The Archive Project

In this episode of The Archive Project, Doree Shafrir and Ellen Ullman discuss their work as authors and as women in the booming, male-dominated world of technology. Shafrir’s Startup tells the stories of Mack, Katya, and Sabrina, three very different people whose lives become perilously engulfed in a tech startup scandal. Ullman’s second memoir, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, takes a grounded look at the ever-evolving tech industry and the very human implications and casualties of such intense and unchecked growth. In this bold and unflinching discussion, Shafrir and Ullman create a snapshot not just of women in tech today, but of their history and possible futures.

Doree Shafrir is a Senior Tech Writer at BuzzFeed News. Her first novel, Startup, was published by Little, Brown on April 25, 2017. Doree has also worked as an editor or staff writer at Rolling Stone, the New York Observer, Gawker, and Philadelphia Weekly, and has contributed to publications including the New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, TheAwl, Daily Beast, Marie Claire, and Wired. A former resident of Brooklyn, she now lives in Los Angeles with her husband Matt Mira, a comedy writer and podcaster, and their dog Beau. 

Ellen Ullman wrote her first computer program in 1978. She went on to have a twenty-year career as a programmer and software engineer. Her essays and books have become landmark works describing the social, emotional, and personal effects of technology. She is the author of two novels: By Blood, a New York Times Notable Book; and The Bug, a runner-up for the Pen/Hemingway Award. Her memoir, Close to the Machine, about her life as a software engineer during the internet’s first rise, became a cult classic. Her new book, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, tells a continuing story of the technical world as she experienced it while living in its midst for more than two decades. She is based in San Francisco.

This special episode of The Archive Project is broken up into three sections, each corresponding to a single event during Lit Crawl Portland 2017. 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 cohosted by De-Canon: A Visibility Project, White Noise, and YesYes Books, and showcasing poets Nabila Lovelace, Alyssa Ogi, Danez Smith, and Mahogany Browne. In the second segment, Elena Passarello reads from and discusses her essay on Twin Peaks nostalgia in the anthology Little Boxes: Twelve Writers on Television. And in the final segment, Deb Olin Unferth and Elizabeth Haidle discuss the near symbiotic process that produced their darkly humorous graphic novel I, Parrot.

Mahogany Browne is a Cave Canem, Poets House, and Serenbe Focus alum and the author of several books including Redbone (nominated for NAACP Outstanding Literary Works) and Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out On-line. 

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 Washington Square Review, Day One, Winter Tangerine Hands Up Don’t Shoot edition.

Alyssa Ogi writes and teaches in Portland, OR. She received her MFA from the University of Oregon, and her recent poetry can be found in Best New Poets 2017, Crab Orchard Review, and other journals.

Danez Smith is a Black, queer, poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead, a finalist for the National Book Award, and [insert] boy, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award & the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. 

Elena Passarello is an actor, writer, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award. Her essays on performance, pop culture, and the natural world have been published in Oxford American, Slate, Creative Nonfiction, and The Iowa Review, among other publications.

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of four books, including Wait Till You See Me Dance and Revolution, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, Granta, and Tin House.

Elizabeth Haidle is a freelance artist based in Portland, Oregon. She is the creative director and regular contributor at Illustoria magazine, while writing and illustrating a nonfiction graphic novel series and raising her teenage son.

In this episode of The Archive Project, bestselling authors Maile Meloy and Claire Messud discuss their new books: psychological mysteries where children go missing and painful truths are revealed in crisis, exploring the spaces between childhood innocence and the hard realities of adulthood. In Maile Meloy’s Do Not Become Alarmed, the children go missing while two families are vacationing in Latin America, sending the parents into panic and forcing the children to discover untapped resourcefulness. In The Burning Girl, Claire Messud explores the intense bond and break of a girlhood friendship, questioning how well we can ever know even the people we are closest to—or ourselves. This conversation is moderated by John Freeman, editor of Freeman’s.

Maile Meloy is the author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter; the short story collections Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (named one of the “10 Best Books of 2009” by the New York Times Book Review); and a bestselling middle-grade trilogy. Her fiction has won the Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Meloy was shortlisted for the UK’s Orange Prize for Fiction and chosen as one of Granta‘s Best Young American Novelists.

Claire Messud is a recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Author of five previous works of fiction including her most recent novel, The Woman Upstairs, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.

How do we create art from our own wounds and wonders? In their poetry, memoirs, and essays, writers Kaveh Akbar, Melissa Febos, and Megan Stielstra reckon with personal trauma and healing. Tracking the joys and pains of the path through addiction, and wrestling with desire, inheritance and faith, Calling a Wolf a Wolf is the darkly sumptuous debut from award-winning poet Kaveh Akbar. His are powerful, intimate poems of thirst: for alcohol, for other bodies, for knowledge and for life. In her memoir Abandon Me, Melissa Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection—with family, lovers, and oneself. In visceral, erotic prose, Febos captures a mutual abandonment to passion and obsession—and the terror and exhilaration of losing herself in another. In her poignant and inciting collection of literary essays, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, Megan Stielstra tells stories to ward off fears both personal and universal as she grapples toward a better way to live. Whether she’s imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra’s work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. These three authors discuss life and art with moderator Marisa Siegel, editor-in-chief of The Rumpus. Kaveh Akbar’s appearance is in partnership with the Poetry Foundation.

Kaveh Akbar is the founding editor of Divedapper. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Kaveh has also served as Poetry Editor for BOOTH and Book Reviews Editor for the Southeast Review. Along with Gabrielle Calvocoressi, francine j. harris, and Jonathan Farmer, he starred on All Up in Your Ears, a monthly poetry podcast. The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently and currently teaches at Purdue University and in the low residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoirs Whip Smart and Abandon Me. Her essays have appeared in Tin House, The Believer, The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, Lenny Letter, and elsewhere. Portions from Abandon Me have won prizes from Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, and twice earned notice in the 2015 Best American Essays anthology. The recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Febos serves on the directorial board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Monmouth University. She lives in Brooklyn.

Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections: The Wrong Way To Save Your Life, Once I Was Cool, and Everyone Remain Calm. Her work appears in the Best American Essays, New York Times, Poets & Writers, Longreads, Tin House, Guernica, Catapult, Lit Hub, Buzzfeed Reader, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A longtime company member with 2nd Story, she has told stories for National Public Radio, Radio National Australia, Museum of Contemporary Art, Goodman Theatre, the Neo-Futurarium, and regularly with The Paper Machete live news magazine at The Green Mill. She is currently an artist in residence at Northwestern University. She lives in Chicago with her husband, their kid, and two dogs.

How do we create art from our own wounds and wonders? In their poetry, memoirs, and essays, writers Kaveh Akbar, Melissa Febos, and Megan Stielstra reckon with personal trauma and healing. Tracking the joys and pains of the path through addiction, and wrestling with desire, inheritance and faith, Calling a Wolf a Wolf is the darkly sumptuous debut from award-winning poet Kaveh Akbar. His are powerful, intimate poems of thirst: for alcohol, for other bodies, for knowledge and for life. In her memoir Abandon Me, Melissa Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection—with family, lovers, and oneself. In visceral, erotic prose, Febos captures a mutual abandonment to passion and obsession—and the terror and exhilaration of losing herself in another. In her poignant and inciting collection of literary essays, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, Megan Stielstra tells stories to ward off fears both personal and universal as she grapples toward a better way to live. Whether she’s imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra’s work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. These three authors discuss life and art with moderator Marisa Siegel, editor-in-chief of The Rumpus. Kaveh Akbar’s appearance is in partnership with the Poetry Foundation.

Kaveh Akbar is the founding editor of Divedapper. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Kaveh has also served as Poetry Editor for BOOTH and Book Reviews Editor for the Southeast Review. Along with Gabrielle Calvocoressi, francine j. harris, and Jonathan Farmer, he starred on All Up in Your Ears, a monthly poetry podcast. The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently teaches at Purdue University and in the low residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoirs Whip Smart and Abandon Me. Her essays have appeared in Tin House, The Believer, The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, Lenny Letter, and elsewhere. Portions from Abandon Me have won prizes from Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, and twice earned notice in the 2015 Best American Essays anthology. The recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Febos serves on the directorial board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Monmouth University. She lives in Brooklyn.

Pretend boyfriends, arranged marriages, getting photographed by the paparazzi? These YA novelists don’t write your typical love stories In Sandhya Menon’s When Dimple Met Rishi, two first-generation Indian-American teens are set up by their parents in an arranged marriage, but the plans backfire when they are paired up at the same coding camp. In Zan Romanoff’s Grace and the Fever, Grace is swept up in the world of the boy band she secretly loves and struggles to keep up her double life as she learns what really happens behind the scenes. In Jenny Han’s Always and Forever, Lara Jean, Lara Jean Song heads into her senior year looking forward to prom with Peter, who was her pretend boyfriend but now is her real boyfriend, and college, when some unexpected news forces her to rethink all of her plans. Moderated by Brendan Kiely (The Last True Love Story).

Jenny Han is the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer I Turned Pretty series; Shug; the Burn for Burn trilogy, cowritten with Siobhan Vivian; and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and P.S. I Still Love You. She is also the author of the chapter book Clara Lee and The Apple Pie Dream. A former children’s bookseller, she earned her MFA in creative writing at the New School.

Sandhya Menon is the New York Times bestselling author of the smash-hit When Dimple Met Rishi and From Twinkle, with Love. She was born and raised in India on a steady diet of Bollywood movies and street food, and blames this upbringing for her obsession with happily-ever-afters, bad dance moves, and pani puri. Now she lives in Colorado, where she’s on a mission to (gently) coerce her husband and children watch all 3,220 Bollywood movies she claims as her favorite.

Zan Romanoff fell in love with Hanson when she was ten and has been a boy-band fanatic and teen-idol obsessive ever since. Romanoff’s non-fiction has been featured in The Awl, Buzzfeed, Elle, GQ, Lucky Peach, The Paris Review Daily, Racked, and Rolling Stone among other publications. She lives and writes in Los Angeles; Grace and the Fever is her second novel.

This episode features award-winning poet and thinker Claudia Rankine discussing race in America in the years since the publication of her hybrid form volume of poetry Citizen: An American Lyric. In this lecture, Rankine explores not only what it means to be black in America today, but how the black experience relates to what we unconsciously consider the standard, white experience. In a society that sees whiteness as the default, how do we interpret and interrogate what it means to be white in America? Using a series of examples ranging from the history of color photography to her own Yale classroom in the present day, Rankine’s lecture reminds us that perhaps our current political climate shouldn’t come as such a surprise after all.

Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; numerous video collaborations and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. For her book Citizen, Rankine won both the PEN Open Book Award and the PEN Literary Award, the NAACP Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (Citizen was the first book ever to be named a finalist in both the poetry and criticism categories); and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Citizen also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times best seller in the nonfiction category. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Poets & Writers Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in California and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.

This episode features Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen reading from his novel The Sympathizer. Between readings, Nguyen humorously meditates on his own refugee experience as a Vietnamese American growing up in post-war Sacramento, California. A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties. In both conversation with and opposition to the narratives of the Vietnam War that have preceded it, Nguyen’s novel offers an important and unfamiliar new perspective on the war: that of a conflicted communist sympathizer. 

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. His novel, The Sympathizer, is a New York Times bestseller and won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as five other awards. He is also the author of the nonfiction books Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. His most recent book is the bestselling short story collection, The Refugees. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Viet is actively involved with promoting the arts and culture of Vietnamese in the diaspora through two organizations: The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), for which he is the co-director, stages film festivals, youth arts groups, and literary festivals and events that center around the voices of Vietnamese in the diaspora. diaCRITICS is DVAN’s blog for which Viet is the editor. It features book, film, and art reviews, essays and commentaries, interviews with artists and writers, travelogues, and more, all dealing with the cultural production of Vietnamese in the diaspora. Viet is also on the steering committee for USC’s Center for Transpacific Studies, which encourages the study of how cultures, peoples, capital, and ideas flow across the Pacific and between Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands.

In this episode, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, cultural critic, journalist, and professor Margo Jefferson asks, “How do we teach ourselves to go beyond the limits of our own experience?” The daughter of a prominent physician and social worker-turned-socialite mother, Jefferson grew up in an upper-middle class black neighborhood of Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s. In this lecture, Jefferson uses her own unique experience and perspective to explore how our nation, with its seemingly infinite identities and histories, can come together to create a community. Jefferson asks us to consider: What kind of “we” is worth dreaming of and working for?

I think we all need to be citizen-critics. I think our task is to bring all the traditions that have shaped us—intellectual, political, aesthetic—to complex questions of identity and community.”

“‘We the People’ is an affirmation, but it’s a provocation too. It provokes each of us as individuals, as ‘I’s’ who cherish our particular identities, to think about how those identities can join forces in a community. And by ‘forces’ I mean beliefs, achievements and dreams, but also uncertainties and conflicts: histories and traditions that often clash. ‘We the People’ are a nation of communities and cultures struggling hard to make sense of one another. What kind of ‘we’ is worth dreaming of and working for?”

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson previously served as book and arts critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York Magazine, The Nation, and Guernica. Her memoir, Negroland, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She is also the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.

In this episode of The Archive Project, author Mohsin Hamid discusses the themes in his novel Exit West, Multnomah County Library’s 2018 Everybody Reads selection.

About Exit West: Shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize, Exit West tells the story of Nadia and Saeed, who begin their love affair against an increasingly unsettling backdrop of unrest and violence. As the city turns into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, the couple begins to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. This timely novel examines the global refugee crisis with a twist of magic realism, showing us that we are all migrants through time.

Everybody Reads is a community reading project of Multnomah County Library made possible in part by gifts to The Library Foundation. The Everybody Reads program celebrates the power of books in creating a stronger community through a shared reading experience. Literary Arts is proud to partner with Multnomah County Library and The Library Foundation on the culminating event of this truly inspiring program.

Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistani writer. He is the author of four novels, Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), and Exit West (2017), as well as a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations (2014). His writing has been featured on bestseller lists, adapted for the cinema, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West), shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award (Moth Smoke), selected as winner or finalist of twenty awards, and translated into thirty-five languages.