The Archive Project

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a discussion on late writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s legacy of pacifism and environmentalism. Our moderator is Theo Downes-Le Guin, Ursula’s son and literary executor. Theo is in conversation with Oregon-based writers Juhea Kim, author of the novel Beasts of a Little Land, a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Michelle Ruiz Keil, author most recently of the young adult novel Summer in the City of Roses, which was a finalist for the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

In her speech at the 2014 National Book Awards, accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Ursula said: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.”

Juhea Kim and Michelle Ruiz Keil are two of those voices that we need now. In this conversation, Juhea and Michelle discuss how they came—and returned—to Le Guin’s work, her influence on their writing, and how they are carrying her legacy forward, including the responsibility of the artist as a humanitarian.

This conversation was recorded in front of a live audience at Literary Arts on July 15, 2022.

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was a celebrated author whose body of work includes 23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA’s Grand Master, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.

Michelle Ruiz Keil is an author, playwright, and tarot reader with an eye for the enchanted and way with animals. She is the author of the critically acclaimed young adult novels All of Us With Wings and Summer In The City of Roses. Her writing for adults can be found most recently in Bitch, Cosmonauts Avenue, and the anthology Dispatches From Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin. She is a 2021 Tin House Scholar and the recipient of residencies from Hedgebrook, The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and the Bloedel Reserve. Born in San Francisco, Michelle has lived in Portland, Oregon for many years where she curates the fairytale reading series All Kinds of Fur and lives with her family in a cottage where the forest meets the city.

Juhea Kim is a writer, artist, and advocate based in Portland, Oregon. Her bestselling debut novel Beasts of a Little Land was named a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a Best Book of 2021 by Harper’s Bazaar, Real Simple, Ms., and Portland Monthly. Her writing has been published in Granta, Slice, The Massachusetts Review, Zyzzyva, Guernica, Catapult, Times Literary Supplement, The Independent, Sierra Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the founder and editor ofPeaceful Dumpling, an online magazine at the intersection of sustainable lifestyle and ecological literature. She has received fellowship support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, and Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She earned her BA in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University.

Join us in our third installment of this special episode where we spend the day at the 2025 Portland Book Festival. Saturday, November 8, in downtown Portland. Our Virgil is once again editor and producer Matthew Workman, who is taking a turn at the microphone as he searches for festival authors to get their book recommendations. It’s an exclusive, rare! Behind-the-scenes look at the festival, plus a great source for your to-read list and hopefully some gifting inspiration for the readers in your own life.

We once again asked some of our featured festival authors to recommend books by other authors in the festival. We have a bit of a National Book Awards theme happening here too:

We will hear recommendations from:

Patricia Smith, author of The Intentions of Thunder, winner of the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry

Jason De Leon, author of Soliders and Kings, winner of the 2024 National Book Award in Nonfiction

Karren Russell, author of The Antidote, finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Fiction

Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and a Thief, finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Fiction

Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, winner of the 2025 National Book Award in Nonfiction

Renée Watson, author of All the Blue in the Sky

Ruth Dickey, poet and executive director of the National Book Foundation

Kristen Arnett, novelist and author of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One

A quick note to listeners: Portions of this episode contain mature themes that may not be suitable for all audiences.

This episode of The Archive Project features a lecture from Tommy Orange in Portland, Oregon. This lecture was the culminating event of the Multnomah County Library’s 2020 Everybody Reads program—an annual shared reading experience that includes city-wide events for readers of all ages. In his lecture, Orange details his experience as a Native American growing up and working in Oakland, California. He didn’t always want to be a writer, and he shares the twisting path that led him to this work. His debut novel, There There, is a winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and named one of the best books of the year by numerous publications. There There—and Orange himself in this lecture—explores a multitude of themes, from identity and ownership to the urban-rural divide.

Link to “Ghost Dance” short film referenced in Orange’s lecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5plHAdBums

Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California.

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. Just one year after almost a decade in hiding from the Iranian government, Rushdie made his first public appearance in Portland, discussing the ideas, both mythical and musical, that inspired this New York Times bestseller. 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.

“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 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. His fourteenth novel, Victory City, released in 2023.

Angela Flournoy came to Portland for the 2025 Portland Book Festival, where she discussed her new novel The Wilderness in conversation with Renée Watson, award-winning author of skin & bones.

The title of The Wilderness refers to what Flournoy describes as the true “coming of age” — instead of the transition out of adolescence, the decades from one’s twenties onward. The book revolves around four friends as they navigate those years, when you confront who you thought you might be as an adult, and what is actually happening in your life: your friendships, romances, success, grief, career, and so much more. The “found family” of long, deep friendship is the center of the book, and Flournoy and Watson discuss the constant choosing that creates and sustains a found family, the ongoing making and remaking that happens over decades of friendship.

Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, an Indie Next pick, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Flournoy has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and UCLA. She lives in New York. Flournoy’s latest novel is titled The Wilderness.

Renée Watson is a #1 New York Times bestselling author. Over the past decade she has authored twenty books for young readers including Black Girl You Are Atlas and Cicely Tyson, which have collectively sold more than a million copies. She received a Coretta Scott King Award and a Newbery Honor for her novel Piecing Me Together and high praise for 1619 Project: Born on the Water, co-written with Nikole Hannah-Jones. Her debut adult novel, skin & bones, was published May 7th, 2024. Watson is on the Council of Writers for the National Writing Project and is a member of the Academy of American Poets’ Education Advisory Council. She splits her time between Portland, Oregon and New York City. Her latest middle grade title is All the Blues in the Sky.

This week we are bringing you a conversation that Literary Arts hosted in October 2025 with historian and political philosopher Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, who spoke about his book On Freedom with Literary Arts executive director – and co-host of this show – Andrew Proctor.

Timothy Snyder is the author of several books including Bloodlands and The Road To Freedom, as well as numerous articles and a popular Substack. He is a scholar of Eastern European history who Anne Applebaum has called, “one of our most original and perceptive thinkers.” He currently serves Chair in Modern European History at University of Toronto. He has won both the Carnegie and the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.  He speaks five languages and reads in ten, once telling a reporter, “If you don’t know Russian, you don’t really know what you’re missing.” The Guardian called him, “one of the most eloquent interpreters of the war in Ukraine.” He served as an advisor to UN Security Council, and has met privately with Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

In the wake of the 2016 election, what began as a list of thoughts on an airplane napkin became On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century. The book spent two years on the bestseller list and catapulted Snyder from respected historian to one of the most prominent voices in fight against authoritarianism. The lessons of On Tyrrany were widely shared, inspiring multiple poster campaigns and at least one rap song.

With On Freedom, Snyder once again places the past in direct conversation with the present and the future. Freedom, for Snyder, is not external thing we may or may not achieve, but an ongoing, embodied struggle. With immediacy and striking humility, he draws lessons from history, not simply to predict future risk, but to claim agency in the present, to see clearly our potential as individuals, as a country and as a species.

Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His books, which have been published in over forty languages, include Bloodlands, Black Earth, On Tyranny, Road to Unfreedom, Our Malady, and On Freedom. His work has inspired poster campaigns and exhibitions, sculptures, a punk rock song, a rap song, a play, and an opera, and he has appeared in over fifty films and documentaries. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut

Every once in a while, a writer arrives in a historic moment who can explain it, even while it is still actually occurring. M. Gessen is one of these writers. They are a part of the lineage of other incredible writers of their moments, like George Orwell, and Hannah Arendt. 

Gessen is the author of eleven books and has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2014, and is a columnist for the New York Times. They won the National Book award in 2017 for The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, and became a household name with their bestselling book Surviving Autocracy, which was published in 2020 and written as both a warning and a call to action in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election. 

Gessen’s talk is a rare glimpse into their childhood and early professional life – growing up in the Soviet Union and emigrating at the age of 14; their early experience in Boston and how it shaped their life personally and professionally; their return to Moscow as a journalist and a rare and strange meeting with Vladimir Putin, and how their grandmothers’ life stories shaped their work.  

Gessen is one of the rare contemporary commentators on authoritarianism who has lived under such a regime, and in a democracy – and they have an urgent warning for us all. 

“I’ve always thought that I was very lucky to know when I had to leave (Russia) because one of the hardest decisions that somebody has to make…is figuring out when your home is no longer your home. It was kind of a great favor that Putin did to me.”

M. Gessen is a Russian American author, translator, and journalist. They’ve written 11 books, including Surviving Autocracy, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction), and an award-winning account of the Boston Marathon bombers titled The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy. They spent years covering Putin’s regime in Russia and was famously dismissed as the editor of the Russian popular science magazine Vokrug sveta for refusing to cover a Putin event they felt was propaganda. Gessen received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, an Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. They’ve written for many US publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. Gessen is a distinguished professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College. They live in New York with their wife and children.  

In this episode, we feature Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation with Omar El Akkad from the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in October 2024.  

Coates’ versatility and virtuosity as a writer makes him one of the most singular and important writers at work today. He first rose to national recognition as a staff writer at The Atlantic Magazine, and in particular for an article he wrote in 2014 titled The Case for Reparations. A year later, Coates published his second book, a long essay called Between the World and Me which became an international bestseller. Coates went on to write a novel called The Water Dancer, for Marvel’s Black Panther comic book series, and a published collection of essays titled We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. For his work he has won a National Magazine Award, a MacArthur fellowship and the National Book Award, among many other prizes.   

He joined us in fall 2024 to talk about The Message, a new book of essays set in Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine about how our stories – personal or political – can both hide and reveal the truth.    

Coates is in conversation with Omar El Akkad, who is a journalist and author of the novels American War, What Strange Paradise and most recently One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, his debut book of nonfiction which publishes in February 2025. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. His books include Between The World and Me and The Water Dancer. He is currently a writer-in-residence at Howard University. 

Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award and the Oregon Book Award. His books have been translated into 13 languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shaped our world. 

Emily Wilson was cast as Athena in a stage production of The Odyssey at the age of eight.  It turned out to be a defining moment in her life, that ultimately set her on a course of decades of passionate and devoted study. 

Her 2018 translation of The Odyssey garnered overwhelming critical acclaim, became a bestseller, and is defining how a generation reads Homer, and by extension understands the relevance of classical literature in general. She followed up, in 2023, with her translation of The Iliad.    

Her genius has been to render these ancient stories in swift, unpretentious, contemporary language, allowing us to see that despite the rise and fall of empires, despite dramatic cultural shifts and technological progress, there are some essential truths about human nature—we are creatures of hubris and humility, of conflict and collaboration, of profound selfishness and of profound sacrifice.   

It is not hard to see in Homer’s Greece a startling similarity to our present-day world. Wilson assures us this is embedded in the text, writing in her introduction to The Iliad, “For a twenty-first-century reader, there is nothing unfamiliar about a partisan society riven by constant striving for celebrity dominance and attention.”   

“Tell me about a complicated man,” begins The Odyssey.  From this first line, Wilson establishes herself as one of the most astute translators working in the English language, a translator both of Ancient Greek and of human complexity.   

“A translation, just like an original work of art, needs to have its own vision. And you need to have the humility to know that you can’t do everything. You have to commit to your own vision.”

Emily Wilson is a classicist, translator, professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of the bestselling translations of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad (winner of the 2024 Audie Award for Best Literary Fiction and Classics). In addition to Wilson’s Odyssey and Iliad, she has also published several other translated works, including translations of four tragedies of Euripides published in The Greek Plays: Bacchae, Helen, Electra, and Trojan Women, and translations of Six Tragedies by Seneca. Her other books include The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca, The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint, and Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton. Wilson was named a fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Wilson is a Professor of classical studies and chair of the program in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Wilson lives in Philadelphia with her family and pets.  

Every year, the Multnomah County Library chooses one book they hope the whole city of Portland will read. Between January and April, the Library, and their partner organizations, host events based around the themes of the book, and they distribute thousands of free copies—thanks to the Library Foundation—to readers of all ages from across the county. Here at Literary Arts, our role is to bring the author to town for a talk in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.  

This year, the 2025 Everybody Reads selection is the memoir Solito by Javier Zamora. For information about how to engage with the program, visit the Multnomah County Library’s web site. I am thrilled to say Javier Zamora will be in Portland on Tuesday, March 11 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall for the culminating event of the 2025 Everybody Reads Program.  

For now, let’s return to the 2024 Everybody Reads event, featuring Gabrielle Zevin and her novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.  

Gabrielle Zevin has been steadily publishing fiction for almost two decades and has also written occasional criticism as well as award-winning screenplays. But it was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow that catapulted her to the stratosphere of literary stardom. It was a #1 New York Times bestseller and spent over 50 weeks on the fiction bestseller list.   

To be sure, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is about video games, and makes a convincing argument for the power and potential of narrative storytelling in video games. But really, it is about making art, and questions about originality, appropriation, and ambition that come with that pursuit. And perhaps more so, it is a love story, about friends and creative partners, and the excitement, joy, tragedy, and betrayal that come with any long relationship. It’s about something, I’d wager, we’ve all been thinking about the past few years: connection.   

Tickets for Everybody Reads 2025 with Javier Zamora are on sale now! Find your tickets here. 

Gabrielle Zevin is a New York Times best-selling novelist whose books have been translated into forty languages. 

 Her tenth novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, was a New York Times Best Seller, a Sunday Times Best Seller, and a selection of the Tonight Show’s Fallon Book Club. Tomorrow was Amazon.com’s #1 Book of the Year, Time Magazine’s #1 Book of the Year, a New York Times Notable Book, and the winner of both the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction and the Book of the Month Club’s Book of the Year. Following a twenty-five-bidder auction, the feature film rights to Tomorrow were acquired by Temple Hill and Paramount Studios. 

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry also spent many months on the New York Times bestseller list. A.J. Fikry was honored with the Southern California Independent Booksellers Award for Fiction, the Japan Booksellers’ Prize, among other honors. A.J. Fikry is now a feature film with a screenplay by Zevin. She has also written children’s books, including the award-winning Elsewhere.  

She is the screenwriter of Conversations with Other Women (Helena Bonham Carter) for which she received an Independent Spirit Award Nomination for Best First Screenplay. She has occasionally written criticism for the New York Times Book Review and NPR’s All Things Considered, and she began her writing career, at age fourteen, as a music critic for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. Zevin is a graduate of Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles.