The Archive Project

With his trademark wit and humor, David Remnick shares personal stories from his career in journalism and talks about other editors and authors whom he has admired. He begins by recounting how he landed his first job at The Washington Post (narrowly dodging a placement that might have had him working in Everett, WA). He then expands on his time spent working for The Washington Post in Moscow in the late-1980s to early-1990s, where he was paid to uncover Soviet secrets, reported on the 1991 coup d’état attempt, and was often tailed by members of the KGB. Throughout the lecture, Remnick reads from his own work, and the work of others, and talks about people who have influenced his career and writing, including former Executive Editor of The Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, journalist Murray Kempton, and numerous Soviet authors.

“What’s been my goal all along, and I think the goal of a lot of nonfiction writers, is to meld the techniques of the conventional novel to the demands and rigor of reporting. It’s not easy to do.”

“Something that’s very important in life is luck. I was extremely lucky to get [my first job].”

David Remnick is an American journalist, writer, and magazine editor. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker magazine since 1998. He was named Editor of the Year by Advertising Age in 2000. Before joining The New Yorker, Remnick was a reporter and the Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. He also has served on the New York Public Library board of trustees. In 2010 he published his sixth book, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.

In this lecture, Siddhartha Mukherjee dives into the complex topic of genetic research and why he wanted to write The Gene: An Intimate History, reasons of which include his family’s own history with genetic diseases. He shares the timeline of historic discoveries in the science of genes, from Gregor Mendel’s work with inheritance patterns in pea plants to modern-day somatic cell and germ line gene therapies, and speculates on the scientific possibilities in the future of genetic research. Throughout the lecture, he asks philosophical questions that will – in the not too distant future – become very real quandaries that human beings will have to face. He asks questions such as: If you could learn more about your or your children’s genetic makeup and potential risks, would you want to know? Would that knowledge change the course of your actions? And is humanity prepared for the responsibility that will come with our growing scientific knowledge?

“Genetics is not an abstraction for me. It is one of the most concrete realities that my family has faced, and I would argue it is one of the most concrete realities that virtually every family will face.”

“In these political times, please read the chapters on race… The Victorian construction of ‘race’ is entirely arbitrary, and the fact that we are fighting about a scientific construction that’s largely arbitrary is really embarrassing.”

“This is technology that our children will be debating and talking about in a way that will make much of these current debates entirely trivial.”

Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, and The Laws of Medicine. He is the editor of Best Science Writing 2013. Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. He has published articles in Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times, and Cell. He lives in New York with his wife and daughters.

In this recording, Michael Ondaatje shares his fourth novel, Anil’s Ghost. He begins by giving an overview of the plot, which is set in a civil war-torn Sri Lanka at the end of the twentieth century. The story follows Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, and educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist to investigate human rights violations. Anil, along with archaeologist Sarath Diyasena, discovers the skeleton of a recently murdered man in an ancient burial ground, and becomes determined to identify the man and bring about justice to the countless nameless victims of the war. Ondaatje then shares selected readings from the novel, which paint the novel as a deeply powerful story of love, family, identity, and the attempt to unlock the hidden past.  

On Anil’s choosing of her own name: “Later, when she recalled her childhood, it was the hunger of not having that name, and the joy of getting it, that she remembered most. Everything about the name pleased her. Its slim, stripped down quality, its feminine air, even though it was considered a male name.”

“Gamini rarely saw himself from the point of view of a stranger. Though most people knew who he was, he felt he was invisible to those around him.”

Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, novelist, editor and filmmaker. Ondaatje’s literary career began with his poetry in 1967, publishing the books The Dainty Monsters, and then in 1970 the critically acclaimed The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. He is widely recognized for his nationally and internationally successful novel The English Patient (1992), which was adapted into a film in 1996. He is the recipient of multiple literary awards such as the Governor General’s Award, the Giller Prize, the Booker Prize, and the Prix Médicis étranger. Ondaatje is also an Officer of the Order of Canada, recognizing him as one of Canada’s most renowned living authors.

This Liars’ League event is filled with stories on the theme “Natives & Transplants,” and features stories by writers Lowrey Brown, Vanessa McKiel, Dan Coxon, Evelyn Sharenov and Hamish Rickett; performed by actors Karen Farley, Reema Zaman, Gabriella Kirby, Kim Bogus and Karen J. Moore. This event was hosted at Literary Arts on February 18th, 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, Elmore Leonard shares stories, often humorous, about his correspondences with his readers—from teenagers who ask how he has perfected the portrayal of criminals in his writing to adults who sell his letters for hundreds of dollars. He also notes how the letters portray varying reactions to his writing, demonstrating how readers and writers often view the same material in contrasting ways. Leonard goes on to discuss the gap between novel writing and screenwriting and how it is ultimately a story’s characters that do all the work and have all the power, not the writers themselves.

They love themes in Hollywood. I never think of theme; I just think of what’s going to happen next, and I know when I reach the end. I always wait for someone else to tell me what it’s about.”

“Your [writing] style blooms from your attitude and the way you see the world.”

“What kind of writing brings in the most money? Ransom notes.”

Elmore Leonard was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1925. A storyteller from the start, Leonard wrote his first play—a war story inspired by the novel All Quiet on the Western Front—at age 10, utilizing the furniture in his fifth grade classroom as stage props. In 1949, he began his professional writing career in advertising, penning Westerns on the side and primarily selling them to pulp magazines. One of his first publications, the short story “3:10 to Yuma,” went on to be adapted to film in 1957 and again in 2007. In 1961, Leonard became a full-time writer, adding crime fiction and suspense thrillers to his list of genres and publishing more than 50 novels, short stories, and screenplays throughout his 60-year career. The most famous among these includes the novella Fire in the Hole, which served as the basis for the award-winning television series Justified, and the novel Rum Punch, which was adapted into the 1997 film Jackie Brown, directed by Quentin Tarantino. In total, 26 of Leonard’s novels and short stories have been adapted for the screen. He died in 2013 at the age of 87.

Francine Prose begins by discussing the differences and similarities between writing fiction and nonfiction, which are not always what one might assume. She finds that both require obsessive attention to detail and clarity. Reading from her novel in progress, A Changed Man, she remarks that she has “about three hundred more drafts before it’s done.” Using excerpts from several different books, Prose illustrates how language shapes character and how information is transmitted while maintaining storytelling in both genres. She teaches close reading to aspiring writers, comparing it to surgeons looking at an appendectomy, and tries to illustrate how to transmit information through showing instead of telling. With humor and great insight, Prose touches on revisions, the sources of ideas, and teaching writing.

“I knew that [my student Elissa Schappell] was going to be a real writer; she gave me a story and she called me up that evening and said, ‘I need it back.’ And I said, ‘Well, I started reading it and it seems perfectly fine.’ And she said, ‘There are five typos in it and I can’t stand to think you’re reading a story with typos in it.’ And I knew she was the real thing.”

Prose is the recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright. A Director’s Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in New York City.

“I can remember being in college and being taught Moby Dick for the first time and having a professor say, essentially, y’know, ‘Melville was looking for a way to talk about the struggle between good and evil, and he was looking for a symbol of evil, and he thought, “Oh, I know, the White Whale.”’ Well, once I started writing myself, I began to notice that it doesn’t actually work that way, that it seemed much more likely to me that Melville started out wanting to tell a story about a whale, and 50, 75 years later, somebody else came along and said, ‘Hmm, symbol of evil. That’s what it’s about.’”

“I’ve had writing classes where every student had a different personality disorder, and they were all kind of complimentary—they played off each other.”

In this lecture, recorded shortly following the 25th anniversary of the publication of his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie shares personal stories and his insights from his time spent in hiding. The consequences Rushdie faced following The Satanic Verses, largely from the fatwā calling for his assassination issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, are brought to life in his memoir Joseph Anton, which takes its title from the assumed name he traveled under. He shares stories of his personal encounters wrought with dark comedy and talks about the delight of his return to normalcy. He also clears up some common misconceptions about the book, explaining how it was written to be a funny novel and how it is largely about the migrant experience of Indians relocating to the UK.

There are absolutes that have to do with our nature as human beings, and one of those absolutes, perhaps the bedrock of those absolutes, is the freedom of expression, because without that freedom all the other freedoms disappear.”

“It’s not difficult to defend the freedom of speech of people that you agree with or people who don’t particularly upset you. It’s when somebody says something that you think is genuinely objectionable and awful, that’s when you discover if you believe in free speech.”

“The secret of an open society is that people will say things you don’t like, and you have to just deal with it.”

Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), won the Booker Prize. His epic fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the subject of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries. Death threats were made against him, including a fatwā calling for his assassination issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In 2012, he published Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life in the wake of the controversy over The Satanic Verses. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations.

This episode of The Archive Project features best-selling authors, and long-time pen pals, Elizabeth Gilbert and Ann Patchett. Their devoted and supportive friendship sparkles throughout their conversation as they weave comfortably through topics at the forefront of their lives as high-profile female authors.

Taking an honest and open approach, they discuss the challenge of balancing the demands of being professional, committed writers while simultaneously facing expectations from society, as women, to spend time and energy on nurturing, supporting, and caring for others. They also discuss fame and the desire/necessity for privacy and invisibility from the public eye, as well as the ups and downs of writing fiction and dedicating themselves to this craft.

“We should be miked whenever we’re together.”

“You have to write the thing that causes a revolution in your mind. …The thing that makes your heart race, that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck, that you can’t not write.”

Ann Patchett is the author of seven novels and three books of nonfiction, including The Magician’s Assistant, Bel Canto, State of Wonder, Truth & Beauty, and This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. 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 of 2011, she opened Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, with her business partner Karen Hayes. She has since become a spokesperson for independent booksellers, championing books and bookstores publicly. In 2012 she was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Elizabeth Gilbert was born and raised in rural Connecticut, living on her family’s Christmas tree farm. She is best known for her memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, which was also turned into a blockbuster Hollywood film. The memoir was an international bestseller, having sold more than 10 million copies in thirty different languages. In addition to her memoirs, biographies, and other works of nonfiction, she has also written two novels: Stern Men and The Signature of All Things. The Signature of All Things was recognized as a Best Book of 2013 in The New York Times.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we’ll listen to compositions from several students who participated in the 2016 Verselandia! Poetry Slam Competition, the grand slam of the individual school slams held throughout the year. Touching on such topics as race, gender, loss, and love, these students confront issues that are core to the human experience. The top five winners for the night were:

1st Place: Tea Johnson from Grant High School

2nd Place: Lily Lamadrid from Franklin High School

3rd Place: Alexis Cannard from Roosevelt High School

4th/5th Place (tie): Zoe Stuckless from Wilson High School & Maia Abbruzzese from Lincoln High School

This episode also features an extended interview with Anis Mojgani, the host of the 2016 Verselandia! Mojgani is a two time National Poetry Slam Champion and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam. He is the author of three poetry collections—Songs From Under the River, The Feather Room, and Over the Anvil We Stretch—and a fully illustrated poetry memoir, The Pocketknife Bible.

The majority of us don’t care about poetry, or believe we don’t care about poetry, or don’t believe that it’s something for us—that it’s not something we’re smart enough to understand, that it’s for a very small percentage of people. As opposed to the idea that poetry is simply a tool for explaining what it means to be human—for processing that, for communicating that, for sharing that, and for being shared that with by others.”

“I always fluctuate back and forth between how much I loathe poetry and how much I love it. But one thing I don’t swing back and forth about is how much I love young folks being introduced to poetry, and writing it, and finding their voice through it.”