The Archive Project

In this episode we feature the iconic writer of nonfiction, Joan Didion, from a special event in 2001. She briefly reads from her then new book Political Fictions, and then talks with David Sarasohn from The Oregonian.

Didion’s career began in 1956 when she began writing for Vogue. Since then, she wrote more than a dozen books of essays and nonfiction, including the 2005 national bestseller The Year of Magical Thinking, which became a Broadway production. Didion contributed work to virtually major magazine and newspaper in the country, and wrote several screenplays with her late husband John Gregory Dunne.

Her writing about American politics began in earnest in 1988 when she got an assignment from The New York Review of Books to cover the presidential election. This reporting was collected, along with other articles and essays, into the book Political Fictions, which was published in 2001 and was the reason for this event in Portland. The reading and conversation in this episode is fascinating because as she says “history is context.” Didion connects her observations in 1988 about the professional political class to the contested political election of 2000, which had occurred just a year earlier. And her insights and thoughts about the dangerous implication for how our American political life was evolving feel eerily prescient for our current situation.

Didion died on Thursday, December 23, 2021 at the age of 87.

“I have a strong sense that we better start noticing the rest of the world.”

Joan Didion was one of America’s most respected writers, her work constituting some of the greatest portraits of modern-day American culture. Over the four decades of her career, she produced widely-acclaimed journalistic essays, personal essays, novels, non-fiction, memoir and screenplays. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award in 2005.

Lydia Davis begins her lecture by explaining her attempt to find a balance between poetry and prose through writing short stories. She discusses several of her favorite authors—including Samuel Beckett, Russell Edson, and Bob Pearlman—and reads short selections from their works. Davis also discusses her work translating Proust and Flaubert, among others. She then reads from a New York poet named Sparrow who writes minimalistic translations, compares his translations to the originals, and asks whether or not one can write the same thing in radically different ways or if it is indeed the same thing at all. Davis goes on to talk about letters of complaint she wrote that became “too literary to send,” and reads one addressed to a frozen peas manufacturer where she criticizes the poor aesthetics of the packaging and her concern that the business will suffer.

 A good poem almost always offers you something surprising in the language and the way of thinking.”

“The way that we read a piece of writing is determined by the context in which we read it.”

“I wrote poems early on, but to be a poet somehow was not a serious option for life. So if eventually some of my work comes right up to the line—if there is one—that separates a piece of prose from a poem…the approach to that line is through the realm of short fiction.”

Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven story collections. Her collection Varieties of Disturbance: Stories was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award of Merit Medal, and was named a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Proust. Davis is the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize. (Biography courtesy of Macmillan.)

Stephen Greenblatt begins his lecture with a discussion of censorship and religious toleration in early Christian Europe. He distinguishes Christianity from earlier Pagan and Jewish ideologies by emphasizing its commitment to a “single absolute doctrinal coherence” and the ways in which the church dealt with heretics. Greenblatt then moves on to discuss the influence of various theologians—including Augustine, John Locke, and Thomas More—on Christian intolerance. Greenblatt emphasizes the Renaissance conception of religion as essential for social order and peace and the common association between atheism and anarchy. He goes on to examine the ways in which certain texts survived religious persecution despite their radical assertions, specifically “De Rerum Natura” by Lucretius, whom Greenblatt credits with influencing the works of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Botticelli.

“It is precisely choice—and the attendant idea that there might be multiple competing positions among which you could choose—that in the name of saving the soul, Christians determined not to allow. In its place was a single truth and with it a determination to weed out false beliefs.”

For Lucretius argued not only that there were atoms and emptiness in the world, but that there was nothing else. There were no demons, there were no angels, there were no ghosts, and there were no bodiless immaterial souls. And what followed as the poem winds its way through its magnificent six books was a succession of unacceptable propositions of the kind that gave More and Locke and all their contemporaries very, very bad stomachaches.”

“Art is linked to survival. Art is linked to the possibility that you might get it down.”

Stephen Greenblatt is a Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of twelve books, including The Swerve: How the World Became Modern; Shakespeare’s Freedom; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Marvelous Possessions; and Renaissance Self-Fashioning. He is General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and of The Norton Shakespeare, has edited seven collections of criticism, and is a founding editor of the journal Representations. His honors include the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and the 2011 National Book Award for The Swerve, MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize (twice), Harvard University’s Cabot Fellowship, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, Yale’s Wilbur Cross Medal, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. (Biography courtesy of stephengreenblatt.com)

Scholar and commentator Karen Armstrong begins her lecture by describing her youth in a nunnery, her subsequent departure and return to religion, and her understanding of religious stagnation. She compares modern concepts of God, in which The Almighty is basically a glorified human, to ancient ones, in which God was too great and too expansive to describe. Armstrong proposes that once God is reduced to a being with a definite form, he can tolerate no other Gods and is used to justify violence. She also addresses the human need for transcendence—the desire to experience the inexplicable nature of music, art, or religion—and challenges the idea that religious commitment requires regurgitating proscribed doctrines.

It is by compassion—by putting yourself in the position of The Other—that we come to the divine, because it gets rid of that ego which holds us back from our best selves. And this is hard work.”

“Idolatry doesn’t just mean bowing down in front of a statue, it means raising a particular human notion of the divine to an absolute level. And once you’ve done that—once you’ve made something that is essentially finite, absolute—you’re going to get violence.”

“I feel that religion is at its best when it helps us to ask questions and holds us in an attitude of wonder. And it’s often worst when it seeks to answer these questions definitively.”

A former Catholic nun who left the convent to study literature, Karen Armstrong is an authority on world faiths, religious fundamentalism, and monotheism. Her poignant and captivating talks, spark worldwide debate and healthy discussion. Armstrong’s bestselling books include The Battle for God, The Spiral Staircase, The Great Transformation, and The Bible: A Biography. Publishers Weekly called her most recent book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, “Provocative and supremely readable…[Armstrong] sweeps through religious history around the globe and over 4,000 years to explain the yoking of religion and violence and to elucidate the ways in which religion has also been used to counter violence.” She was a key advisor on Bill Moyers’ landmark PBS series on religion, has addressed members of the U.S. Congress, and was one of three scholars to speak at the UN’s first ever session on religion. The Sunday Times calls her “a bridge between religions.”

(Biography courtesy of The Lavin Agency: https://www.thelavinagency.com)

Recorded at Wordstock: Portland’s Book Festival on November 7, 2015, the panel “Lost & Found: Fiction on the Threshold” brings authors Carmiel Banasky (The Suicide of Claire Bishop), Sloane Crosley (The Clasp), Katherine Taylor (Valley Fever), and Vendela Vida (The Driver’s Clothes Lie Empty) together to discuss their lost characters and what it means to be found. Each of these four writers read from their daring new novels that feature characters who are searching for mythical objects, lost in time or place, or going on a wild goose chase trying to escape themselves and their everyday realities. Maris Kreizman, journalist and curator of the Tumblr “Slaughterhouse 90210,” moderates this event.

 The sense of loss [in the book] is about what was missing before the book started…For my own life, I think it was a way I was saying goodbye to that time period.” – Sloane Crosley

“I never know when I’m writing a book or a story or an essay until later, sometimes years later, what the theme is.” – Katherine Taylor

Carmiel Banasky is the author of the novel The Suicide of Claire Bishop. Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Guernica, The Rumpus, and on NPR, among others. After four years on the road at writing residencies, she now lives and teaches in Los Angeles.

Sloane Crosley is the author of the New York Times bestsellers I Was Told There’d Be Cake (a finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor), How Did You Get This Number, and The Clasp. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, The Guardian, and on NPR, among others. Prior to writing full time, Sloane spent twelve years working in book publishing.

Katherine Taylor is the author of Valley Fever and Rules for Saying Goodbye. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Elle, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a McGinnis Ritchie Award for Fiction. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

Vendela Vida is the co-founder of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing center in San Francisco. She is an editor for The Believer magazine, as well as the author of five novels, two of which have been New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She is the recipient of a Kate Chopin Award, given to a writer whose female protagonist chooses an unconventional path.

Maris Kreizman is the creator of Slaughterhouse 90210, a blog and book that celebrates the intersection of her two great loves: literature and pop culture. She is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and Vulture, among others.

In Another Day, best-selling author David Levithan tells the story from the side of Every Day’s Rhiannon as she seeks to discover the truth about love and how it can change you. Girl at the Bottom of the Sea, Michelle Tea’s sequel to Mermaid in Chelsea Creek, finds our hero Sophie traveling from Massachusetts to Poland with her unlikely guardian, the mermaid Syrena. And in Beastly Bones, the follow-up book to the acclaimed Jackaby, William Ritter tells of a supernatural investigation from the perspective of Abigail Rook, R.F. Jackaby’s assistant. Alison Clement, author of Twenty Questions, moderates this panel.

“They like knowing there are other cultures in the world, and they rally at the opportunity to think about other societies and other ways of thinking about things. And when we only focus on one—just Western society—we miss out on lots of really cool philosophical ways of thinking about the world.” – William Ritter, on teaching world mythologies

“It is a really sweet feeling to create characters and then get to keep returning to them.” – Michelle Tea, on writing a sequel or series

“You may deploy this amazing metaphor [in your manuscript], and you’re like, ‘Wow! I’ve seen everything in a new light because of this amazing articulation that is so brilliant.’ And then when you’re revising, you’re like, ‘There is no way this character would ever have thought that.’ And so you have to kill your darling.” – David Levithan, on character and voice 

David Levithan is the author of numerous books for young adults, including Boy Meets Boy, the Lambda Literary Award winner Two Boys Kissing, and Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, which was adapted into a film starring Michael Cera. Levithan is an editorial director at Scholastic and the founding editor of its PUSH imprint, which is devoted to finding new voices and new authors in teen literature. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Michelle Tea is an author, poet, and literary arts organizer whose work often explores queer culture, feminism, race, class, and prostitution, among other topics. Her award-winning memoir, Valencia, was adapted into a feature length film shot by 21 independent filmmakers as a collaborative film-arts project. Tea is the founder of the literary nonprofit RADAR Productions and the co-founder of the infamous spoke word tour, Sister Spit. She lives in San Francisco.

William Ritter is the author of two Young Adult novels, Jackaby and its sequel, Beastly Bones. He is a graduate of the University of Oregon and currently teaches high school language arts and mythology. When reading aloud, he always does the voices. He lives in Springfield, Oregon.

The moderator of this panel is Alison Clement. She is the author of Pretty is As Pretty Does and Twenty Questions, which won the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction through the Oregon Book Awards in 2007. Before earning her Master’s Degree, Clement had dropped out of college after reading Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society and worked a variety of jobs, including selling underground newspapers in Madison, Wisconsin; managing an occult bookstore in Normal, Illinois; and panhandling in San Francisco. She now teaches composition at a small, rural community college in Oregon.

At the age of sixty-four, long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad became the first person to swim the 111 miles from Cuba to Key West without a shark cage, a Herculean feat that had eluded her when she made the attempt three decades earlier, in peak form. Nyad discusses her new memoir, Find a Way, a passionate story of this heroic adventure and the extraordinary life experiences that have served to carve her unwavering spirit, with Cheryl Strayed (Brave Enough).

Always that swim has been for me about living large, about turning 60 and feeling the grip of existential angst—Who am I? And I the person I can admire?—much more than an endurance event. And the people who were on the beach that day—the crying, weeping thousands of people, and the millions of people who have gotten a hold of me—they’re not [all] swimming fans . . . They’re people who want to live that message: You never, ever give up and you will get to your other shore. – Diana Nyad

Two hours before the end of this thing, now the palm trees are in full sight. And I asked my team—it’s 44 people, this is a true expedition: you’ve got Dr. Angel Yanagihara, the world’s leading box jellyfish expert from University of Hawaii; you’ve got your shark team, which I mentioned earlier; you’ve got a navigation team (this is an extremely difficult mathematical navigation); you’ve got the medical team; I’ve got my own personal team, which is nutrition and rousing that drop of courage when you don’t think you have anything left—it’s a big expedition. And two hours from the end, more of less, when we’re pretty sure we’re making it to the end, I ask my team to come over and make a semi-circle of boats, and we stop. And I cried like a baby. And I said, ‘You know, I guess I’m going to stumble up on that beach pretty soon, and I guess somebody is going to take my picture, but don’t you ever forget—because I will never forget—that we did this together. We made history together. – Diana Nyad

On September 2, 2013, at the age of sixty-four, Diana Nyad swam the 111 miles from Havana to Key West in fifty-three hours, becoming the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without the aid of a shark cage. For those already familiar with Nyad—whether as an author, journalist, motivational speaker, or long-distance swimmer—this was the fruition of a long-anticipated dream. Nyad first gained national attention in 1975, when she completed a record-breaking swim around Manhattan, and then again in 1979, when she swam from The Bahamas to Florida and set a world record for distance swimming over open water. It was at this time that she also made her first attempt at the Cuba-to-Florida swim, but was thwarted by unfavorable winds after 76 miles. In the thirty-year interim between the height of her swimming career and her 2013 feat, Nyad was a sports broadcaster and journalist for such media as NPR and ABC’S “Wide World of Sports,” among others. She is the author of four books, including her most recent memoir, Find a Way: One Wild and Precious Life, which details her multiple attempts and eventual success at the Cuba-to-Florida swim. Of the book, People Magazine wrote, “It reads like a gripping thriller. Nyad is living proof that, as she says, ‘You can live out your dreams if you refuse to ever, ever give up.’”

Cheryl Strayed catapulted into fame in 2012 with her #1 New York Times bestselling memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which went on to be adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern. Nick Hornby wrote the screenplay, and Jean-Marc Vallée directed the film. Strayed followed up this book with two more New York Times bestsellers: Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of essays compiled from Strayed’s “Dear Sugar” advice column in The Rumpus; and Brave Enough, a collection of quotes drawn from her previous writings. Strayed co-hosts the WBUR podcast Dear Sugar Radio, and her essays have been published in The Best American Essays, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, Salon, and Tin House, among others. She is a long-time activist for women’s rights, including abortion rights and women in the arts. Of her writing, George Sanders has said, “Big-hearted, keen-eyed, lyrical, precise…Cheryl Strayed reminds us in every line that if defeat and despair are part of human experience, so are kindness, patience, and transcendence.”

One of the most acclaimed contemporary historians presents a fresh, startling new look at the Salem witch trials, the first great American mystery. In The Witches: Salem, 1692, Pulitzer Prize winning author Stacy Schiff examines the religious, social, and political context of the Massachusetts Bay Colony that doomed year, the only moment when women played the central role in American history. Schiff is interviewed by Karen Karbo, author Julia Child Rules and the forthcoming In Praise of Difficult Women.

 “There’s so much of this particular tragedy that is seminal and sort of hardwired into our DNA. And one does wonder if the fact that these people are exceedingly litigious might explain something. They are always in court, and in fact very few people who are accused during the trials have not already been in court for some other reason.” – Stacy Schiff

“Reading those quarterly court cases is really fascinating, because you begin to see how contentious relationships were, where the fault lines are, how easily and often people sued—and you realize there’s a lot of unfinished business here, which obviously witchcraft will help to finish off.” – Stacy Schiff

Stacy Schiff has been called “that rare combination: a first-rate historian and a brilliant storyteller.” Her 2000 biography on Vera Nabokov—the wife of author Vladimir Nabokov—won the Pulitzer Prize, and her 2010 biography on Cleopatra has been praised as “a masterpiece.” In her newest publication, The Witches: Salem, 1692, Schiff presents a fresh, startling new look at the Salem witch trials, examining the religious, social, and political context of the Massachusetts Bay Colony that doomed year. Of this work, historian and writer David McCullough has said, “History in the hands of Stacy Schiff is invariably full of life, light, shadow, surprise, clarity of insight, and so it is again and then some in her latest work, The Witches. Few writers combine as she does superb scholarship and an exceptional gift for language with amazing reach and agility of mind. This is a superb book.” Schiff has received numerous awards and currently serves as a guest columnist for The New York Times, and her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, among other publications.

Karen Karbo, who interviewed Schiff, is the author of fourteen award-winning books, most notably including the best-selling “Kick-Ass Women” series featuring Julia Child, Georgia O’Keeffe, Coco Chanel, and Audrey Hepburn. Her 2004 memoir, The Stuff of Life, about the last year she spent with her father before his death, was a New York Times Notable Book, a People Magazine Critics’ Choice, and an Oregon Book Award winner. Her writing has appeared in Elle, Vogue, Esquire, Outside, The New York Times, and Salon.com, among others. Karbo was one of 24 writers awarded an Amtrak Residency, and she currently serves on the Literary Arts Board of Directors.

Acclaimed chef and food writer Ruth Reichl discusses the highlights of her career as a food writer, including how she got her start, her current work, and some of the lessons she has learned along the way. She explains how the many illusions of the fine dining world have taught her a lot about herself.

An acclaimed chef and food writer, Ruth Reichl served as a restaurant critic for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and was Gourmet magazine’s editor-in-chief for ten years. As the co-owner of The Swallow Restaurant during the mid 70s, Reichl was also part of the culinary revolution that took place in Berkeley, California. In pursuit of her goal to demystify the world of fine cuisine, Reichl has been praised for her honest writing, including her examination of the sexism experienced by women at restaurants and the pretentious nature of many of New York’s dining establishments. Her books include Tender at the Bone; Comfort Me with Apples, Garlic and Sapphires; and For You Mom, Finally—which have collectively been translated into 18 languages. Her latest publication and first novel, Delicious!, was published by Random House in 2014. The recipient of 6 James Beard Awards, Reichl is currently the executive producer of PBS’s Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie, the host of PBS’s Gourmet’s Adventures With Ruth, a judge on Top Chef Masters, and the culinary editor for the Modern Library Food Series.

We all have a contract with an expensive restaurant. You agree to pay them a lot of money. They, in turn, agree to feed you lovely food and provide you with the illusion, if only for a few hours, that you are a person who lives a privileged life. If they’re going to take your money, they not only have to feed you well, they have to make you feel good.”

“I began to understand that the costumes had been much more to me than just props for eating out. They had allowed me anonymity, yes, but they had also provided an illusion that was much more long lasting than the one you get from a restaurant. For the first time in my life I understood, really understood, how it felt to be someone else. And, then, the most amazing thing happened: in becoming other people, I discovered myself.”

“I feel that I learned to tell stories at my family table. We sat down to dinner together, and we were expected to have a good story about what happened that day—to be able to turn your day, no matter what had happened, into a story. The lesson there is that everybody’s day is interesting. Every day is interesting. It’s just how you tell it. And I do think that in learning to tell stories, you learn to be a writer. And it’s just one of the many reasons that I think family meals are so important.”