The Archive Project

In this episode of The Archive Project, Bill Buford discusses his history working at Granta, including iconic magazine covers and experimentations with the magazine’s content. He goes on to talk about being an editor for Granta Books, stating that it is “the aim of every editor, at some point in his or her life, to get arrested.” Later, he discusses his research for Among the Thugs, a nonfiction piece on British soccer and crowd violence, including his experience at the World Cup in Italy in 1990.

There is an ambition in any literary editor, I think, to start a world war because of the cover of his magazine.”

“This was a very self-conscious literary project, this was literature with a capital ‘L,’ and it made me distinctly uncomfortable. And I have to admit I am still uncomfortable with this idea of literature. I don’t really know what it is. I have my own definition of what I regard as a literary work, which is nothing more than ‘a complex piece of writing that allows me to respond to it in a complex way.’ But, actually, literature and the idea of doing a literary magazine—it’s the kind of thing that people who wear socks with their sandals do.”

Bill Buford is a staff writer and European correspondent for The New Yorker, where he has written about sweatshops, the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, and chef Mario Batali, among other topics. Prior to this, he also served as the magazine’s fiction editor, an editor for Granta magazine, and publisher for Granta Books. Buford is the author of Among the Thugs, a personal nonfiction account of crowd violence and British soccer hooliganism, and has edited three anthologies: The Best of Granta Travel, The Best of Granta Reportage, and The Granta Book of the Family. He lives in New York City with his wife and two sons.

In this episode of The Archive Project, Donald Barthelme begins his lecture with a series of readings, including a story about his family’s quest for a dog, his reflections on being a father, a study of angels, and a conversation with Goethe in which he compares music, art, and nationalities to everyday objects. Barthelme previews a selection of excerpts from his forthcoming novel The King—a retelling of Le Morte D’Arthur through the lens of World War II—which at the time he not yet named and which was posthumously published in 1990. He returns to a discussion of the short story form following this, tackling the subject of life in New York and revisiting the subject of parenthood.

It is a curiosity of writing about angels that very often one turns out to be writing about men. The themes are twinned.”

“You must not confuse the monster in the story with the monster you see before you; they are two different monsters.”

“It seems to me that in the contemporary world we suffer from something called information sickness; that is, the point is to push away experience, much of it unwanted vicarious experience and much of it synthetic and contrived by other people to manipulate us. If I thought there was any authentic experience to experience, I would probably recommend that—but I’ve seen very little of it.”

Donald Barthelme is a short story writer and novelist who is considered to be critical to the post-modern school of writing, in the company of such writers as John Barth, John Hawkes, William Gass, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon. Recognized for his technical experimentation and melancholy gaiety, Barthelme first rose to national prominence when his debut novel, Snow White, was printed in its entirety in The New Yorker, taking up virtually the entire issue. He later received the National Book Award for his 1972 children’s book, The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or the Hithering Thithering Djinn. In addition to his stories and novels, Barthelme served as a reporter for the Houston Post, the managing editor for Location magazine, and the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. He also co-founded the literary magazine Fiction with Mark Mirsky, Max Frisch, and Marianne Frisch. In his New York Times obituary, the paper remarked that his “minimalist style placed him among the leading innovative writers of modern fiction.” Barthelme died on July 23, 1989, less than six months after his lecture in Portland, OR.

In this episode of The Archive Project, Don DeLillo and Noah Hawley begin at the end, discussing DeLillo’s writing process for each segment of his novels from finish to start. Throughout this conversation, DeLillo delves into some of the research related to several of the books he has written throughout his career. He and Hawley also compare the process of writing a novel to the process of writing for television or film.

I go sentence by sentence, word by word, and the sentences seem to extend themselves into paragraphs . . . For me there is an element of a certain mystery. The language itself is what matters most to me, and then people evolve out this; people evolve out of words.” – Don DeLillo

“I think there is that novelist tool as well where you write stuff that you don’t know why it’s in there and then months later you have that eureka moment where you realize where you’re going to pay it off.” – Noah Hawley

Don DeLillo was born in 1936 and grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx. As a teenager, he spent many of his work hours reading William Faulkner, James Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, and Ernest Hemingway—writers who would have great influence on his later work. After graduating college and a brief stint as an advertising copywriter, DeLillo lived cheaply in a Manhattan studio apartment and started to work on his first novel, Americana, which was published in 1971. He went on from there to publish 14 more novels, including White Noise, Libra, Underworld, Falling Man, and his latest novel, Zero K. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, among other accolades.

Noah Hawley is an Emmy, Golden Globe, PEN, Critics’ Choice, and Peabody Award-winning author, screenwriter, and producer. He has published four novels and penned the script for the feature film Lies and Alibis. He created, executive produced, and served as showrunner for ABC’s My Generation and The Unusuals and was a writer and producer on the hit series Bones. Hawley is currently executive producer, writer, and showrunner on FX’s award-winning series, Fargo. He is adapting Don DeLillo’s Zero K for film.

The Far East. Western Europe. America’s East Coast. The West Coast. Eastern Oregon. The Willamette Valley. Northeast Portland. Southwest Portland. Each of these brings to mind a distinct idea about lifestyles, political views, fashion trends, reading habits, pet preference, means of transportation—any and all elements of how we live, work, play, think and feel. But can all of that be summed up by a simple directional bearing? And does it create a defining line or a dividing line? Do we automatically fit into such elementary and oppositional stereotypes?

Keiji is a quiet man. He doesn’t like Hank. He finds his beard ridiculous, his clothing too relaxed, and his sleeve tattoos distracting. Hank is younger, 29, but carries himself with the kind of personal confidence that is found, in Keiji’s experience, in old men or drunks. Hank fills silences with questions and small talk. The trip into the parking garage gave them time to cover all of the clichés. The time difference. The flight. The connections. The little frustrations everyone endures in order to arrive on the other side of the world.” – Excerpt from “Infrastructure,” written by Liam Lund and performed by Jon Farley

“I’m really not judging. Had we stayed in the US, I bet I would be just like my old girlfriends. I would make innuendos over macchiatos, have a kick ass work wardrobe, quietly resent my husband and kids, and call it a day.” – Excerpt from “Number 58,” written by M.E. Bergstrom and performed by Barbara Kite

Aundré Barnes is a Portland native who has been involved with many local theater companies since the age of 15. Although he lives to hone his craft on stage, his love for film work constantly calls. Barnes is also a singer/songwriter and plays on his downtime.

E. Bergstrom has bribed her way out of a speeding ticket in Morocco, given a wedding speech in Shanghainese, and impersonated a firefighter in France. She has talked herself into a lot of excellent situations and is always on the lookout for more. She writes both fact and fiction in the Bay Area.

James Dixon is a local singer and actor originally from North Carolina. After nearly 10 years of travel to over 32 states and 7 countries, he decided to make Portland his home. He is an active member of a local classic plays focus group called The Asylum Lab. Most recently, he was the Earthworm in James and the Giant Peach with Oregon Children’s Theatre. Other past favorite credits includes Dalton/Horse Ensemble in Equus with Post5 Theatre and Newt Lee in Parade at Staged! Theater.

Jon Farley is an actor, clown and occasional aspiring aerialist. Portland audiences may have seen him as Bob in Faultline Ensemble’s Holding Onto the Sky, Humphrey in Imago’s Beaux Arts Club, Meera in Tooth of Crime: Second Dance or as Herod in For the Time Being. Film appearances include Portlandia, the indie features sLipPage and Let’s Bury the Hatchet (Deep in Your Face). 

Liam Hogan is a London-based writer and host of Liars’ League London. He is the winner of the 2015 Quantum Shorts and Sci-Fest LA’s 2016 Roswell Award and has been published in the online magazine Daily Science Fiction and in more than a dozen anthologies.

Marc Janssen is alive somewhere. There is proof hidden on the internet and in print at such periodicals as The Rio Grande Review, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Off the Coast, Cirque Journal and The Ottawa Arts Review, as well as in the anthologies Manifest West, Green is the Color of Winter and The Northern California Perspective. He also organizes the Salem Poetry Project, a weekly poetry reading in Salem, Oregon.

Barbara Kite graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York City, receiving the prestigious Jehlinger Award for Best Actress. She has gone on to work as a professional actor, director, and acting coach in Toronto, New York and Portland for over 30 years. A short list of Barbara’s film and theatrical credits include All My Children, So the Story Goes, Under Suspicion, The Beau Stratagem, A Little Night Music, Icarus’s Mother and Trojan Women.

Liam Lund is a playwright, unpublished novelist, artist, and news junkie. Those are the things that bring him joy and frustration, but no money. He endures a day job that provides him money and frustration, but no joy. He is a member of the Shakespeare Liberation Army, a group that writes and performs educational Shakespeare plays in public schools.

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, Doris Lessing discusses “the machinery of the literary scene,” going beyond the romanticization of publishing to the nuts and bolts of how it all works. She delves into the shift from small, family-owned publishers to gigantic corporations; the intense, almost indescribable partnership between an author and an editor; and the various adaptations to the lifestyle of a writer that have led to the state of publishing today.

“One has to remind [publishers] that what authors need is quiet—all writers need to be quiet; that we need in fact to be rather bored, we need to be unstimulated. We spend large quantities of our time alone, solitary, slopping about somewhere, probably in a dressing gown. This is what we need. This is the last thing that publishers these days are interested in.”

Doris Lessing was born in Persia (now Iran) in 1919 to British parents. Enticed by the promise of the riches to come from maize farming, the family moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1925. Lessing described her childhood as an uneven mixture of some pleasure and much pain, once commenting that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers. Lessing broke into popular consciousness with her second novel, The Golden Notebook, a narrative that delved into the multidimensional lives of contemporary women in a dynamic new way. Over the course of her writing career, Lessing went on to publish more than 55 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In 2007, at the age of 88, she became the oldest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and published her final book, Alfred and Emily, in 2008. Lessing died in 2013, at the age of 94.

“I must tell you of course that there is no such thing as a villain—there are no villains in this scene. It started in the 1950s with this meanness of the publishers about advertising and, as I said, coincided with this hungry media and has grown to where it is now. And you can’t say that it is anyone’s fault, it just happened.”

In this episode of The Archive Project, Malcolm Gladwell examines the idea of the underdog (namely, why the underdog persists in their quest despite the odds) through the story of Alva Belmont, also known as Alva Vanderbilt, a prominent multi-millionaire American socialite and major figure of the suffragette movement in the early 20th century.

“Why do underdogs fight? We have all of these cases, in all sorts of contexts, where the weaker party in a conflict continues to rebel long after we feel like they should, when the odds seemed overwhelming stacked against them, when the logic of the situation would suggest that what they really should do is give up. But they don’t give up. They keep fighting.”

“Nothing serves as a greater engine of defiance than the condition of being denied standing and neutrality.”

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers–The Tipping Point, Blink,Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces the podcasts Revisionist History, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood, and Broken Record, where he, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musicians across a wide range of genres. Gladwell has been included in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list and touted as one of Foreign Policy‘s Top Global Thinkers. His latest book is 2019’s Talking to Strangers.

In this episode of The Archive Project, Annie Proulx shares her life’s journey, including her life-long love of reading, history, and the great outdoors; her reflections on being a woman in a culture where women are “denied time for reflection and meditation”; her perchance for falling in love with places; and her travels across the world in search “some half-wild place.”

Probably the most important thing you should know about me is that I am a reader, I have always been a reader, and it’ll probably be the last thing I do.”

“Gradually, I began to write—not starting with fiction, but articles for horticulture magazines, books on rural living, apple cider, and that sort of thing. And I kept looking for some half-wild place. As children, I think we often experience inchoate and unspecified longings, those childhood moods and feelings of something important that’s out there.”

Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Her most recent novel is Barkskins. She lives in Seattle.

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.”

—Anis Mojgani