of the organization, including investment policy, asset allocation, performance measurement, manager selection, and risk management. Before joining Meyer, she ran the $6.5 Billion capital markets fund at The Standard. Rukaiyah is the Vice Chair of the Oregon Investment Council, the board that manages approximately $90 Billion for the State of Oregon and PERS; she also serves on the board of OPB. Rukaiyah holds a BA in African American Studies with academic distinction from Carleton College and a JD from Stanford Law, where she was on the Law and Policy Review and the Co-President of the Law Student Association. She also has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

This episode of The Archive Project features a conversation between 2020 Oregon Book Award winners Kesha Ajose Fisher and Ashley Toliver, with Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani. Much of their conversation focuses on craft—writing from the space of the unknown, writing as self-discovery, the role of time in the creative process—but they also discuss what it is like to cultivate a diligent writing practice while juggling motherhood, family, and all the other human demands during these especially trying times. These three are among some of the most exciting writers at work today, and their conversation provides insight and depth into how a creative piece of work makes its way into a reader’s hands.

“To me, writing is an act of listening. Most of the time what I hear I don’t understand, but I write it anyway.” – Ashley Toliver

Kesha Ajose Fisher was born in Chicago and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. She now lives in Oregon with her family. Kesha’s debut collection of fictional stories, No God Like the Mother, focuses on the lives and realities of women who have been tasked with holding up the sky, all while the world whispers “you’re doing it wrong”. Fisher has won the 2020 Oregon Book Award for Fiction and The Phoenix Literary Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award for Short Fiction in both 2011 and 2012. Her writing has been published in several online and print collections, and in such publications as Multicultural Familia Magazine, the Alchemy Literary Magazine, and twice in Beyond Black & White Magazine. She works in social services, is a vocal advocate for immigrants and refugees, and she champions equality and education while opposing the poverty that plagues humanity.

Ashley Toliver is the author of Ideal Machine (Poor Claudia, 2014) and Spectra (Coffee House Press, 2018). A poetry editor at Moss., her work has been supported by fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. She received her MFA from Brown University in 2013.

Anis Mojgani is the current Poet Laureate of Oregon. A two-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, he has been awarded residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, AIR Serenbe, The Bloedel Nature Reserve, The Sou’wester, and the Oregon Literary Arts Writers-In-The-Schools program. The author of five books of poetry, he has done commissioned work for the Getty Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum, given multiple TEDx talks, and April 2021 will see the premiere of his first opera libretto, Sanctuaries. Anis’ work has appeared on HBO, National Public Radio, and as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series; and in the pages of such journals as Rattle, Platypus, Winter Tangerine, Forklift Ohio, and Bat City Review. Originally from New Orleans, Anis currently lives in Portland Oregon.

In this episode of The Archive Project we revisit an event that took place at the 2019 Portland Book Festival. The panel, titled Self Portrait: Memoir, Auto-Fiction and History, features three incredible Oregonian writers: Debra Gwartney, Mitchell S. Jackson, and Peter Rock, and was moderated by Elena Passarello.

What is shared between these writers are projects that attempt to reconstruct a past in order to understand the present. They have not simply written personal accounts of their lives, but they have widened the lens and scope of their books to account for the communities that shaped them, the historical forces that shaped their communities, and the lives they have led—both their interior lives and as actors in the world. This work is exhilarating because it connects us all to the course of time, helping us see we are not merely alone in shaping our lives, but part of the mysterious current of the past—personal and historical—that play a role in defining who we are.

For more information about the books discussed in this episode:

“A memoir is like a story; a story with a person at the heart of it.” – Mitchell S. Jackson

Debra Gwartney is the winner of the 2018 RiverTeeth Nonfiction Prize, judged by Gretel Ehrlich, for her memoir, I Am a Stranger Here Myself. Her 2009 memoir, Live Through This, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and the Oregon Book Award. Debra has published in such journals as Granta, Tin House, American Scholar, The Normal School, Creative Nonfiction, Prairie Schooner, Triquarterly Review, the NYT “Modern Love” column, among others. She is the 2018 winner of the Real Simple essay contest and is a contributing editor at Poets & Writers magazine. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Playa, UCross, and the Wurlitzer Foundation. She teaches in the MFA Program at Pacific University and lives in Western Oregon with her husband, the writer Barry Lopez.

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.

Peter Rock is the author of the novels The Night Swimmers, SPELLS, Klickitat, The Shelter Cycle, My Abandonment, The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, Carnival Wolves and This Is the Place, as well as a story collection, The Unsettling. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Alex Award and others, he is a Professor in the English Department of Reed College.

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!.

The 2020 Portland Book Festival will take place November 5-21, and will be presented virtually with most events available to view for free. For more information, including our lineup of authors & presenters, visit: literary-arts.org/pdxbookfest

Note: Portions of this episode contain mature themes that may not be suitable for all audiences.

This episode of The Archive Project features a panel conversation from the 2019 Portland Book Festival between Laurie Halse Anderson, Saeed Jones, and T Kira Madden, with moderator Michele Filgate. All three of these writers crafted memoirs about coming of age as a writer that question how to be in your body in the world and in your own mind. They contemplate the repercussions of physical and psychological trauma, and how we become the person we imagine ourselves to be—and how that changes over time. Resilience, vulnerability, and writing as healing all feature as themes in this frank and inspiring discussion.

For more information about the books discussed in this episode:

“You can’t dream until the nightmares are slain.” – Laurie Halse Anderson

“To me, as a writer, it feel like this is my mission. I know I’m an excellent writer. Writing is the only thing that I will never let anyone convince me that I am not excellent at. With America being what it is—and it’s always been this way, this is not new—I feel as if I owe it to the America that we live and are dying in to do the best I can. And if I am excellent at writing, how could I not use this tool to contribute?” – Saeed Jones

“I would say always lean in to letting your form and content be in conversation. If that’s how it feels, let the words spill, let the chapters mesh; just follow the messiness.” – T Kira Madden

Laurie Halse Anderson is a New York Times bestselling author whose writing spans young readers, teens, and adults. Combined, her books have sold more than 8 million copies. Her new book, SHOUT, a memoir-in-verse about surviving sexual assault at the age of thirteen and a manifesta for the #MeToo era, has received widespread critical acclaim and appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for seven consecutive weeks. Laurie has been nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award three times. Two of her books, Speak and Chains, were National Book Award finalists, and Chains was short-listed for the prestigious Carnegie medal. Laurie was selected by the American Library Association for the 2009 Margaret A. Edwards Award and has been honored for her battles for intellectual freedom by the National Coalition Against Censorship and the National Council of Teachers of English.

Saeed Jones is the author of How We Fight for Our Lives and Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. The poetry collection was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as awards from Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle in 2015. Jones is a co-host of BuzzFeed’s morning show, AM to DM, and previously served as BuzzFeed’s LGBT editor and Culture editor. Jones was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Lewisville, Texas. He earned a BA at Western Kentucky University and an MFA at Rutgers University-Newark. He lives in New York City.

T Kira Madden is an APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician. She is the founding editor-in-chief of No Tokens, and facilitates writing workshops for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals. A 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature, she has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Tin House, DISQUIET, Summer Literary Seminars, and Yaddo, where she was selected for the 2017 Linda Collins Endowed Residency Award. She lives in New York City and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Michele Filgate’s work has appeared in Longreads; The Washington Post; the Los Angeles Times; The Boston Globe; The Paris Review Daily; Tin House; Gulf Coast; O, The Oprah Magazine; BuzzFeed; Refinery29; and many other publications. Currently, she is an MFA student at NYU, where she is the recipient of the Stein Fellowship. She’s a contributing editor at Literary Hub and teaches at the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop and Catapult. What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About is her first book.