The Archive Project

This episode of The Archive Project features author Salman Rushdie reading from and discussing his 1999 New York Times bestseller The Ground Beneath Her Feet. In his remaking of the myth of Orpheus, Rushdie tells the story of Vina Apsara, a pop star, and Ormus Cama, an extraordinary songwriter and musician, who captivate and change the world through their music and their romance. Beginning in Bombay in the fifties, moving to London in the sixties, and New York for the last quarter century, the novel pulsates with a half-century of music and celebrates the power of rock ‘n’ roll. In this episode, Rushdie discusses the musical and mythological influences that inspired this ambitious work of magical realism. [Book description courtesy of SalmanRushdie.com]

“The thing that I wanted to do most of all was to write a love story. And to find a way of writing a contemporary love story that was neither gushily sentimental nor fashionably cynical, but which could face up to great passion and try and make sense of it. And so, in my usual perverse way, while trying to write a modern story I found myself thinking about an ancient myth.”

–Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is the author of several novels, including Grimus, Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and Shalimar the Clown. He has written collections of short stories, including East, West, and co-edited with Elizabeth West a collection of Indian literature in English, Mirrorwork. He has also published several works of nonfiction, among them The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, and Joseph Anton, a memoir of his life under the fatwa issued after the publication of The Satanic Verses.

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 episode of The Archive Project features great American author Philip Roth reading from his 1991 memoir Patrimony: A True Story. Patrimony is a true story about the relationship between a father and a son. In this masterful and tender memoir, Philip Roth watches as his 86-year-old father, famous for his vigor, his charm, and his skill as a raconteur—lovingly called ‘the Bard of Newark’—battles with the brain tumor that will kill him. Roth, full of love, anxiety and dread, accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father’s long engagement with life. In this episode, Roth reads from the third chapter of the memoir, entitled “Will I Be a Zombie?”

In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.” In 2006 and 2007 Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards: the PEN/Nabokov Award and the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. Roth is the only living American novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. Roth passed away in 2018.

In this episode of The Archive Project, Omar El Akkad, Benjamin Percy, and Lidia Yuknavitch discuss their newest works in a conversation titled “Resistance and Rebellion: Dystopian Fiction” at the 2017 Portland Book Festival. El Akkad’s début novel American War imagines an American landscape devastated by its second Civil War and tells the story of the young woman who carries the war-torn country’s fate. Benjamin Percy’s Dark Net is set in contemporary Portland, where a group of misfits must work together to stop Internet demons from spreading virally into the real world. Set in the year 2049, Lidia Yuknavitch’s Book of Joan follows the eponymous child-rebel Joan of Arc as she fights for humankind on an Earth ravaged by climate change. They discuss the inspiration for and execution of their boundary-pushing new works. Drawing on some of today’s most pressing issues, these authors create poignant images of a not-so-distant future.

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 Guantanamo 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. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Benjamin Percy has won a Whiting Award, a Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of the novels The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding, two story collections, and an essay collection, Thrill Me. He also writes the Green Arrow and Teen Titans series for DC Comics. He lives in Minnesota with his family.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the National Bestselling novel The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award’s Ken Kesey Award for Fiction, as well as the Reader’s Choice Award; the novel Dora: A Headcase; and three books of short stories. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader’s Choice. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland, Oregon, where she also teaches Women’s Studies, Film Studies, Writing, and Literature. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.

This episode features a panel discussion from the 2017 Portland Book Festival wherein Dawn Lundy Martin, Morgan Parker, and Danez Smith discuss the intersection of race and language, and what it means to render black bodies in literature. Together, these poets explore what it means to be a black artist in America today, and what it means to represent this experience in their work. This panel is moderated by Portland writer and performer Béalleka.

Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet and activist whose poetry collections include Discipline (2011), winner of the Nightboat Books Prize, and A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering (2007), which was selected for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She is also the author of Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (2015) and Good Stock, Strange Blood (2017). With Vivien Labaton, Martin coedited The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism (2004). She also cofounded both the Third Wave Foundation and the Black Took Collective. She has received the Academy of American Arts and Science’s May Sarton Prize for Poetry and has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, The New School, and Bard College.

Morgan Parker is the author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (2017) and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (2015). Her third collection of poems, Magical Negro, will be published by Tin House in 2019, and her debut book of nonfiction will be published later that year by One World, an imprint of Random House. Her poetry and essays have been published and anthologized in numerous publications, including The Paris Review, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Best American Poetry 2016,  The New York Times, and The Nation. Parker is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She is the creator and host of Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel in New York. With Tommy Pico, she co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series, and with Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective.

Danez Smith is a Black, queer, poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (2017), a finalist for the National Book Award, and [insert] boy (2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award & the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. Danez is also the author of two chapbooks, hands on your knees (2013) and black movie (2015), winner of the Button Poetry Prize. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. Danez’s work has been featured widely including in The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Danez is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and is the co-host of VS with Franny Choi, a podcast sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness.

Wright begins his lecture by elaborating on his recent journalistic investigation into the history of Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard. Wright seeks to answer two overarching questions: 1) Where do new religious ideas come from? and 2) why would anybody believe them? Although he focuses on Scientology, Wright also emphasizes the fundamental needs that drive people to all organized religions: hope, play, purpose, community, and structure. He credits the unique appeal of Scientology to a potent mixture of therapy, celebrity, and science.

Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, and playwright. After graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans, Wright completed his M.A. in Applied Linguistics in Cairo. He then pursued a career in journalism, writing for publications such as Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, for whom he has been a staff writer for two decades. He is the author of one novel and eight nonfiction books, including The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, which was nominated for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Wright is the co-writer of The Siege (1998), starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, and Annette Bening. His one-man play, “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” was adapted into an HBO documentary film directed by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney. In addition to his writing career, Wright is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the keyboard player for the Austin-based blues band WhoDo. He is currently writing a series for HBO called God Save Texas.

Perhaps these are all revelations from God, in which case I do wish he’d get his story straight. Or else they are hallucinations, frauds, or products of a diseased imagination. I think in the case of L. Ron Hubbard, we see all three of these factors at work.”

“But new religions will come along, whether Scientology exists or not; they always do, especially in America where you can believe anything you want. And if you don’t find a belief you like from the smorgasbord of beliefs that are laid out before you, you can create your own.”

Ursula Le Guin begins her discussion with Margaret Atwood in 2010 by saying, “I emailed Margaret about six weeks or so ago and said, ‘What are we going to talk about?’ and she replied, ‘I expect we will talk about 1) What is fiction?; 2) What is science fiction?; 3) The ones who walk away from Omelas—where do they go?; 4) Is the human race doomed?; 5) Anything else that strikes our fancy.’” The two women examine these questions and talk through their answers. They delve into their writing processes and motives, creating many humorous analogies for the act of writing, whether they connect it to naked chickens, salted slugs, or dark boudoirs.

“If we knew everything ahead of time, we wouldn’t write the book. It would be paint by numbers and there wouldn’t be any discoveries.” – Margaret Atwood

“Rereading a book is much better than reading it. A good book reread is better than a good book read.” – Ursula Le Guin

“All doors are doors to the future, if you go into them.” – Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series, 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; The MaddAddam Trilogy; The Heart Goes Last; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. In 2019, The Testaments won the Booker Prize and was longlisted for The Giller Prize. She lives in Toronto.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in 1929 in Berkeley, and passed away on January 22, 2018 in Portland, Oregon. She published 21 novels, 11 volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, 12 books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many honors and awards including the Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, and PEN-Malamud. Her most recent publications are Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2010 and The Unreal and the Real: Selected Short Stories, which received the 2012 Oregon Book Award for Fiction.

We are incredibly saddened by the news of her passing, are so grateful and honored to have known her, and thank her for her transformative contributions to international literature. Our thoughts are with her family, friends, loved ones, readers, and writers everywhere.

Ursula K. Le Guin opens with the question, “Where do you get your ideas from?” and replies with her favorite response, from Harlan Ellison: “He says he gets his ideas from a mail-order house in Schenectady.” Le Guin goes on to seriously address the question, because “unanswerable questions are just what fiction writers like to answer.” She discusses the process of all artists’ work, of the connection between experience and imagination, and the tendency for Americans to prefer realism in their novels and to put genre fiction in the literary ghetto. She warns against the dismissal of fantasy: “People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.” She goes on to explain the importance of reading, and how this virtual experience not only feeds writers’ imaginations, but is also a wholly different experience than viewing stories onscreen. She ends with a profound meditation on the nature of rhythm in the world and the way art breaks down barriers between people. This lecture is transcribed in the Literary Arts anthology The World Split Open (Tin House, 2014).

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in 1929 in Berkeley, and passed away on January 22, 2018 in Portland, Oregon. She published 21 novels, 11 volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, 12 books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many honors and awards including the Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, and PEN-Malamud. Her most recent publications are Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2010 and The Unreal and the Real: Selected Short Stories, which received the 2012 Oregon Book Award for Fiction. (from www.ursulakleguin.com)

We are incredibly saddened by the news of her passing, are so grateful and honored to have known her, and thank her for her transformative contributions to international literature. Our thoughts are with her family, friends, loved ones, readers, and writers everywhere.

This is a very radical job, dealing with the ideas you get if you are an artist and take your job seriously, this shaping a vision into the medium of words. It’s what I like best to do in the world, and what I like to talk about when I talk about writing.” 

“Fiction results from imagination working on experience. We shape experience in our minds so that it makes sense. We force the world to be coherent, to tell us a story.” 

“Literature is a communal enterprise…The stuff from other people’s books gets into us just as our own experience does, is composted and transmuted and transformed by the imagination just as actual experiences are, and comes forth entirely changed.”

In this episode of The Archive Project, Ann Patchett retraces the steps that lead to her 2013 essay collection, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. With a seemingly endless wellspring of wit and charm, Patchett takes us a series of adventures that ultimately lead to her first and only collection of essays. From refilling ketchup bottles to writing pieces for Seventeen and Vogue to opening up her own bookstore, Parnassus, Patchett effortlessly weaves the story of her literary journey. Simultaneously humorous and deeply personal, Patchett’s lecture gives the listener a peek into the rich and often meandering path of one of literature’s great voices.

“Well, what it turned out the story of my happy marriage was, was the never ending history of divorce in my family. Everyone in my family for as far as the eye can see, in any direction, has been divorced. And when I sat down to write about marriage, it was really fascinating to realize that everything I know about marriage comes from divorce, and that divorce is the bedrock of my marriage.” —Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett is the author of seven novels, The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, The Magician’s Assistant, Bel Canto, Run, State of Wonder, and Commonwealth. She was the editor of Best American Short Stories, 2006, and has written three books of nonfiction–Truth & Beauty, about her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, What Now? an expansion of her graduation address at Sarah Lawrence College, and This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a collection of essays examining the theme of commitment. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Patchett has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, and her books have been both New York Times Notable Books and New York Times bestsellers. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. In November, 2011, she opened Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, with her business partner Karen Hayes. In 2012 she was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. Ann Patchett lives in Nashville with her husband, Karl VanDevender, and their dog, Sparky. (Bio courtesy of Ann Patchett)