The Archive Project

In this episode, we honor two-time United States Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner W.S. Merwin. In November of 2008, Merwin joined Literary Arts downtown in the Newmark Theatre for an intimate Q&A session, followed by a reading from his 2005 National Book Award-winning collection, Migration. The collection features a combination of new poems and selected favorites from the course of his lengthy and prolific career. In a New York Times review of the book, Don Chiasson wrote that Merwin’s poetry “implies something above or below ordinary speech: the hum of deep interiority, a chorus of ancestral voices, the music of the spheres.” It was Merwin’s ability to blend this kind of secular spirituality with the political that made him much beloved among literary lovers and critics alike. His keen ear for language allowed him to epitomize and transcend the issues he tackled, among them the Vietnam War and environmentalism, with heart-wrenching elegance. Merwin’s passion for the environment in particular colored his later work. When asked about the role of the poet in society, Merwin replied, “I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time. I think that’s a social role, don’t you?”

After over a half-century of award-winning literary and civic contributions, W.S. Merwin passed away on March 15, 2019, at the age of 91. Born September 30, 1927, in New York City, William Stanley Merwin was the son of a Presbyterian minister, for whom he began writing hymns at the age of five. He was raised in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and attended Princeton University on a scholarship. As a young man, Merwin went to Europe and developed a love of languages that led to work as a literary translator. Over the years, his poetic voice has moved from the more formal to a more distinctly American voice. Merwin was perhaps the most highly decorated poet in American history, with two Pulitzer Prizes, and National Book Award, and two terms as United States Poet Laureate, among many other honors. As the Atlantic Monthly says, “The intentions of Merwin’s poetry are as broad as the biosphere yet as intimate as a whisper. He conveys in the sweet simplicity of grounded language a sense of the self where it belongs, floating between heaven, earth, and the underground.”

He lived in Majorca, London, France and Mexico and several places in the United States, including Boston and New York. In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaii to study with Robert Aitken, a Zen Buddhist teacher. He married Paula Dunaway, in 1983, and settled on Maui. For nearly 30 years, they lived in a home that he designed and helped build, surrounded by acres of land once devastated and depleted from years of erosion, logging, and toxic agricultural practices. Merwin painstakingly restored the land into one of the most comprehensive palm forests in the world. He passed away on March 15 in his home at the age of 91.

In this episode, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan joins us in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall for a lecture on the journey to her New York Times best seller Manhattan Beach. In her own words, Egan takes us through her research process for the novel—from the initial spark of intrigue and inspiration, through the many stories she uncovered along the way, and finally to the relationships she was able to foster and channel into the final product.

About the book: Manhattan Beach (2017) is set in a World War II–era New York City populated by gangsters, sailors, bankers, union men, and the divers of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The novel tells the haunting and propulsive intertwined stories of heroine Anna Kerrigan, the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s only female diver, her father Eddie Kerrigan, who works for both the union and the mob, and nightclub owner Dexter Styles, Eddie’s complex and charismatic boss. Egan has said of writing Manhattan Beach: “It was incredibly fun to just go there with this stuff, in the manner of Robinson Crusoe or Mutiny on the Bounty, these stories that I loved as a kid. It was just incredibly fun to write a shipwreck, and a survival-at-sea story about mobsters trying to kill each other. That felt different.” The book was awarded the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was longlisted for the National Book Award.

Jennifer Egan is the author of Manhattan Beach, the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus, and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope, All-Story, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction appears frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Of her writing, George Saunders has said: “To see the world through Egan’s eyes is to be moved, through language, to new adoration of the world. I don’t know a better writer working today. There is a generosity in her prose that is vastly enlivening to its reader and brings about that beautiful effect fiction sometimes causes: more, and better-grounded, fondness for reality, just as it is.” For more information on this speaker, please visit prhspeakers.com

This special episode of The Archive Project is broken up into three sections, each corresponding to a single micro-interview at Portland Book Festival 2018, in partnership with The Believer magazine. The first featurette puts The Believer’s Sara Ortiz in conversation with Tommy Orange, author of critically acclaimed debut novel There There, which follows the struggles of Oakland Indians as their lives converge at a local powwow. In the second micro-interview, moderated by local artist Jonathan Hill, graphic artists Ali Fitzgerald (Drawn to Berlin) and Jason Lutes (Berlin) delve into the relationships we have with places we move to or have left behind. What is the connection between place, time, and borders? And what obligations do we have to homes both old and new? For the finale in this micro-interview triptych, Alexander Chee (How to Write an Autobiographical Novel) and Meaghan O’Connell (And Now We Have Everything) discuss the fluidity of nonfiction—the process of taking from the past and crossing into the present. How much truth does one share, and what details, if anything, are sacred and private?

Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, all from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor-at-large at VQR. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, T Magazine, Tin House, Slate, and Guernica, among others. He is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

Ali Fitzgerald is a comic artist and writer living in Berlin. Her most recent book is Drawn to Berlin. She is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and recently began a monthly satirical comic there about America. She has also contributed comics to New York Magazine’s The Cut, Modern Painters, The New York Times, Art-Das Kunst Magazine and Greenpeace Magazine. She wrote and drew the popular webcomic “Hungover Bear and Friends” for McSweeney’s from 2013 to 2016.

Jonathan Hill is an Ignatz-nominated cartoonist, illustrator, and educator living in Portland, OR. He currently teaches comics at PNCA and OCAC, and serves on the Literary Arts Board of Directors. As an illustrator and cartoonist, some of his clients include the Willamette Week, Image Comics, Dark Horse Comics, The Believer magazine, and Powell’s City of Books. He is currently working on two graphic novels, Wild Weather: Storms, Meteorology, and Climate and his first solo graphic novel, The Searchers.

Jason Lutes was born in New Jersey in 1967 and grew up reading American superhero and Western comics. He is the creator of comic book series Berlin. In the late 1970s, he discovered Heavy Metal magazine and the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, both of which proved major influences on his creative development. Lutes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in illustration, and in 1993 he began drawing a weekly comics page called Jar of Fools for Seattle’s The Stranger. Lutes lives in Vermont with his partner and two children, where he teaches comics at the Center for Cartoon Studies.

Meaghan O’Connell is a freelance writer whose most recent work has appeared on Longreads and New York Magazine’s The Cut. From 2013–2015 she co-edited the personal finance website The Billfold, and before that worked in the tech industry. Her first book, And Now We Have Everything, is out now from Little, Brown. She lives with her family in Portland, OR.

Tommy Orange is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is a 2014 MacDowell Fellow and a 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California, and currently lives in Angels Camp, California. There There is his debut novel.

Sara Ortiz is the program manager of The Believer magazine and Black Mountain Institute. Daughter to Salvadoran immigrants, Ortiz strives to cultivate cultural and creative programming that offers a platform to amplify underrepresented voices. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, the Texas Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews. An Austin native, Ortiz currently serves as a member in the 2019 YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Committee.

Joshua Wolf Shenk is an essayist, and arts leader. He is artistic and executive director of the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV and editor-in-chief of The Believer magazine. Josh’s books include Lincoln’s Melancholy, named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times and The Washington Post; and national bestseller, Powers of Two: How Relationships Drive Creativity. He’s published in Harper’s, The New Yorker, the New York Times, GQ, The Nation. He splits his time between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, where he fathers an eight-year-old boy who, like Josh, has webbed toes.

Ron Chernow opens his talk with a discussion on being a biographer—from the perils of picking a subject to debates about how much one should reveal about that subject. Specifically, he discusses his research on the life of John D. Rockefeller for his book Titan (1998) and how it is not unusual when writing a biography to encounter “somebody I had not met in any of the earlier biographies. Here was a man with a beautiful, dry Midwestern wit; somebody with an inexhaustible fund of droll stories; somebody who had a very, very canny sense of people and situations, and certainly had a talent for business analysis that dwarfed anything I met with the Morgans or the Warbergs.”

Ron Chernow is an American writer best known for his prize-winning biographies of historical figures in business, finance, and American politics. His first book, The House of Morgan, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1990. He has also won the 1993 George S. Eccles Prize for Excellence in Economic Writing, the 2011 American History Book Prize, and the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award twice. He is also a freelance journalist with over 60 articles appearing in various national publications. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

“Biographers, I think, are all too easily seduced by those people who are expressive, who are demonstrative, and who can be conjured up with that kind of theatrical vividness. I think that we as a breed have a secret bias against the subtle, the elusive, and the reticent, and this is perhaps why I didn’t initially see the potential in doing Rockefeller.”

“In the age of political correctness, you’re able to tell an absolutely filthy joke, and as long as it comes from Mark Twain you’re covered.”

This special episode of The Archive Project is broken up into three sections, each corresponding to a single event during Lit Crawl Portland 2018. 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. The first segment features a reading titled “Our Voices are a Bridge” cohosted by The Rumpus, VIDA, and YesYes Books, and showcases poets Nabila Lovelace, Sophia Shalmiyev, and Stacey Tran. In the second segment, “OPPOSSUM: A Literary Caberet!”, writer Benjamin Soileau performs with musician Dustin Spillman, followed by a reading from writer Erica Trabold accompanied by musician Adam Trabold. And in the final segment, tribal elder and poet Ed Edmo of the Shoshone-Bannock tribe formally and fully recognizes the Portland area’s indigenous people in this first-ever Land Acknowledgement for Lit Crawl Portland and Portland Book Festival. Edmo was joined in the reading by indigenous poets Laura Da’ of the Eastern Shawnee and Trevino L. Brings Plenty of the Lakota.

Trevino L. Brings Plenty is a poet and musician who lives, works, and writes in Portland, OR. He is singer/songwriter/guitarist for the musical ensemble Ballads of Larry Drake. Trevino is an American and Native American; a Lakota Indian born on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, South Dakota, USA. His works include Wakpá Wanáǧi, Ghost River (2015); Real Indian Junk Jewelry (2012); Shedding Skins: Four Sioux Poets (2008).

Laura Da’ is a poet and teacher. A lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is Eastern Shawnee. Her first book, Tributaries, was published by the University of Arizona Press and won a 2016 American Book Award. In 2015, Da’ was both a Made at Hugo House Fellow and a Jack Straw Fellow. Her newest book is Instruments of the True Measure. Da’ lives near Seattle with her husband and son.

Ed Edmo is a Shoshone-Bannock poet, playwright, performer, traditional storyteller, tour guide, and lecturer on Northwest tribal culture; and he served as a consultant to the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his family.

Nabila Lovelace is a born and raised Queens native, as well as a first generation American. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Narrative Northeast, Washington Square Review, Day One, ESPNW, and Vinyl. She is co-founder of The Conversation Literary Festival. In her debut collection, Sons of Achilles, Nabila Lovelace attempts to examine the liminal space between violence and intimacy.

Sophia Shalmiyev emigrated from Leningrad to NYC in 1990. She is an MFA graduate of Portland State University with a second master’s degree in creative arts therapy from the School of Visual Arts. She lives in Portland with her two children. Mother Winter is her first book.

Benjamin Soileau is from south Louisiana. His fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Grist, Opossum, Louisiana Literature, Bayou, and many other journals. His story won the 2018 Rumble Fish Quarterly New Year’s Writing Contest, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He stages homes in Olympia, Washington. Reach him at [email protected].

Adam Trabold is a designer currently living in Oregon with his wife Erica and their two cats, Ewok & Coco (yes, their names fit their personalities). Adam is obsessed with human-centered design, and gets excited about new technology, great records, and storytelling. His spare time is spent writing music with his band Adelaide, playing with digital synthesizers and analog electronics, and with his wife exploring the West Coast.

Erica Trabold is a Nebraska-born essayist. Her lyric essays appear in The Rumpus, Passages North, The Collagist, South Dakota Review, Seneca Review, Essay Daily, and elsewhere. A graduate of Oregon State University’s MFA program and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Erica writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon.

Stacey Tran is a writer from Portland, OR. She is the creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, family, and identity. She is a member of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of writers and artists of the Vietnamese diaspora. Her writing can be found in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and diaCRITICS. She is the author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma, 2018; Black Ocean, 2019). She currently lives in Providence, RI.

In this episode of The Archive Project, American Book Award winning poet Martín Espada discusses his then most poetry collection, A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen. In this, his sixth collection, Espada has created a poetic mural. There are conquerors, slaves, and rebels from Caribbean history; the “Mayan astronomer” calmly smoking a cigarette in the middle of a New York tenement fire; a nun staging a White House vigil to protest her torture; a man on death row mourning the loss of his books; and even Carmen Miranda. In many ways, the collection mirrors Espada’s own career: a winding, fascinating journey punctuated by episodes that on their surface could not appear to have less in common. Espada has worn many hats—civil rights lawyer, teacher, poet—and this is evident in the various people, places, and themes his work tackles.

As a courtesy, we warn that this episode contains sometimes graphic descriptions of violence and racism, and may not be suitable for all audiences.

​Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published almost twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His latest collection of poems from Norton is called Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000), Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993) and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (1990). His many honors include the 2018 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, an American Book Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona, and has been issued in a new edition by Northwestern University Press. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston’s Latino community, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

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.”

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.

“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.”

In this episode of The Archive Project, Mary Oliver reads poems from several of her collections, focusing on brief images of the natural world that she believes people need to attend. These poems include “Messenger,” “Thirst,” “Percy 1,” “The Swan,” “Beans,” “Swimming with Otter,” “Wild Geese,” “Percy 2,” “There you were and it was like spring,” and “The Sun.” Between poems, Oliver shares details about her personal life, including her time as a teacher and her time spent observing the world with the help of her partner, photographer Mary Cook.

“Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness and empathy was necessary if the attention was to matter.”

A notoriously private person, Mary Oliver has been described by The New York Times as “far and away America’s best-selling poet,” and has written more than 30 collections of poetry and nonfiction. Her allocates include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a Lannan Literary Award. While she never formally completed a degree, Oliver has received honorary doctorates from four institutions, including Dartmouth College and Tufts University. As a teenager, Oliver lived briefly in the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, where she helped Millay’s family sort through the papers the poet left behind. In her review of Oliver’s poetry, Maxine Kumin noted that Oliver “stands quite comfortably on the margins of things, on the line between earth and sky, the thin membrane that separates human from what we loosely call animal,” acting as an “indefatigable guide to the natural world, particularly to its lesser-known aspects.” Though Oliver resided in Florida up to her recent passing, she lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts for roughly 40 years with her partner, photographer Molly Cook, and the location has served as the inspiration for much of her work.

This episode of The Archive Project features bestselling novelist, poet, and essayist Barbara Kingsolver discussing her then most recent novel Flight Behavior. The novel is a heady exploration of climate change, along with media exploitation and political opportunism that lie at the root of what may be our most urgent modern dilemma. Set in Appalachia, a region to which Kingsolver has returned often in both her acclaimed fiction and nonfiction, its suspenseful narrative traces the unforeseen impact of global concerns on the ordinary citizens of a rural community. As environmental, economic, and political issues converge, the residents of Feathertown, Tennessee, are forced to come to terms with their changing place in the larger world. [Book description courtesy of Kingsolver.com]

Kingsolver is writer who has never shied away from the political, who embraces the inherent presence of the political in all artistic creation. In this interview, Kingsolver discusses her belief in the power of art for change and the distinctly American myth of apolitical art.

Barbara Kingsolver is the author of nine bestselling works of fiction, including the novels, Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the enormously influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts, as well as the prestigious Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her body of work. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia. [Bio courtesy of HarperCollins]

In this rare, vintage recording from the Literary Arts archive, world-renowned author, poet, and essayist John Updike reads from various poems as well as an essay at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in the fall of 1988. Updike reads from his essay, “Getting the Words Out,” which meditates on his lifelong struggle with stuttering, as well as the nature of speech and communication. With sparkling, self-effacing humor, Updike gives us a doorway into his childhood eccentricities and the ways in which they manifested later in both his public and private life.

Updike agreed to only a small number of speaking engagements, and even fewer of these have been recorded. This rarity, coupled with Updike’s candor and wit, makes for a truly remarkable listening experience.   

Poet, essayist, short-story writer, critic, and novelist John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, on March 18, 1932. His father taught high school math, and his mother wrote short stories and novels. Updike received his BA from Harvard University in 1954, the year he began to publish in The New Yorker.

Updike is the author of more than fifty books. Among his volumes of poetry are Americana and Other Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), Collected Poems 1953-1993 (1993), Facing Nature (1985), Tossing and Turning (1977), Seventy Poems (1972), Midpoint and Other Poems (1969), and The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958).

His novels and short-story collections include Toward the End of Time (1997), The Afterlife and Other Stories (1994), Problems and Other Stories (1981), Marry Me (1976), Rabbit Redux (1971), and Couples (1968).

Updike received numerous honors and awards including the National Book Award, American Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and a National Arts Club Medal of Honor. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for Rabbit is Rich and another Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for Rabbit at Rest.

John Updike passed away due to complications of lung cancer on January 27, 2009. [Bio courtesy of the Academy of American Poets.]