The Archive Project

Nikky Finney, the 2011 National Book Award winner for poetry, tells a full-house audience that her grandmother’s words have always guided her work as a poet: “To tell a lie is a sin of the highest order.” She gives extensive, fascinating introductions for each of her long-form narrative poems before performing them. Her subjects include family ties, the writing life, oppression, maternity, solidarity, class disparity, and the plight of Black women in America. Both her poems and her commentaries about them are powerful and moving.

“The influence of my grandmother, who was a farming woman in South Carolina, who probably went as far as the tenth grade or so, but who was the most brilliant woman I ever knew, because she mixed her head knowledge with her belly knowledge, and she never let me forget that. And she did make me tell the truth—or else. And I’m still trying to do that with my work. I’m really trying very hard not to skirt the hard things, but to still say them as beautifully as I know how. Because, who needs someone to rant up on a podium? None of us. But who needs somebody at a podium and a microphone to tell the truth for once: we all do. So I thank my grandmother, every day of my life, for not letting me off easy in that way—because I see so many people lying easily today, like it means nothing.”

“I read poetry in Philly for the first time ever. She started walking up, all the way, from in back of the room. From against the wall she came, big coats, boots, eyes soft as candles in two storms blowing. Something she could not see from way back there, but could clearly hear in my voice. Something she needed to know before pouring herself back out, into the icy city night. She came close, to get a good look, to ask me something she found in a strange way missing, from my black woman poetry. Side stepping the crowd, ignoring the book signing line, she stood there waiting, for everyone to go, waiting like some kind of representative. And when it was just the two of us, she stepped into the shoes of her words: ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘You write real soft, spell it out kind. No bullet holes, no open wounds in your words; how do you do that? Write, like you’ve never been hit before.’ I could hardly speak, all my breath held ransom by her question.”

Nikky Finney was born in South Carolina, within listening distance of the sea. A child of activists, she came of age during the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements. At Talladega College, nurtured by Hale Woodruff’s Amistad murals, Finney began to understand the powerful synergy between art and history. Finney has authored four books of poetry: On Wings Made of Gauze (1985), Rice (1995), The World Is Round (2003), and Head Off & Split (2011). The John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Southern Letters and Literature at the University of South Carolina, Finney also authored the fiction work Heartwood (1997), edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. Finney’s fourth book of poetry, Head Off & Split, was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for poetry.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we bring you poet and dramatist Cornelius Eady, from a Poetry Downtown event in 2002. Cornelius Eady published his first book of poetry, Kartunes, in 1980, at the age of 26. He went on to publish seven more books of poetry over the next 20 years, winning numerous prizes and being nominated as a finalist for a National Book Award. In the 1990s and early 2000’s, Eady also wrote for the stage, collaborating in several projects that resulted in several more national awards and the distinction of being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1996, Eady co-founded, with Toi Derricote, Cave Canem: A nonprofit organization serving Black poets to remedy  “the under-representation and isolation of African-American poets in the literary landscape”. This organization has played a crucial role in fostering several generations of black poets over the course of nearly thirty years. In 1996, for this work as convener, educator, and mentor, the National Book Foundation gave him an Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

In this episode, Eady reads and discusses selections from different works, and from different parts of his career. But despite the varied selections, his reading presents a devastating arc. He moves from stories and poems centered in the innocence of childhood, to work that portrays and meditates on violent racist acts–physical, emotional, legal–and how those acts affect, and that they mean for, his characters and those they love.

“Today we learn about poetry…The word just has that sound about it—like vegetables—that makes us want to shove our hands in our pockets and pout. It’s a grown up word, a suck-the-fun-from-the-room word—like behave. Every kid whines as if the lips of a dreaded aunt were upon them.”

Cornelius Eady is the author of eight books of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather (Putnam 2008). His second book, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, won the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1985. In 2001, Brutal Imagination was a finalist for the National Book Award. His work in theater includes the libretto for an opera, “Running Man,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999. His play “Brutal Imagination” won Newsday’s Oppenheimer award in 2002. Eady has been a teacher for more than 20 years and is now a professor at Notre Dame University.

“Both churches have an organ, but while the white church whispers, the black church growls. It pulls well-dressed women up into a sweat and men in mohair to lose their jackets and silk ties…The church rocks with a noise we have never heard before. Why are they acting like this? Something in their dancing makes us worry if this is something that we should be seeing, if someone is going to break in and catch us. This JESUS! they scream for is not the one our mother has been sending us away to visit.”

“One day my mother pointed up at the sky. I saw a sparrow being snatched up by a hawk. ‘Someday,’ she said, ‘you’re going to grow up to be just like him.’ She was speaking of the hawk, but I was thinking about the sparrow.”

In this Long Distance conversation, bestselling author and independent bookstore owner Emma Straub speaks with Literary Arts’ Amanda Bullock about her recently released novel, All Adults Here. The book is a warm, funny, and keenly perceptive novel about the life cycle of one family–as the kids become parents, grandchildren become teenagers, and a matriarch confronts the legacy of her mistakes. In their discussion, Straub and Bullock talk about world-building in realist fiction, how contemporary lit writers reckon with modern politics, and the strange way time contracts and expands in our lives.

“When I wrote The Vacationers, I felt like I figured out who I was as a novelist, because it was in my voice and it was my world, and that included humor. I’m not saying that writing is easy, or should be easy, because it is not. But when the writing itself is closer to your own voice, then you’re able to get in deeper. And for me, humor is often how I deal with uncomfortable situations or sad situations.”

Emma Straub is the New York Times-bestselling author of three other novels, Modern Lovers, The Vacationers and Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, and the short story collection Other People We Married. Her most recent book is All Adults Here. Her books have been published in twenty countries. She and her husband own Books Are Magic, an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, New York.

Books recommended by Emma Straub in this episode:

Portland-based independent bookstores to shop for this title and others:

Three months after the catastrophic earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat begins her lecture with a proverb from the country she grew up in: “We remember, but we move forward.” She mentions Haiti’s nickname, terre glissée or “slippery ground,” and expounds on the metaphoric and literal connotations of that phrase. With the devastation still on everyone’s mind, Danticat tells of both her own and her family’s experiences during and after the earthquake, mentioning that her cousin Maxo was killed. She witnessed bodies in the rubble and an “altered human landscape” of so many people with injuries. After the quake, Haitians would simply call it “the thing,” or “the devil dancing,” or even onomatopoeias like “gudugudu.” Referencing several other Haitian writers throughout her lecture, such as Dany Lafferière, Danticat discusses the role of the artist who comes from a place of loss, including the importance of bearing witness.

“There is poetry often in Haitian language, through proverbs, through the way that we try to interpret tragedy.”

“I kept wondering, would there be poetry amidst the Haitian ruins?”

“Nou led, nou la; we are ugly, but we are here.”

“The Angel of Death is more democratic [than God]; everybody goes.”

Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including Claire of the Sea Light, a New York Times notable book; Brother, I’m Dying, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist; Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; and The Dew Breaker, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the inaugural Story Prize. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She lives in Miami.

Julia Alvarez reflects on her dual childhood in the Dominican Republic and in the United States: living in a world under the hand of a dictator; her poor performance in school but robust and diverse education at home; her difficult time adjusting to immigrant life and the prejudice she faced; the sixth grade teacher who showed her the world that existed within books; and her realization that 1) intelligence comes in many forms and 2) imagination can save you.

“One thing that hasn’t changed is my faith in the power of stories. Even before I came into English, or became a reader, or wanted to be a writer, stories were helping me find my way to the person I would become, the writer who stands before you today.”

“One thing the Dictator Trujillo could not repress was the irrepressible need of the human creature for stories.”

“Ours was not a literary culture but an oral culture, a storytelling culture . . . Years later, when I attended a graduate program in creative writing, I would realize that all that I was being taught about character and plot and timing and rhythm and lyricism and metaphor I had learned in my home land, in many cases by people who could not read or write or had minimal book learning. It was an important discovery for me to make as a young writer.”

Julia Alvarez was born in New York City on March 17, 1950, the second of four daughters. Three months later, her parents returned to their native Dominican Republic after a self-imposed exile from General Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship. When her parents became involved in an underground movement to overthrow Trujillo, the Alvarez family was forced to flee the Dominican Republic in order to escape imprisonment. They returned to the United States in August of 1960, when Alvarez was 10 years old. The immigrant experience and bicultural identity is the subject of much of Alvarez’s fiction and poetry, including her popular first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, which was published in 1991. Since then, Alvarez has gone on to publish more than 20 additional works.

The 2020 Oregon Book Awards ceremony was originally scheduled on April 27, 2020 as a live event. However, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, our 33rd annual ceremony was reimagined into this special, state-wide broadcast and podcast episode, with special thanks to our partners at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Since 1997, the Oregon Book Awards have celebrated the work of our state’s authors. This year, 215 books from 44 towns across Oregon were submitted. Out-of-state judges determined the finalists and winners. In this episode of The Archive Project, you’ll hear excerpts read by the winning authors themselves. Our guest hosts for this special episode are previous Oregon Book Award winners Elena Passarello and Omar El Akkad.

Our episode hosts:

Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt and grew up in Doha, Qatar until he moved to Canada with his family. He is an award-winning journalist and author who has traveled around the world to cover many of the most important news stories of the last decade. His reporting includes dispatches from the NATO-led war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantànamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. He is a recipient of Canada’s National Newspaper Award for investigative reporting and the Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Canadian Journalists, as well as three National Magazine Award honorable mentions. His debut novel is American War, for which he won the Oregon Book Award for Fiction. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

In this episode of Long Distance from The Archive Project, debut novelist Jean Kyoung Frazier talks with Amanda Bullock about Pizza Girl. Set in Los Angeles, the eponymous Pizza Girl is a pregnant 18-year-old who falls into obsession with an older woman for whom she delivers pizza. In this discussion, Frazier talks about her writing practice, including some surprising real-life inspirations for this sharp, funny book. She explores Los Angeles as the book’s setting and wonders at how distance from a place or situation can provide the needed perspective to write. She also touches on how things such as our 2010s nostalgia and the book’s striking cover art add depth to this truly enjoyable reading experience.

“For so long it felt like the only way I could talk about romantic feelings or attraction towards women was through a male voice… I really do feel like I wrote Pizza Girl at the right time, when I was finally feeling more at home in my skin.”

On her writing practice during the COVID-19 pandemic: “There are many periods where I can’t write a word. Whether it’s because of what’s going on on the news, the sadness everywhere, the vileness. Sometimes I think you just need to be okay not writing and not doing anything productive.”

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

Books Jean Kyoung Frazier mentions in this episode:

A selection of independent, Black-owned bookstores that will ship book orders during the COVID-19 pandemic:

Toni Morrison begins her lecture by saying she wants to discuss two of her books in particular—Beloved (1987) and Jazz (still forthcoming at the time)—and the progression of her writing. She considers the impact of history on both novels. In discussing Beloved, Morrison touches on the pornography of writing about violence as a voyeur and how she worked to keep the focus on the characters themselves, not the institution of slavery.

For Jazz, Morrison discusses the genre’s contradictions, its place in the cultural psyche, and how the Jazz Age “was a period when black people placed an indelible hand of agency on the cultural scene.” All of this, she says, was part of her sustained investigation of “self-regard, in both racial and gendered terms.” Morrison also discusses the interior, imaginative freedom that jazz fostered and how this agency changed the course of cultural history in America.

 “The embrace of history and fiction is what I was concerned with—or rather, the effort to disentangle the grip of history, while remaining in its palm, so to speak.”

“We move from data to information, to knowledge, to wisdom. And separating one from the other, being able to distinguish among and between them, that is knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category of intelligence. That’s generally what serious education is about.”

“It’s impossible to hear that sort of blues cry without acknowledging in it the defiance, the grandeur, the agency that frequently belies the wale of disappointed love. And it may be through that agency—and the even more powerful assertiveness of what we call Jazz, which uses those gestures—that is how compromise becomes reconciliation. It’s also the way in which imagination fosters real possibilities. If you can’t imagine it, you can’t have it.”

Toni Morrison was born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. She was an avid reader, and her favorite authors included Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. Morrison attended Howard University and wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye, while teaching there and raising two children. She went on to become the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Sula, Song of Solomon, Jazz, and Home. In 1988, she won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for Beloved, and in 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best American novel published in the previous twenty-five years. In 1993, Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her most recent book, The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, Meditations, was published in February of 2019. Morrison passed away in August of 2019.

This episode of Long Distance, Literary Arts’ new podcast series, features an interview with author Megha Majumdar whose debut novel, A Burning, was recently released. A Burning features three protagonists all connected by a terrorist incident involving a train bombing in India. Jivan, a young Muslim woman, witnesses the incident, and creates a social media post asking “If the police didn’t help ordinary people like you and me, if the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean that the government is also a terrorist?” which results in her arrest and imprisonment for the crime. The other two protagonists are Jivan’s former gym teacher, who is becoming increasingly involved with a right-wing political party, and Lovely, a hijra—a third gender recognized in India—and aspiring actress whom Jivan had been teaching to speak English. Their narratives are interspersed with “interludes” from other characters, creating a polyphonic landscape of Kolkata and the aspirations, motivations, and deprivations of the people making their lives there.

In this discussion with Literary Arts’ Amanda Bullock, Majumdar dives deeper into the novel’s inspirations, including the rise of right-wing extremism in her native India, and her interest in how, in the face of such societal and institutional challenges, people still “hold on to big dreams and humor and ambitions”.

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.

Books Megha Majumdar mentions in this episode:

This episode of The Archive Project features a lecture from Tommy Orange in Portland, Oregon. This lecture was the culminating event of the Multnomah County Library’s 2020 Everybody Reads program—an annual shared reading experience that includes city-wide events for readers of all ages. In his lecture, Orange details his experience as a Native American growing up and working in Oakland, California. He didn’t always want to be a writer, and he shares the twisting path that led him to this work. His debut novel, There There, is a winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and named one of the best books of the year by numerous publications. There There—and Orange himself in this lecture—explores a multitude of themes, from identity and ownership to the urban-rural divide.

Link to “Ghost Dance” short film referenced in Orange’s lecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5plHAdBums

Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California.