The Archive Project

This episode of The Archive Project features a panel discussion of modern masterpieces in a classic genre: the intergenerational family epic. In a conversation recorded live at the 2019 Portland Book Festival, authors Karl Marlantes, Elizabeth McCracken, and Daniel José Older—with moderator Maria Russo of the New York Times—discuss how the themes of their latest works, including ancestry and genealogy, intersect.

Karl Marlantes’s Deep River follows Finnish immigrants, who flee Russian imperialist rule in Finland in the early 1900s and settle in a Washington state logging community, where they strive to rebuild lives and families in an American in flux, while holding fast to the tradition of the home they left behind. A sweeping and enchanting new novel from award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway is the story of three generations of an unconventional New England family who own and operate a candlepin bowling alley. A sudden death throws the family into upheaval, unraveling myths and secrets long buried. Daniel José Older’s The Book of Lost Saints, Ramon is living in modern New Jersey when the spirit of his aunt, who vanished in the Cuban Revolution, prompts him to unearth their painful family history in this story of revolution, loss, and forgiveness.

It’s very much about history as something that is alive and breathing and moving through us constantly. Most of us have grown up under this false mythology that history is something that has ended and will never happen again, but we all are very aware in our everyday lives that history does walk with us in palpable ways. Discovering that and seeing that in the pages of a book, for me, is immensely gratifying. – Daniel José Older

I always feel like my ability to write from a character comes from if I can create that character from the inside and not the outside. If I’m ever writing any sort of character and I feel like I’m dealing with a mass of attributes and trying to shape them into a character, I know I can’t write that character. But if I feel like I understand the soul of the character, and I’m building outward, then I will hazard it. – Elizabeth McCracken

Karl Marlantes is the author two New York Times bestsellers: Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War and his nonfiction book What It Is Like to Go to War. His most recent book is Deep River. He is married and has five adult children and three grandchildren. He grew-up in a small logging town on the Oregon coast and fished commercially with his grandfather as a teenager.

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of six books, Bowlaway, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry (stories), The Giant’s House (a National Book Award finalist), Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, and Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize, long-listed for the National Book Award), three of which were New York Times Notable Books. She has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently holds the James Michener Chair for Fiction at the University of Texas at Austin.

Daniel José Older is the New York Times bestselling author of the young adult series The Shadowshaper Cypher, the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, the middle-grade historical fantasy series Dactyl Hill Squad, and Star Wars: Last Shot. He won the International Latino Book Award and has been nominated for the Kirkus Prize, the Mythopoeic Award, the Locus Award, the Andre Norton Award, and the World Fantasy Award. Shadowshaper was named one of Esquire’s 80 Books Every Person Should Read. His most recent book is The Book of Lost Saints.

Maria Russo, co-author of How to Raise a Reader, is the children’s books editor of the New York Times Book Review. She has been a writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times, the New York Observer, and Salon, and holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her husband and three children.

In this episode, we feature poet Robert Bly who came to Portland as part of our Poetry Downtown series in 2006.

Born in 1926, Bly is considered one of the legends of contemporary poetry.  He is not only the author of more than 30 collections of poems, he has also written many works of nonfiction, and, crucially, he introduced many unknown European and South American poets to a U.S. audience through his work as an editor. Robert Bly passed away in November 2021, at the age of 94.

“What’s the most beautiful word in the English language? I think maybe it’s ‘listen.'”

“For a couple of years, I stayed in bed until I had written my poem for the day.”

Robert Bly is the author of more than 30 books of poetry, including The Light Around the Body (1967), which won the National Book Award. He is also an editor, translator, and nonfiction writer. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Bly received a Fulbright scholarship to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. During his time as editor of the magazine The Sixties, he introduced many unknown European and South American poets to an American audience and because of this, is regarded by many to have had a profound impact on the shape of American poetry. His honors include Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, as well as The Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.

“When we stride or stroll across the frozen lake, we place our feet where they have never been. We walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy.”

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.

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.

 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.

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.

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.

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.