The Archive Project

Julia Alvarez reflects on her dual childhood in the Dominican Republic and in the United States: living in a world under the hand of a dictator; her poor performance in school but robust and diverse education at home; her difficult time adjusting to immigrant life and the prejudice she faced; the sixth grade teacher who showed her the world that existed within books; and her realization that 1) intelligence comes in many forms and 2) imagination can save you.

One thing that hasn’t changed is my faith in the power of stories. Even before I came into English, or became a reader, or wanted to be a writer, stories were helping me find my way to the person I would become, the writer who stands before you today.”

“One thing the Dictator Trujillo could not repress was the irrepressible need of the human creature for stories.”

“Ours was not a literary culture but an oral culture, a storytelling culture . . . Years later, when I attended a graduate program in creative writing, I would realize that all that I was being taught about character and plot and timing and rhythm and lyricism and metaphor I had learned in my home land, in many cases by people who could not read or write or had minimal book learning. It was an important discovery for me to make as a young writer.”

Julia Alvarez was born in New York City on March 17, 1950, the second of four daughters. Three months later, her parents returned to their native Dominican Republic after a self-imposed exile from General Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship. When her parents became involved in an underground movement to overthrow Trujillo, the Alvarez family was forced to flee the Dominican Republic in order to escape imprisonment. They returned to the United States in August of 1960, when Alvarez was 10 years old. The immigrant experience and bicultural identity is the subject of much of Alvarez’s fiction and poetry, including her popular first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, which was published in 1991. Since then, Alvarez has gone on to publish more than 20 additional works.

In this episode of The Archive Project, award-winning novelist, poet, and author of The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros, discusses her new book, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, at the 2015 Wordstock Festival. A House of My Own is a richly illustrated compilation of true stories and nonfiction pieces that, taken together, form a jigsaw autobiography—an intimate album of a beloved literary legend. Cisneros is in conversation with Elena Passarello, author of the essay collection Let Me Clear My Throat.

“I grew up in Chicago, with poor neighborhoods and poor schools but great museums. And the museums were important in shaping us…For a whole generation of us, our lives were enriched thanks to museums being free on the days that working class people had off.”

“You can’t write about things that you’re angry about and publish it when you’re angry. You need to write when you’re angry, and then you need to compost and keep writing until you’re not angry anymore and you understand the situation with clarity and generosity, and then some little flower can grow out of that compost.”

“For all of us, I think stories enter us—especially the ones that are the real stories, the ones we wish we could forget—like grains of sand, and we have to cover them with nacre. Each time we tell the story, it’s like we’re trying to survive the event.”

Sandra Cisneros is the author of several books, including the widely acclaimed novel The House on Mango Street. In addition to establishing the Latino McArthur Fellows, she is the founder of two organizations that serve writers: the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award, and the American Book Award. Cisneros has been writing for more than 45 years, and her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Her most recent book is A House of My Own. Cisneros lives in central Mexico.

Elena Passarello is the author of the essay collection Let Me Clear My Throat, a finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Awards. Her essays on pop culture, performance, and the natural world have appeared in several publications, including Oxford American, Creative Nonfiction, and Slate. She is the recipient of the 2015 Whiting Award in Nonfiction and is a member of the creative writing faculty at Oregon State University. Her latest collection of essays, Animals Strike Curious Poses, was published by Sarabande Books in July 2016.

This episode of The Archive Project features a conversation between Academy Award-nominated actor Jesse Eisenberg and Portland novelist and screenwriter Jon Raymond, recorded at Wordstock: Portland’s Book Festival in 2015. Eisenberg is known for his iconic film roles, as well as regular pieces in The New Yorker and three critically acclaimed plays. During this conversation, he presents his fiction debut, the whip-smart Bream Gives Me Hiccups: And Other Stories. The National Post called the collection, “Funny and poignant, a darkly comic look at family, insecurity, and, briefly, Cameroonian separatism.”

 I realized that during this difficult transition that we all make to these different stages of our lives, we react to things usually with kind of these histrionic emotions that we didn’t even know we had.”

“One of the great things about acting is that it forces me to get into the emotional experience of a character in a way that maybe if I was sitting in my room trying to conjure it [through writing], it would be either less effective or more inefficient.”

“Now the two things seem unrelated as finished products, but that’s the nature of art—whatever you’re doing seems to infect everything else.”

Jesse Eisenberg is an Academy Award-nominated actor, playwright, and contributor to The New Yorker and McSweeney’s. His acting credits range from indie films like The Squid and the Whale to Oscar contenders like The Social Network. His latest film is Batman v. Superman, in which he takes on the role of the villainous Lex Luthor. Eisenberg is also the author of three plays, including The Spoils, which won the Theater Visions Fund Award. In 2015, he published his first book, Bream Gives Me Hiccups, a short story collection.

Jon Raymond is the author The Half-Life and Rain Dragon, both novels. He also wrote the short story collection Livability, which was chosen as a Discover Great New Writers selection by Barnes & Noble. His screenwriting credits include Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, and Night Moves, which features Jesse Eisenberg in the lead role. Raymond currently serves on the Board of Directors for Literary Arts, and his next novel is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2017.

In this episode of The Archive Project, author Mohsin Hamid discusses his childhood transitions from Pakistan to the United States and back again, citing Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons as two of his earliest storytelling influences. He goes on to highlight moments on his journey as a writer, including how Moth Smoke, his debut book, began as his Harvard Law thesis; how he convinced a supervisor to let him have three months off each year to work on his writing; and the most basic human trait that unites us all: mortality.

“At one point, [Douglas Adams] writes that ‘the secret to flying is throwing yourself at the ground and missing.’ And that is really how I approach writing novels. I throw myself at the ground and hit, repeatedly, for years—I write draft after draft after draft…and eventually, hopefully, I miss.”

Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid is the author of three novels and one collection of essays. His debut book, Moth Smoke, was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award, propelling him from his career as a management consultant in New York to an author in his hometown of Lahore. His second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was an international best seller, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and adapted into a movie directed by Mira Nair. His book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations, contains his reflections on life over the past 15 years. Hamid spent much of his childhood and early adulthood alternating between life in Pakistan and life in the United States. From this experience, Hamid has noted, “I’m somebody who can blend in usually quite quickly, but inside continues to retain a sense of feeling foreign.” In addition to living in Lahore, New York, and California, Hamid spent eights years in London following the start of his professional writing career. Of the central theme of his works, Hamid has stated, “All of my novels are love stories, in a way. I think love is kind of the plot in our lives, you know? It’s embedded in the culture and even the religion of the part of Pakistan I’m from, which is that one of the ways in which we can confront the horror of being mortal and dying one day is to love enough that we’re not so central to ourselves that we can’t face the fact that we’re going to end.”