The Archive Project

In this humorous and personal lecture, Tayari Jones discusses her complex journey to literary success, and her novel, An American Marriage. She describes the path her career has taken, from childhood to university and beyond, in which she’s made decisions to pursue writing despite receiving varying levels of support from educators, family, and the publishing industry. She finishes the talk by sharing a short selection from An American Marriage.

An American Marriage is a stirring love story and a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. A masterpiece of storytelling, it’s an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward—with hope and pain—into the future.

“For me, the novel lives in the place of moral ambiguity. And moral ambiguity happens when there’s a conflict and the people don’t agree, but nobody’s wrong.”

“I got all the way to about fifty pages from the end, and I hit a wall. I couldn’t figure out how to end the book. It was stressful. It was as though me and this book were in a relationship in New York City…we had broken up, but we couldn’t afford to move out. I felt like the book was sleeping on my couch. I would wake up in the morning: there’s the book. It’s not speaking to me, I’m not speaking to it. I can’t bring any new books home because this book is on my couch. And it went like this for a year.”

New York Times best-selling author Tayari Jones is the author of the novels Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow, and An American Marriage. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, the New York Times, and Callaloo. A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Silver Sparrow was added to the NEA Big Read Library of classics in 2016. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.

This episode of The Archive Project, features a lecture from prolific author Jonathan Lethem from 2007. As a writer, Lethem melds genres, often mixing crime and sci-fi with more traditional fiction. He is also known for his unpretentious incorporation of American pop-culture into his works. In this lecture, Lethem’s dry humor, sincerity, literary allusions, and post-modern sensibility are on full display as he discusses what has shaped him as a writer, including growing up in New York during the 70s, and the tragic loss of his mother when he was just fourteen years old. He also speaks to the debate on the generative function of art, calling out writers in particular. This is a great introduction to Lethem and also entertaining chance for existing fans to get to know him even better.

“Ruined things, after all, can be transformed. Shattered things can reconstitute and be repurposed. Artists do this all the time. And loss itself can be repurposed, which is exactly what I did. I’ve made my career, in a sense, on that black hole of loss. That missing mom, my argument with her departure, with the unreplying ghost she left behind, became my whole enterprise of selfhood.”

“Should we resent the distraction or be relieved? We live, I think, in a world of punch lines taken seriously. To watch television is to be immersed in practically nothing else.”

“Who are these people? Who invited them to the convention, let alone gave them the floor? Are they starting the important conversation, the one we so desperately need to hear, or are they ending it—dissolving it in schemes and nonsense?”

Jonathan Lethem is the New York Times bestselling author of eleven novels including The Fortress of Solitude, Dissident Gardens, Chronic City, The Feral Detective, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of National Book Critics Circle Award. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Lethem has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times, among others. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.

This episode of The Archive Project features Azar Nafisi, author of the acclaimed Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. In her lecture, Nafisi discusses Iranian literature and how it serves as a source of identity. She examines the fundamentalist Muslim identity in comparison to the national identity, concluding that people must focus on the literature of a nation in order to truly understand a culture. She also reflects on her life in England and her personal need to preserve Iran in her memory, and how that drive ultimately lead her to fall in love with fiction.

“The worst crime you can commit is to be blind towards others—to impose the dreams you have on the reality of other people.”

“Fiction is so important because against the fragility and fickleness of life, literature preserves all the passing moments that are constantly dying and we are constantly losing.”

“The way I discovered what Nabokov calls a ‘portable world’ is of course through literature and art. I didn’t know much about England, and my classmates didn’t know much about Iran, but I knew about Great Expectations, and I knew about Pride and Prejudice—so that is how I made my home in England and, later, in America.”

Azar Nafisi is an acclaimed writer, journalist, teacher, and activist. Her most famous book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is a memoir about her experience as an educator during the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The book spent 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into 32 languages. Nafisi’s teaching experience includes Oxford University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Tehran, where she advocated for Iranian intellectuals and youth, specifically young women. Nafisi was dismissed from the University of Tehran in 1981 for her refusal to wear the mandatory Islamic veil. She returned to the United States in 1997 and began working on Reading Lolita in Tehran, writing, “I left Iran, but Iran did not leave me.” Nafisi’s essays have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and her 1999 cover story for The New Republic, “The Veiled Threat: The Iranian Revolution’s Woman Problem,” has been reprinted into several different languages. Her 2014 book, The Republic of Imagination, examines the vital importance of fiction in a democratic society and serves as a long-awaited companion piece to Reading Lolita in Tehran.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we highlight sections from three recent interviews shared through Literary Arts’ Long Distance podcast series. The Long Distance series was created during the COVID-19 pandemic as an online space where we can host conversational interviews with authors during a time when we are missing gathering in community—at bookstores and events—to hear from authors and talk about their books.

Here we share discussions with three women of color, all of whom released debut novels in the summer of 2020. Megha Majumdar’s A Burning features three protagonists all connected by a terrorist incident involving a train bombing in India. Jean Kyoung Frazier’s Pizza Girl is the story of the eponymous Pizza Girl, a pregnant 18-year-old, who falls into obsession with an older woman for whom she delivers pizza. Kelli Jo Ford’s Crooked Hallelujah is a novel-in-stories which depicts a family of proud, stubborn, Cherokee women as they sacrifice for those they love, amid larger forces of history, religion, class, and culture. Listen to their discussions around these new books as well as their writing crafts and art-making.

Megha Majumdar was born and raised in Kolkata, India. She moved to the United States to attend college at Harvard University, where she was a Traub Scholar, followed by graduate school in social anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She works as an associate editor at Catapult, and lives in New York City. A Burning is her first book.

Jean Kyoung Frazier lives in Los Angeles. Pizza Girl is her debut novel.

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.

Full interviews here:

In this episode of Long Distance, debut novelist Raven Leilani talks with Literary Arts’ Amanda Bullock about Luster (on sale now!). Luster focuses on Edie, who is stumbling her way through her twenties—sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage—with rules. It is a striking and irresistible portrait of a young woman trying to make sense of her life—her hunger, her anger—in a tumultuous era.

It is a book that Leilani says “goes into the dark,” but that also makes room for joy. In their talk, Leilani and Bullock discuss race, sex, art, work-life balance, disco, faith (and loss thereof), and more.

“This is a book that goes into the dark—and I wanted to have room to write bluntly about all of those dark parts—but I also wanted to make room for joy.”

On climate anxiety in the book: “I feel that dread creeping into all the conversations I have with people who are concerned about what’s happening. But the idea of living now and being concerned about our future is a different kind of imperiled state that is right alongside [Edie’s] Blackness and her womanhood, and I wanted to speak to that. She is aware of those death possibilities—that danger around the corner—in a way that is sharp and keen because she is a Black woman and she is very aware and almost deteriorated by the surveillance that she’s constantly managing.”

“In this book, I think the humor is an understatement. The hyperbolic environment that Edie is often moving through, that up against understatement is really destabilizing and strange and funny. But also the friction between her private mind—the candor we see there, the rage we see there—up against the external performance that is demanded of her… there is an absurdity to that that I think lends itself to humor.”

Raven Leilani’s work has been published in Granta, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, The Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. Leilani received her MFA from NYU and was an Axinn Foundation Writer-in-Residence. Luster is her first novel.

Books recommended by Raven Leilani in this episode:

Portland-based independent bookstores to shop Luster and other titles:

Click here to view the slideshow Lewis references during her lecture.

In this episode of The Archive Project, poet, scholar, and National Book Award winner Robin Coste Lewis presents on “The Race Within Erasure.” Lewis first became widely known in 2015, when her debut poetry collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus won the National Book Award in poetry –– it was the first time a poetry debut by an African-American had ever won the prize, and the first time any debut had won the award since 1974.

Lewis’s career as an academic and poet brings language and visual art, and their histories, to bear on questions of race and gender, both now and in the past. In this talk, Lewis focuses on a writing practice called “erasure” which is essentially the act of creating a new work out of an existing one by deleting text. She gradually widens this lens to talk not only about erasure in literature, but about how history is recorded, remembered or erased; how the humanities are taught; which stories are published and read, and how this shapes our understanding of our society and our worldview.

Throughout her talk, Lewis toggles between the past and present, celebrates writers both famous and obscure, challenges a cannon that is missing far too many writers of color, and surfaces ideas, stories and voices that are essential, especially right now.

“I had read every book placed before me, but in all those twelve years of my so-called education, I had never heard the name of one black woman novelist. I had never read a novel or short story by any black woman. Worse, I didn’t even know there was such a creature as a black woman who could write fiction. We knew, incorrectly, that there had been a few poets—in fact, there had been hundreds. But we learned this correction from the adamant literary commitment of our great migration working class families, not from our schools, teachers, textbooks, nor our school districts. Which is to say that at the time I went to high school—which is not so long ago, mind you—it was possible to earn a high school diploma in the United States without any knowledge whatsoever about the literary traditions of Americans of color.”

“As readers, it is our responsibility to pay attention to everything in a book—not only the way a writer wants us to read her project, but we should also attend scrupulously to the parts of the book to which the writer is wholly unaware.”

“Like a photograph, a poem or story erases what is outside of its frame—but here’s the curious part, also like a photograph, it captures the unintended, and sometimes that turns out to be the most engaging part of a text: its accidents.”

“Erasure is a collaboration of time and intent. Erasure often erases intent. Ironically, sometimes by removing text from its source, erasure can even magnify the original writer’s intent. When it is really, really, really good, erasure can reveal more about the projects of both writers.”

Robin Coste Lewis was born in Compton, California. When she was six, she told her mother that she wanted to be a writer. At the time, she thought this could only mean being a novelist. In pursuit of that goal, she studied comparative literature as an undergraduate, attended NYU’s Creative Writing Program, and earned a master’s degree in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature.

Everything changed for Lewis after she had an accident that caused her permanent brain damage, keeping her bed-ridden for two years. As part of her long recovery, her neurologist limited Lewis to reading and writing one sentence a day. It was physically painful for Lewis to read and write, so she decided, “OK, if it’s one line a day, it’s going to be a goddamned good line.” It was at this time that she realized she was a poet.

Her debut collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, won the 2015 National Book Award for poetry. It was the first debut book to be awarded the prize since 1974. The book is a triptych: Lyric poems exploring desire and race bookend the title piece, which is made up of titles, catalog entries, and descriptions of art depicting the black female figure from 38,000 bce to the present day. The citation from the National Book Foundation praises Voyage by stating, “In poems that consider the boundaries of beauty and terror, Lewis intimately involves us with all that has formed her. The aesthetic and psychological complexity of this work is underscored by its clarity. This voice is essential to our present moment.”

In this episode of The Archive Project, Orhan Pamuk discusses his published works and why he writes about Turkey so much: to him, this act is not only about portraying the city to outsiders, but also about retracing his memories of the city. He reads from Other Colors, a collection of articles and notes from his personal journals, which comprise ideas and segments of writing he wanted to include in some of his books but ultimately left out. Throughout his lecture, Pamuk shares personal stories, including experiences at the barbershop, moments with his family, and his thoughts on the concept of time, concluding his talk with a discussion of the reasons why he continues to write.

“The first aim of an intelligent person is to achieve unhappiness when everyone around her is happy.”

“Digital watches represent particles of time as numbers, whereas the face of my watch is a mysterious icon. I love to look at it—the face of time. In some ways it conjures up that metaphysical conceit, or something close to it.”

“The beauty of a city is also held in the sentiment that the city carries along.”

Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and grew up in a large family similar to those found in his novels. He first discovered storytelling through art, devoting himself to the pursuit of a painter’s life throughout his childhood and early twenties, including three years spent studying architecture at Istanbul Technical University. At age 23, Pamuk experienced a change of heart, decided to become a novelist, and succeeded in publishing his first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons, only seven years later. “I am happier when I paint and draw, but I definitely feel more intelligent when I write,” he has said. In 1985, his third novel, The White Castle, earned him international notoriety. Apart from his time in New York at Columbia University, which he visits once a year as a guest lecturer, Pamuk has resided in the same district of Istanbul for his entire life and even lives in the same building where he was raised. In 2006, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. To date, Pamuk’s 18 published books have sold over 11 million copies and have been translated into more than sixty languages, making him Turkey’s best-selling author.

Jesmyn Ward is the author of the National Book Award-winning novels Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones, and the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning memoir Men We Reaped. Ward is in conversation with Mitchell S. Jackson, Whiting Award-winner, native Portlander, and author of the novel The Residue Years and nonfiction book Survival Math (forthcoming 2019). Both Ward and Jackson address the uncomfortable realities of the black experience in America in their work. In this conversation between real-life friends and colleagues, Ward and Jackson seriously discuss the issues of systemic racism, poverty, and violence that are central to their works. Despite the weight of these topics, the intimacy and comfort between the authors creates a light and even humorous discussion. In this episode, Ward and Jackson invite us not only to think, but to laugh with them as well.

Jesmyn Ward is a two-time National Book Award winner, a MacArthur Genius, and a recipient of the Strauss Living Award. She is the author of Where the Line Bleeds, Salvage the Bones, Men We Reaped, and Sing, Unburied, Sing, and editor of The Fire This Time. She teaches creative writing at Tulane University.

Whiting Award winner Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years won The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for The Center for Fiction Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Jackson’s honors include fellowships from Lannan Foundation, Ford Foundation, PEN America, TED, NYFA, and The Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and Tin House. His newest is the nonfiction book Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family. He is a Clinical Associate Professor of writing in Liberal Studies at New York University.

This episode of The Archive Project features an interview with Salman Rushdie from June 2020. This interview with Steph Opitz was presented through a partnership between the Wisconsin Book Festival, Literary Arts, Black Mountain Institute, and The Loft’s Wordplay, and was originally live-streamed online during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rushdie and Opitz’s discussion focuses on Quichotte, Rushdie’s latest novel. Rushdie shares how his original inspiration for the novel was taken from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, as well as works by other classic writers, but details how his characters quickly came into their own. They also discuss current events, including the global pandemic and social uprisings in America. Throughout, Rushdie centers the power that stories and reading have to change the way a person understands the world.

You can read a transcript of this interview here, at The Believer.

“People have a very deep need for story. When children are born, the first thing they want is to feel safe, loved, have a roof over their heads, food, and so on. But very soon after that, the request comes to ‘tell me a story.’ And stories become the way in which we learn and understand the world.”

“We live in a moment in which the world can be transformed in an instant.”

“[Writing] books is a strange kind of fun. They drive you mad, and they make you constantly aware of your own inadequacies. But this one was enjoyable because I really wanted it to be funny.”

About Quichotte: Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen.” Meanwhile, his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own. Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of Rushdie’s work, the fully realized lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.

Salman Rushdie is the author of thirteen previous novels—Grimus, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, and The Golden House—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published four works of nonfiction—Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line—and coedited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

In this episode of Long Distance, Literary Arts’ Amanda Bullock interviews debut novelist Kelli Jo Ford. Ford’s Crooked Hallelujah (on sale now!) is a novel-in-stories which depicts a family of proud, stubborn, Cherokee women as they sacrifice for those they love, amid larger forces of history, religion, class, and culture. It is a big-hearted and ambitious novel of the powerful bonds between mothers and daughters.

Ford and Bullock dive into a discussion about writing craft: How the idea for this work came together, and how Ford found ways to connect the threads of the narratives of the main characters. Ford shares some writers whom she admires, speaks to how her writing is inspired by music, and explores the role that religion and faith plays for her characters. And, of course, they chat about our world’s current dystopian reality, and what it’s like to release a debut novel amid a global pandemic.

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.

Books recommended by Kelli Jo Ford in this episode:

Portland-based independent bookstores to shop Crooked Hallelujah and other titles: