The Archive Project

This episode of The Archive Project features a conversation recorded live at the Keller Auditorium in Portland, Oregon between Margaret Atwood, acclaimed novelist, poet, literary critic, and activist, and Omar El Akkad. Atwood visited Portland to celebrate the publication of The Testaments, the sequel to her acclaimed dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which was originally published in 1985. Their conversation spans the length of Atwood’s remarkable career, her diverse range of works, and why she has returned to her seminal story, 34 years later.

“It annoys me when people say ‘it could never happen here’. There’s no such thing. ‘It’ could always happen ‘here’, wherever ‘here’ is, given the circumstances.” — Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in thirty-five countries, is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize; The Year of the Flood; and MaddAddam. She is the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award, and lives in Toronto.

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.

This special episode of The Archive Project is broken up into three sections, each from events that took place during Lit Crawl Portland on November 8, 2019. Lit Crawl is an eclectic mix of literary events staged in nontraditional locations. From poetry readings in bars to literary trivia and karaoke in hotel lobbies, Lit Crawl seeks to unite readers and writers in a single night jam-packed with literary fun and surprising mash-ups.

The episode opens with an impassioned spoken word poem written and performed by DeAngelo Gillispie. We then drop in on an event hosted by Counterpoint Press wherein Dao Strom shares from her novella collection, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys, that centers the experiences of Vietnamese women in the contemporary landscape. Strom is joined by Jenny M. Chu and Amy Lam for a poem recitation, then she performs an original song. Lastly, we visit an event hosted by The Rumpus, Corporeal Writing, and YesYes Books that features readings from Diannely Antigua, Steph Cha, Ross Gay, and Matt Hart.

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music 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.

Steph Cha, author of the Juniper Song crime trilogy, is now the Noir Editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books and a contributing book reviewer for The Los Angeles Times. Her most recent book is Your House Will Pay. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two basset hounds.

Jenny M. Chu was born and raised in Portland, Oregon by way of immigrant parents from Saigon and Hong Kong. She’s an older sister to a little brother. In life, she is the Community Engagement Manager at Write Around Portland. In life, she thinks and writes. In life, her creative work is intermittently public. In life, her creativity is omnipresent. She often seeks the horizon on a clockless day.

Ross Gay is the author of three books of poetry, including Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Catalog was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, the Ohioana Book Award, the Balcones Poetry Prize, the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and it was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. His most recent book is The Book Of Delights. He is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. Gay has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Indiana University.

DeAngelo Gillispie hails from Atlanta, Georgia and has been a part of the spoken word community for the past two decades. He’s performed and hosted his own events at spoken word gatherings around the country as well as internationally. DeAngelo is also one of three authors of a published novel at nineteen years old, titled “Down South Poets Vol. 1”. On the surface, he’s a simple man but the love of the English art and his fellow man compels him to spread the good word and fight the good fight.

Matt Hart is the author of seven books of poems, including Radiant Action, Radiant Companion, and Everything Breaking/For Good. Hart’s poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in The Academy of American Poets online, Big Bell, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Jam Tarts Magazine, jubilat, Kenyon Review online, Lungfull!, and POETRY, among others. After earning his BS in Philosophy from Ball State University in 1992, Hart recorded and toured as lead vocalist for the LOOKOUT! Records band Squirtgun. In 2001, Hart earned an MFA in Poetry from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, a 2013 individual artist grant from The Shifting Foundation, and fellowships from both the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He lives in Cincinnati where he is Associate Professor in Creative Writing and the Chair of Liberal Arts at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

Amy Lam is a writer and editor based in Portland, Oregon. She is a contributing editor and cohost of Backtalk podcast at Bitch Media, the editorial assistant at diaCRITICS, and the former editorial lead at On She Goes exploring the world of women of color and travel. She is a Kundiman fellow and received an MFA from the University of Mississippi where she was the John & Renee Grisham fellow. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Tin House, Gay Mag, Pacifica Literary Review, Utne Reader, and Papercutter.

Dao Strom is the author of a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, an experimental memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, a song cycle, East/West, and two books of fiction, Grass Roof, Tin Roof and The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys. She has received awards from the Creative Capital Foundation, RACC, the NEA, and others. She was born in Vietnam, grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, and is now based in Portland.

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

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

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

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

In this episode of The Archive Project, novelist Min Jin Lee discusses her writing craft and inspiring personal journey to become a professional writer. With warm humor, Lee honestly opens up about her struggle to succeed—as a Korean-born American immigrant battling a life-threatening chronic illness—within the publishing industry, and details her perseverance in the face of countless rejection letters. A life-long reader and lover of books, Lee shines as she speaks of the necessity of the arts as a vehicle to empower those who are disempowered.

“I had already failed for such a long time, but I still cared about writing something really beautiful. No matter who I was, and no matter the consequences, it was still within my power to write about the people who fascinated me.”

“I am a great reader. It is that identity that I still cling to today.”

Min Jin Lee’s novel Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017. The San Francisco Chronicle lauds it as “beautiful… Lee’s sweeping four-generation saga of a Korean family is an extraordinary epic.” It was on over 75 best books of the year lists, and will be translated into 27 languages. Her debut novel, 2007’s Free Food for Millionaires, was also a national best seller as well as a Top 10 Books of the Year for The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air, and USA Today. Lee is a recipient of fellowships in fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard.

This episode of The Archive Project features an onstage conversation from the 2019 Portland Book Festival between Portland-based authors Rene Denfeld and Phillip Margolin, with moderator Amy Stewart. As writers, Denfeld and Margolin each pull from their own personal and professional experiences to craft high-octane thrillers that are as detailed and insightful as they are compelling and bingeable. Though there are many similarities between the two, including their chosen form, genre, and the fact that their books are set in Portland, these writers are also very different. What makes this conversation interesting is hearing them discuss how they approach their material, what about that material is important to them as writers, how they construct their novels, and how their remarkable professional lives in the legal world helps to make them the celebrated writers they are today.

“To me, setting is actually a character. The place that the novel inhabits is in and of itself a character. And, for writers, we have this wonderful opportunity to capture these places and to take readers into worlds that they’re not familiar with.” – Rene Denfeld

“My advice, if you want to be a writer and you’re just learning how to do it, is this: Once you get your idea, do not write. Think.” – Phillip Margolin

“I think readers and writers are two sides of the same coin. We all love story.” – Rene Denfeld

Rene Denfeld is an award-winning author, journalist, and licensed private investigator living in Portland, Oregon. She is the bestselling author of The Child Finder, The Butterfly Girl, and The Enchanted, which was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel prixe and received the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in France. She has written for many publications, including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Oregonian.

Phillip Margolin has written over twenty novels, most of them New York Times bestsellers, including Gone But Not Forgotten, Lost Lake, and Violent Crimes. His most recent book is The Perfect Alibi. In addition to being a novelist, he was a long-time criminal defense attorney with decades of trial experience, including a large number of capital cases. Margolin lives in Portland, Oregon.

Amy Stewart is the New York Times best-selling author of ten books, including Girl Waits with Gun and the rest of the Kopp Sisters series, which are based on the true story of one of America’s first female deputy sheriffs and her two rambunctious sisters. The books are in development with Amazon Studios for a television series. Her popular nonfiction titles include The Drunken Botanist, Wicked Plants, and Flower Confidential. While they have not been adapted for television, there are a few bars around the world named after The Drunken Botanist, which is even better. She lives in Portland with her husband Scott Brown, a rare book dealer. They own an independent bookstore called Eureka Books, which is so independent that it lives in California while they live in Oregon.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we share the late V. S. Naipaul’s 1991 event in Portland, Oregon. Naipaul visited Portland on the occasion of the publication of India: A Million Mutinies Now. The book was the third installment of travelogues about his ancestral India, at a time when the nation was in the midst of a massive transformation. Naipaul, who refers to the book as “an exploration of an old civilization through the experiences of the people who live in it,” introduces the listener to diverse voices from India. Through reading selections from the book, Naipaul gives us an intimate look at the lives of both the wealthy upper caste, and also their servants. The stories take us from palaces to slums, to the homes of the burgeoning middle class. Naipaul’s writing is attentive to the details, and sympathetic to his subjects.

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. His novels include A House for Mr. Biswas, The Mimic Men, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. In 1971, he was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, The Masque of Africa, and a trio of books about India: An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now. In 1990, Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He lived with his wife Nadira and cat Augustus in Wiltshire, England, and died in 2018.

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.

This episode of The Archive Project features notable funny woman, Elaine May, in a talk from 1997. In it, May explores the art of writing comedy, drawing on her lengthy career as a screenwriter, actor, comedian, director, and playwright. She asks “why are things funny?” and details how to craft comedy out of life’s ordinary moments. Through sharp jokes and personal anecdotes, May’s bright wit shines.

Depth is easy. Comedy is hard.

It’s so hard to say what comedy is because it’s only when you laugh. …You can immediately prove comedy because if nobody laughs, it isn’t funny.

You can get away with a lot in comedy because you deal with—or, I deal with at any rate—very ordinary things, which are probably what concern people the most.

Elaine May is an American comedian, screenwriter, director, and actress. She made her initial impact in the 1950s from her improvisational comedy routines with Mike Nichols, performing as Nichols and May. After her duo with Nichols ended, May subsequently developed a career as a director and screenwriter, best known for A New Leaf (1971), The Bird Cage (1996), Primary Colors (1998), and Small Time Crooks (2000). In 2013, President Barak Obama awarded her a National Medal of Arts, and in 2019, at the age of 86, New York’s Film Forum payed tribute to her.

This episode of The Archive Project features acclaimed author Tommy Orange in his appearance at the 2019 Sun Valley Writers’ Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. In this onstage interview with Andrew Proctor, the executive director of Literary Arts, Orange discusses his bestselling debut novel, There There, as well as his personal passions and journey to becoming a writer.

Orange’s wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. A national best-seller, There There has won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Nation Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and an American Book Award. It was named to numerous Book Books of the Year lists and was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

I think fiction can do anything. I think if you write a sentence well enough, and collect those sentences together, you can convince people of anything. The possibilities are endless.

I knew I wanted to write a novel but I didn’t necessarily know what. And I didn’t have the drive to even start until I found out I was going to be a father. I was writing a lot of experimental stuff, and it was pretty unreadable, but something about the experience of becoming a father—and the role of teaching another human how to be a human—switched something in me and made me want to take writing more seriously and to take on a real project.

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.