The Archive Project

This episode of The Archive Project, features a panel discussion between authors Casey Cep, Lara Prescott, and moderator Pamela Paul of The New York Times, from the 2019 Portland Book Festival. Cep and Prescott are both New York Times best selling debut authors who have drawn inspiration from famous figures in literary history. Cep’s nonfiction book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, explores the true-life murder trial that inspired Harper Lee to research and write To Kill a Mockingbird. Prescott’s novel, The Secrets We Kept, is inspired by the true story of the CIA plot to infiltrate the hearts and minds of Soviet Russia with the greatest love story of the twentieth century: Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The women discuss their works, historical inspirations, and writing craft in this engaging conversation.

Casey Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in English, she earned an M.Phil in theology at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New Republic, among other publications. Furious Hours is her first book.

Lara Prescott received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin. She was previously an animal protection advocate and a political campaign operative. Her stories have appeared in The Southern Review, The Hudson Review, Crazyhorse, Day One, and Tin House Flash Fridays. She won the 2016 Crazyhorse Fiction Prize for the first chapter of The Secrets We Kept. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Pamela Paul is the editor of The New York Times Book Review and oversees books coverage at The New York Times, which she joined in 2011 as the children’s books editor. She is also the host of the weekly Book Review podcast for The Times. She is the author and editor of six books, including: My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues, The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony, Pornified, Parenting, Inc., and By the Book. She is a former columnist for The Economist, Worth, and The New York Times Styles section. Her work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Slate, Vogue, Psychology Today, Brown Alumni Magazine and other national publications.

This first episode of Long Distance, Literary Arts’ new podcast series, features an interview with author Kristen Arnett whose debut novel, Mostly Dead Things, was recently released in paperback by Tin House Books. In her conversation with Literary Arts’ Amanda Bullock, Arnett dives into the novel’s inspiration, including family dynamics and her obsession and deep research into taxidermy. They also discuss Florida, where the novel is set; what it means to be a “funny person;” and the books in which Arnett has found comfort and entertainment during this challenging moment in time.

Kristen Arnett is a queer fiction and essay writer. She won the 2017 Coil Book Award for her debut short fiction collection, Felt in the Jaw, and was awarded Ninth Letter‘s 2015 Literary Award in Fiction. She’s a columnist for Literary Hub and her work has either appeared or is upcoming at North American Review, The Normal School, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Guernica, Electric Literature, Volume 1 Brooklyn, Bennington Review, Tin House Flash Fridays/The Guardian, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

Books Kristen Arnett mentions in this episode:

In this episode of The Archive Project, poet Eavan Boland reads a selection of her poetry and prose, pausing between pieces to discuss how each particular work originated and her writing process. The topics of her work include history vs. the past and love vs. loss (most often as these topics relate to Ireland), and she weaves Greek and Roman mythology into many of her poems. At the end of her reading, she answers a series of questions from the audience.

“I grew up in a time in Ireland when Irish history was made…In many ways that narrative was the story of a small country against a great one and was a story of heroes. But the past is a different place from history. The past, you know, consists of these shadows and whispers and lost names and no heroes. And increasingly it was the past that seemed to me the place where I would turn.”

“For these couple of sentences, these people, whoever they were—without name, without history, without anything—gleam into account and are gone. And I wanted to write the poem really to reproach the forms we have, the histories we have, and love poetry, which so rarely recognizes that sort of immense defeat and immense steadfastness.”

“If you can open the classroom to even impolite questions, then you give some access. The last thing you want is some sacred classroom where people are just struggling through the stuff.”

Born in Dublin, Ireland, Eavan Boland divided her childhood between London and New York. She later returned to Dublin to attend Trinity College, during which time she published her first collection of poetry, titled 23 Poems. The collection focused on Boland’s experiences as a young wife and mother and highlighted the role of women in Irish history and culture. These became reoccurring topics of Boland’s work. In an online interview, Boland further explained, “I began to write in an Ireland where the word ‘woman’ and the word ‘poet’ seemed to be in some sort of magnetic opposition to each other. Ireland was a country with a compelling past, and the word ‘woman’ invoked all kinds of images of communality which were thought to be contrary to the life of anarchic individualism invoked by the word ‘poet’…I wanted to put the life I lived into the poem I wrote. And the life I lived was a woman’s life. And I couldn’t accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation.”

Boland’s books of poetry include A Woman Without a Country, Domestic Violence, An Origin Like Water, and In Her Own Image. She also authored A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, a collection of essays that won the 2012 PEN Award, and The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, a volume of prose. Her awards include a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry, an American Ireland Fund Literary Award, and a Jacob’s Award for her involvement in The Arts Programme broadcast on RTÉ Radio. She taught at several colleges and universities, including Trinity, was a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and was a regular reviewer for the Irish Times. Boland passed away in April 2020 at the age of 75.

In March 2019, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie joined thousands of book-lovers for the culminating lecture of the Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads program. Starting in January, readers across the county took part in reading and discussing Adichie’s novel Americanah and her book-length essay We Should All Be Feminists. In this episode, Adichie discusses her journey as a writer—from her earliest memories in her hometown of Nsukka, Nigeria to her American college experiences and beyond. Throughout her story, at least one thing is constant: a persistent hunger for and desire to create literature that celebrates the stories of the unsung, to reach a higher, clearer truth through fiction. Adichie is at once an impressive artist and a disarming speaker, imbuing even the sternest of lessons with wit and warmth. Tender and honest, Adichie’s words are sure to resonate with readers, writers, feminists, and dreamers of all ages and persuasions.

A Nigerian-born artist whose influence spans continents and genres, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has received worldwide acclaim as an author, poet, playwright, and speaker. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and her work has been recognized with the O. Henry Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award (fiction), and the PEN Pinter Prize, among many other distinctions.

Adichie is the author of three novels, Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah; a short story collection, The Thing around Your Neck; the essay We Should All Be Feminists (2014, based on a widely viewed talk at TEDxEuston in 2012); and Dear Ijeawele, Or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions.

In this episode of The Archive Project, playwright Terrence McNally traces the arc of his career with humor and passion—from a boyhood in New York and Texas, the special influence of a high school English teacher, mentorship by Elaine May—to the peaks (and valleys) of a career that spanned five decades. McNally explores what it is that ignites a person’s interest in the arts, and how crucial it is to have teachers/mentors/family members encourage and nurture that interest, especially in children. He also speaks to the unique magic of theatre as a collaborative art form that has the power to meaningfully engage audiences.

“It’s not a question of being different. It’s being yourself. Because, if we are ourselves, we automatically are different from everybody else. That’s what we really want from one another: To be authentic.”

“A new play is a delicate thing. Trying to get a new play to work is like trying to grow orchids in Alaska… in February.”

“The arts, to me, are a very simple expression of our humanity and who we are and what we want to tell one another.”

Terrence McNally was an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. Described as “one of the greatest contemporary playwrights the theater world has yet produced,” McNally was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1996. He received the 2019 Tony Award for Lifetime achievement, the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011, and the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2018, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the highest recognition of artistic merit in the United States. He received the Tony Award for Best Play for Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class, as well as the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime. His other accolades included an Emmy Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, four Drama Desk Awards, two Obie Awards, and three Hull-Warriner Awards. McNally died of complications from COVID-19 in March 2020.

Read our “Adventures in Analogue” blog post for a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of this episode.

This episode features an event from the 2019 Portland Book Festival called Dangerous Love: Desire & Obsession. The event’s panel includes some of the greatest poets at work today: Diannely Antigua, Jericho Brown, Malcolm Tariq, and was moderated by Erika Stevens.

The conversation explores what poetry is, what it can do, and who it is for. Through their writings, these poets engage with our most urgent issues and speak powerfully about an individual experience of race, class, power, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Antigua, Brown, and Tariq each write with urgency, passion, anger, and joy. And in conversation, they perform a vital function by approaching all of our most essential challenges from a perspective fundamentally different from our news cycle, and from our polarized political discourse. Through poetry they are able to give us a new and surprising perspective on experiences and issues that we may otherwise feel are intractable. They are what we need to advance the conversation.

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize. A graduate of the MFA program at NYU, she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program. Her poems can be found in Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. Her heart is in Brooklyn.

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. His 2019 collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press), was a National Book Award finalist. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.

Malcolm Tariq is from Savannah, Georgia, and is the author of Extended Play, winner of the 2017 Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. His debut poetry collection is Heed the Hollow (Graywolf Press). A graduate of Emory University, Tariq has a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. He lives in New York.

Erika Stevens is senior editor at Coffee House Press, and was previously in acquisitions at the University of Georgia Press and the University Press of Florida. She has taught in the Graduate Program in Book Publishing at Portland State, and she does manuscript consulting, coaching, and developmental editing under the name of Quick Bread Editorial.

In this episode of The Archive Project, Malcolm Gladwell joins Literary Arts executive director, Andrew Proctor, for an onstage discussion at the 2019 Portland Book Festival. Gladwell shares his latest book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know, which is a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers—and why they often go wrong. As a writer, Gladwell is interested in exploring the hidden, counterintuitive stories and the unseen forces that shape our choices, our lives, and who we are. In this discussion, he dives deeper into the risks it takes to engage with some of the most contentious issues of our time, and how we approach the tough moments.

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers–The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces the podcasts Revisionist History, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood, and Broken Record, where he, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musicians across a wide range of genres. Gladwell has been included in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list and touted as one of Foreign Policy‘s Top Global Thinkers. His latest book is Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know.

In this episode of The Archive Project, Amor Towles discusses his celebrated second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, in front of a live audience in Portland, Oregon. In the talk, Towles shares the creative origins of the novel and treats the listener to a lively lesson on Russian history and, in particular, the history of the landmark Metropol Hotel. A Gentleman in Moscow begins in 1922, when Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. It is at once a romance, a socioeconomic commentary, a history of Russia from the Bolshevik Revolution to the Cold War, a rumination on the meaning of family and home, and an exploration of the power of literature.

Born and raised in the Boston area, Amor Towles graduated from Yale University and received an MA in English from Stanford University. His first novel, Rules of Civility, published in 2011, was a New York Times bestseller and was named by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of 2011. His second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, published in 2016, was also a New York Times bestseller and was named as one of the best books of 2016 by the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR. His work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. Having worked as an investment professional for more than twenty years, Mr. Towles now devotes himself full time to writing in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife and two children.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, National Book Award-winning author of bestselling nonfiction titles Between the World and Me, The Beautiful Struggle, and We Were Eight Years in Power, shares from and discusses his debut novel, The Water Dancer, with fellow writer Renée Watson. The Water Dancer explores the story of Hiram Walker, a gifted young man born into bondage on a plantation in the American South. In this discussion, recorded in front of a live audience in Portland, Oregon, Coates speaks about America’s cultural history and its role in our current sociopolitical climate, as well as his own career and his process of writing this book.

“I don’t want to bear witness to art that is solicitous of me. I come to art to see the person express something that’s deep, deep inside and being pulled out and rendered in some kind of beautiful fashion. And so, the first thing I would say [to young, aspiring writers] is write for yourselves.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a distinguished writer in residence at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is the author of the bestselling books The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, and Between the World And Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. Ta-Nehisi is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He is also the current author of the Marvel comics The Black Panther and Captain America. The Water Dancer is his first novel.

Renée Watson is the New York Times bestselling, Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Author Award-winning author of the novels Piecing Me Together, This Side of Home, What Momma Left Me, Betty Before X, co-written with Ilyasah Shabazz, and two picture books: Harlem’s Little Blackbird and A Place Where Hurricanes Happen. Renée is the founder of I, Too, Arts Collective, a nonprofit committed to nurturing underrepresented voices in the creative arts. She lives in New York City.

In this episode, The Atlantic staff writer George Packer discusses his recent biography, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. Richard Holbrooke, a diplomat and activist who served under numerous American presidents, has been described as a brilliant, utterly self-absorbed almost-great man who possessed almost inhumane energy and appetites. In this lecture, Packer details his process of writing the biography and provides the audience with insights into this complicated and contradictory man’s life while more broadly exploring the nature of power and the lives of those who hold it. It’s a keen look at the arc of our country’s recent political history that sheds important light on where we find ourselves today.

“The more I thought about it, the more I realized: This is what I need. I need to write a book that doesn’t sound like a biography. I need to write a book that sounds like a novel… I thought of this book like a yarn, like a long night’s yarn in which you sit down with the narrator and he tells you the story of Holbrooke.” — George Packer

George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, which was a New York Times best seller and winner of the 2013 National Book Award. His other nonfiction books include The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize, and Blood of the Liberals, winner of the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is also the author of two novels and a play, Betrayed, winner of the 2008 Lucille Lortel Award, and the editor of a two-volume edition of the essays of George Orwell.