The Archive Project

In this episode, Jeffery Eugenides and Danzy Senna discuss their most recent works. Fresh Complaint, Eugenides’s first collection of short stories, centers on people in the midst of crises—both personal and political. In Senna’s New People we meet a self-identified “mulatto” couple as they navigate the messy realms of love, race, and identity. Both works fearlessly approach the realm of the taboo with a humor and tenderness that renders them utterly human. No strangers to representing the taboo in literature, Eugenides and Senna boldly tackle questions of content, character, and what it means to push them to the edge in this candid and insightful conversation.

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published by FSG to great acclaim in 1993, and he has received numerous awards for his work. In 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex (FSG, 2002), which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and France’s Prix Médicis. The Marriage Plot (FSG, 2011) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won both the Prix Fitzgerald and the Madame Figaro Literary Prize. His collection of short stories, Fresh Complaint, is from FSG (2017). Eugenides is a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton. (Bio courtesy of Macmillan)

Danzy Senna is the author of five critically acclaimed books of fiction and nonfiction. Her first novel, Caucasia, won the Book of the Month Award for First Fiction and the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Caucasia was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was named a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Her other books include the novel, Symptomatic, the memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History, and the short story collection, You Are Free, and her most recent novel, New People (Riverhead Books). Senna is a recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and was recently awarded the 2017 Dos Passos Prize for Literature. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times and Vogue, among other publications. She lives in Los Angeles. (Bio courtesy of Danzy Senna)

For me, desperation is a good quality in a character, and the things that you least want for your own self are the things that make the story most alive. And those are places inside of you that you draw on, but you might not want to write about directly. Though I tend to think of my characters as a kind of alter ego, a place where I can explore these dangerous spaces in myself. And I want them to have a desire, and I want them to have fears, and I want them to have things they want but can’t have. But…the thing I love about fiction is that nothing has to be resolved, and that the character can be sort of unlikable in so many ways. It’s not necessarily the person you want to hang out with or you want to marry, but if you’re inhabiting them fully there’s something really radical about the experience of having to live inside a character without judgment. And so I really like the idea of not judging my characters and allowing them to be deeply flawed and fully embodying them.” –Danzy Senna

In this episode of the Archive Project, author Daniel Handler (also known as Lemony Snicket) is interviewed by the New Yorker’s Gilbert Cruz at Wordstock: Portland’s Book Festival. As the enigmatic author of children’s, young adult, and adult fiction, Handler offers a unique perspective on literature, life, and the creative impulse. In this interview, he reflects on the moments that drew him to both reading and writing, describing his creative process and inspiration. With his signature dry, dark humor, Handler muses on everything from craft and his literary influences to the growing gender gap in reading and the necessity of fiction in our modern world.

My mind adjusts accordingly to what seems right for the story rather than thinking about the age of the reader. Particularly because…I think that’s, in fact, fictional. Children’s literature is read by all sorts of people in all sorts of circumstances. Adult novels, for lack of a less ‘smirky’ term, are read by an even wider age range of people. And so, in the same way that nobody says ‘I’d like to write a book for someone who’s 41,’ I don’t think deciding to write for someone who’s three makes any sense.” 

“[Reading] felt like a conversation I wanted to be a part of…It’s why I like to go to a book festival. I see the history of the things that people are writing down—that they’re thinking and believing and wondering—as being just the closest thing to the universe as we can get. And I love to see how wide and how broad and how deep the literary tradition is, how more and more people’s voices are joined to it, and how everybody has something that they would like to write down, probably. Just about everybody. And that they’re writing them down, and people are reading them, and it is an ongoing conversation. And it seems to me particularly essential now, when we also have loud voices that are announcing that things should be narrower, that the conversation should contain fewer people, that not everyone is welcome.”  

Daniel Handler is the author of six novels. As Lemony Snicket, he is responsible for numerous books for children. His books have sold more than 70 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages, and have been adapted for screen and stage. His first play, Imaginary Comforts, or The Story of the Ghost of the Dead Rabbit, was produced this fall at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. He lives in San Francisco with the illustrator Lisa Brown, to whom he is married and with whom he has collaborated on several books, and one son. (Bio courtesy of Danielhandler.com)

This Liars’ League event is filled with flash fiction stories on the theme “Willpower & Shame,” and features stories by writers Jean Rover, Laurie Sandra Davis, Todd Davidson, Rebecca Haas, Elizabeth Danek, Beth Fernandez, Amreen Ukani, Marc Cozza, Anna S. King, Omie Wallace, Betsy Porter, and Raymond Mitchell; performed by actors Aundré Barnes, Kim Bogus, James Dixon, Megan Katherine, Karen J. Moore, and Deanna Wells. This event was hosted at Literary Arts on May 20th, 2017.

Liars’ League was founded in London and has taken root in New York City, Hong Kong and Portland. The company is devoted to creative collaboration through showcasing great new writers and talented local performers. With a specific theme in mind for each show, Liars’ League calls upon writers to submit thought provoking and emotionally engaging short fiction, which a crew of actors then rehearses and performs in front of a live audience. To learn more about Liars’ League, visit https://www.liarsleaguepdx.com.

In this episode of The Archive Project, the legendary Margaret Atwood reads from two pieces of her short fiction. These works, which she reads publicly for the first time in Portland’s First Congregational Church, blend humor, empathy, and deep sentiment in ways that only Atwood can. With all her characteristic wit and humor, Atwood brings her work to life, finding levity in even the most difficult of subjects.

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa, and grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, and in Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master’s degree from Radcliffe College. Atwood is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. Her latest book of short stories is Stone Mattress: Nine Tales (2014).  Her MaddAddam trilogy—the Giller and Booker prize-nominated Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013)—is currently being adapted for HBO. The Door is her latest volume of poetry (2007). Her most recent non-fiction books are Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008) and In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011). Her novels include The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; and The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale—now an Emmy-winning Hulu Original Series—and The Penelopiad. Her most recent work includes Hag-Seed (2016), a novel revisitation of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, for the Hogarth Shakespeare Project, and Angel Catbird—with a cat-bird superhero—a graphic novel with co-creator Johnnie Christmas (Dark Horse, 2016). Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.

In this episode, George Saunders discusses the process that lead to his award-winning first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which contemplates the time Abraham Lincoln spent in his son’s tomb following his death and the fate of the young boy’s soul. With all the characteristic wit and humor of his short stories, Saunders takes the audience through the process of writing the novel—from the first spark of inspiration decades ago, through many iterations, to the final masterpiece. Saunders explores both craft and the role of the literary artist today with a compassion and intimacy that resonates deeply in our current moment.

“If I am a novelist—and that’s open for debate—but if I am, and you are my dear reader and you pick up the novel and you know it’s a novel, we enter into a sacred, ancient contract of storyteller and story-receiver. The contract that we have entered into is: I am going to do whatever it takes, including small lies, exaggerations, omissions, compressions. My purpose is to, through multiple lies or fictions, to convey to you a higher truth. And in the process, by doing that, I’m availing myself of a higher truth—you are too—and in that sacred moment, like two fish rising, we kiss. That’s a very holy thing.” 

George Saunders is the author of nine books, including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short-story collection). He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships and the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University  

Kazuo Ishiguro begins the interview by talking about growing up in a Japanese family in England and watching the British with “amused distance,” stating, “I was taught to respect British customs, but they were just that: values and customs that the natives adhered to.” His family finally decided that they would not return to Japan when he was 15, but he says that he first began writing novels with the idea of “this Japan that I never went back to.” He goes on to discuss the real-life places that writers build versions of in their imaginations. Ishiguro also answers questions about being an international writer in translation, saying, “My idea of an international story isn’t someone who gets on planes a lot; it’s universal because it’s something human that people of all cultures can relate to.” He goes on to discuss experiences from his life that have motivated him to take up specific themes.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s seven published books have won him numerous honors and wide renown. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages. Both The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go have more than 1,000,000 copies in print across platforms, and both were adapted into highly acclaimed films. His most recent novel is The Buried Giant. (source: Random House)

I feel quite at home in big cities.”

“I would hope that something like The Remains of the Day would be universal, because essentially it isn’t, as a few people suggested…a study of the British class systems or anything like that, specifically. It might be that incidentally, but I always start with a fairly abstract idea about human beings and people. And I had certain actual themes that I wanted to express.”

“I know that a lot of writers write very fine books by taking a kind of alter ego of themselves and putting them through the story. Now, there’s a long tradition of that, and I know a lot of writers feel happier doing that. But I’m at the other end. I feel terribly inhibited if I try to work through a character who is, on the surface, like me.”

This episode of the Archive Project features writer and thinker Reza Aslan as he takes the listener on a historical journey to find the roots and reasons for faith. In this lecture, Aslan reflects on the nature of faith, highlighting the human tendency to depict higher powers in our own image. Aslan uses evidence from several archaeological sites—some from as far back as 14,000 B.C.—to illustrate the human drive toward ritual faith and humanization of the divine. Aslan asks the listener to consider not what we believe, but why. Using his vast knowledge of varied religions and cultures, Aslan creates a crash-course on the history of faith and its role in all our lives, regardless of belief.

“You could look at the entirety of human spirituality, the entire history of religious expression, and what you will see is one long, ever-evolving, and remarkably cohesive attempt to make sense of God by giving God our personality and our attributes, our emotions, our motivations, our strengths and our weaknesses, our vices, our virtues—even our own bodies. In short, by making God a human being.”

Reza Aslan is an internationally renowned writer, commentator, professor, producer, and scholar of religions. His books, including his #1 New York Times Bestseller, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, have been translated into dozens of languages around the world. He is also a recipient of the prestigious James Joyce Award. Born in Iran, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife, author and entrepreneur, Jessica Jackley, and their three sons. Aslan currently teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

“I’m not saying there’s no such thing as God or that God is just some kind of human construct; that may be true, but it’s not something I’m interested in. I have no interest in having a conversation about whether or not God exists. I’m not here to prove one way or the other, because there ain’t no proof. Faith is a choice. I often say that anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to convert you…Faith is not a rational thing; it’s an experiential thing. It’s an emotion, like love.”

This episode of The Archive Project features journalist and New York Times bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation with the New York Times’ Jenna Wortham at the 2017 Portland Book Festival. Hailed by Toni Morrison as the intellectual heir to James Baldwin, Coates has become one of the most sought after voices on the subject of race in America. In this interview, he discusses the Black American experience as described in his newest book We Were Eight Years in Power, a collection of new and selected essays that focus on former President Barack Obama’s ascent to the highest office in the nation as well as the sharp backlash that followed.

“White Guilt is a thing that people mock now…but it really is the guilt of power. You understand? And recognizing that that power is being used in an unjust way. And you’re part of it.”

“The theory is, in a lot of black folks’ circles, if we make ourselves respectable to them then maybe that will ameliorate the hatred. But they have it wrong. They hate you because you’re respectable; it’s the respectableness that inspires the hate, because you undercut [the stereotype] by your very example.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years In Power and Between The World And Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. He is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Jenna Wortham is an award-winning journalist for New York Times Magazine, among other things. Her work has been featured in Medium, Smithsonian Magazine, The Village Voice, and Vogue. Wortham also hosts the New York Times podcast Still Processing.

This episode of The Archive Project features filmmaker and writer Francis Ford Coppola discussing his new book, Live Cinema and Its Techniques, with New York Times’ Melena Ryzik. In this eye-opening interview, Coppola discusses his thoughts on live cinema, a technique in which movies are performed live and broadcast via satellite into theaters. Throughout the conversation, Coppola looks back on his own career and the history of the art form itself, giving us an intimate and informative glimpse into the mind of one the greatest American filmmakers of his generation.

Perhaps this new method, this digital method of making films might imply different kinds of films, films that wouldn’t have been possible in the old, mechanical, photochemical era. And one of the aspects that it could be is that you could make cinema—basically what we know as cinema, movies—and they could be made in a live performance. And this old tradition of performance, which has been with the theatre for thousands of years, wouldn’t necessarily be lost.” 

Francis Ford Coppola is a writer, director, and entrepreneur perhaps best known for his Academy Award-winning masterpieces, The Godfather (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979). In addition to his numerous directing credits, Coppola has written or adapted many of the stories he’s brought to the screen. In 1997, he began a decade-long break from filmmaking, focusing on a number of new ventures, including Zoetrope: All-Story, a literary magazine of essays and short stories which publishes emerging writers alongside literary powerhouses. Since his return to film in 2007, Coppola has released three films through his production company, American Zoetrope. The Godfather Notebook, Coppola’s notes on the novel as he made the film, was published in 2016, followed by this year’s Live Cinema and Its Techniques. Coppola is currently creating a four-part “live cinema” movie based on his own family’s multigenerational history.

Melena Ryzik is the lead writer of the New York Times’ Carpetbagger blog. In addition to being a general assignment culture reporter, covering film, music, theater, television, visual art, dance and the occasional Dumpster pool party or eco-art-barge, Ms. Ryzik has chronicled cultural life in New York for the UrbanEye video series and written the UrbanEye e-mail, a daily events guide. She joined The New York Times in 2001 writing for metro and investigative news, and got her start on the red carpet beat as a contributing writer for The Times column Boldface Names. She enjoys riding her bicycle to black tie events.

In this episode of The Archive Project, Colson Whitehead and Yaa Gyasi discuss the intersection of race and fiction. In his novel, The Underground Railroad, Whitehead explores a world in which the infamous Underground Railroad is not a euphemism, but a reality—a subterranean railroad system connecting alternate versions of America in each state along its route. In Homegoing, Gyasi tells the story of one family, spread over 250 years and split by the slave trade across two continents. Both Whitehead and Gyasi use fiction as a tool to get at larger truths about race, slavery, and their legacies in America and abroad. This discussion is moderated by Rukaiyah Adams.

“I didn’t have to force comparisons between law enforcement in 1850 and 2015; the language that I would use to describe my experience is the same way a slave would describe his or her experience with a slave patroller.” –Colson Whitehead

“For me, this book is so much about the fact that a lot of these things, a lot of these issues that we are dealing with in the present, particularly issues around racial justice…they don’t appear out of nowhere. There has been groundwork laid for them over the course of many, many, many years. And it’s important to kind of not take things out of context and just start to believe that we’re living kind of divorced from history. Because we aren’t.” –Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She holds a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held a Dean’s Graduate Research Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn.

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad, which in 2016 won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, as well as The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. He is also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. He lives in New York City.

Rukaiyah Adams is an avid reader and lover of American History. For work, she is the Chief Investment Officer at Meyer Memorial Trust. She is responsible for leading all investment activities to ensure the long-term financial strength of the organization, including investment policy, asset allocation, performance measurement, manager selection, and risk management. Before joining Meyer, she ran the $6.5 Billion capital markets fund at The Standard. Rukaiyah is the Vice Chair of the Oregon Investment Council, the board that manages approximately $90 Billion for the State of Oregon and PERS; she also serves on the board of OPB. Rukaiyah holds a BA in African American Studies with academic distinction from Carleton College and a JD from Stanford Law, where she was on the Law and Policy Review and the Co-President of the Law Student Association. She also has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.