The Archive Project

Critically acclaimed, best-selling authors Jon Krakauer (Missoula, Into the Wild, and more) and Barry Lopez (Outside: Stories, Arctic Dreams, and more) are known for writing about human nature in confrontation with the natural world: from summiting Everest to our relationships with wolves and everything in between. In this conversation at the 2015 Portland Book Festival (formerly Wordstock), the two American literary legends discuss both the raw natural world and the interior nature of humanity.

With Arctic Dreams, I loved so fiercely where I was and the people who opened the doors so I could see it better…and my belief really was that if I could do the right kind of work, it would help people understand the grace in their own interiors.” – Barry Lopez

“There’s something about putting yourself at the mercy of nature, where the risks are real, that enforces a certain humility that is valuable.” – Jon Krakauer

Jon Krakauer spent his childhood in Corvallis, Oregon. At the age of eight, he began mountaineering with his father. This activity sparked a lifelong obsession with wilderness landscapes, and in 1996, Krakauer set forth to climb Mt Everest. While he and his five companions successfully reached the summit together, only Krakauer and one other climber made it back down the mountainside, a harrowing experienced he shares in his 1997 New York Times bestseller, Into Thin Air. Krakauer’s other nonfiction books include Into the Wild, which spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list; Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith; and Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, for which Krakauer spent five months embedded with combat forces along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. His most recent book, Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, was published in April. Krakauer is the recipient of a National Magazine Award and an Academy Award in Literature. Of his work, the American Academy of Arts and Letters has stated, “Krakauer combines the tenacity and courage of the finest tradition of investigative journalism with the stylish subtlety and profound insight of the born writer.” His writing has appeared in Outside, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker, among others.

Barry Lopez moved to Oregon in 1968, after dividing his childhood between Southern California and New York City, as well as a brief stint in the Midwest for college. His nonfiction often explores the relationship between physical landscapes and human cultures. His books include the National Book Award winner Arctic Dreams and the National Book Award finalist Of Wolves and Men. He has also written eight books of fiction, published two collections of essays, and is a regular contributor to Harper’s, Granta, Outside, and The Paris Review, among others. His most recent work is the short story collection Outside, which incorporates engravings by Barry Moser. Lopez is the recipient of numerous major literary and cultural awards, including an Academy Award in Literature and Pushcart Prizes in fiction and nonfiction, and his writing has taken him to more than 90 countries. Of his work, The New York Times has stated, “Mr. Lopez’s tone is intimate, inviting, as if his words shared the air with the snap and hiss of a campfire.”

Robert Pinsky begins his lecture by discussing the physicality of poetry. He compares poetry to other modern mediums of creativity and argues that poetry is uniquely intimate because it only reaches full expression in the body of the recipient. Pinsky goes on to discuss the special position of poetry in America: that it often produces ideas on an individual level before they are absorbed into systems of mass culture. Pinsky finishes his lecture by discussing the Favorite Poem Project, which called upon Americans from various backgrounds to submit their favorite poem and a brief statement on its significance.

“I believe that the human craving for art is bottomless and tremendous, so I don’t that think poetry or any other art is threatened by the presence of other arts.”

“The notion that the art of poetry doesn’t need equipment, doesn’t need mass-production, doesn’t need a skilled performer, doesn’t need the presence of the poet, is for me an important notion about our culture.”

“You’re keeping alive something you got from dead people—people like Yeats and Dickinson and your teachers, who eventually will die. And then you’re going to hand it on to other people, some of whom are not even born yet, and say to them ‘take care of this.’”

Robert Pinsky served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997-2000. Some critics regard him as the last of the “civic” or public poets. In an interview for Christian Science Monitor, he stated, “I think poetry is a vital part of our intelligence, our ability to learn, our ability to remember, the relationship between our bodies and minds. Poetry’s highest purpose is to provide a unique sensation of coordination between the intelligence, emotions, and the body. It’s one of the most fundamental pleasures a person can experience.” During his tenure as Poet Laureate, Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, which invited ordinary Americans to name their favorite poems and read them for a permanent audio archive at the Library of Congress. Pinsky’s initial goal was to record 100 people, but he soon found himself overwhelmed by the correspondence he received from people of all ages, locations, educations, and socioeconomic status asking to be included in the project. In addition to his acclaimed poetry collections, Pinsky has been praised by critics for his 1994 English translation of Dante’s Inferno. He is the author of nineteen books and currently teaches at Boston University.

A William Stafford devotee and former mentee, Naomi Shihab Nye opens her lecture by reading from Stafford’s “Time for Serenity, Anyone?” She then discusses the countless ways his work has inspired her and the poets around her. Afterwards, she reads several poems from her most recent collection at the time, Fuel: Poems, many of which focus on the simplicity of everyday life and which contain elements of the Southwest culture in which she spends the majority of her time.

“Sometimes it seems to me, traveling around, that one of the most enduring and comforting families that any of us can have is the family of people who hearken to the same voice over time, who return to the same voices for sustenance.”

Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent 40 years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspire students of all ages. Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to a shared humanity. She is the author or editor of more than 30 publications, including her poetry collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her new novel for children, The Turtle of Oman, which was chosen as a 2015 Notable Children’s Book by the American Library Association. She has been a poetry editor at The Texas Observer for 20 years, serves on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, and was recently named laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Award for Children’s Literature.

“As a child, the library was our sanctuary and we went there religiously. We checked out as much as we could, we kept as long as we could, and we all felt equally rich there.”

“I like it when people for whom English is not a native language say unusual words. It gives me a new sense of the dictionary.”

Mary Gordon begins the lecture by discussing how writers of autobiography or memoir often depend on memory to portray the truth. In the case of her own writing, Gordon says memory takes the form of specific images that have stuck with her throughout the years. She reads a selection of excerpts from her work that focus on an image or a concrete moment embedded in her childhood memories. She goes on to talk about the years she spent researching her family’s roots, imagining herself in her father’s place or inhabiting the hundreds of memories she has from her childhood in order to go about writing her memoir. Frank McCourt shares how writing Angela’s Ashes was the main goal he had in his life, saying that he knew it was something he had to put into the world or else he would go crazy. He discusses the poverty of his childhood and what it was like to grow up in Ireland during such difficult times, touching on how the state of the country, his alcoholic father, and the family’s failed attempt at American life had set them all up for disaster.

Mary Gordon is an American writer and professor of English at Barnard College. Over the past four decades, she has published novels, story collections, memoirs, essays, and biographies. Her first novel, Final Payments, was published in 1978 to tremendous critical acclaim and quickly followed by The Company of Women in 1981. Since then, she has published more than a dozen books on a wide range of subjects and won some of the country’s highest honors. She is best known today for her nonfiction writing, which focuses on her parents and childhood. In 2006, The Stories of Mary Gordon, including new and old works, was published and received The Story Prize in 2007.

Frank McCourt’s story is best gleaned from the pages of his memoir trilogy: Angela’s Ashes, Tis, and Teacher Man. These three books chronicle McCourt’s life—from his impoverished childhood in Ireland to his rich teaching career in America—and were all written after his retirement. Selling more than 5 million copies, Angela’s Ashes won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and was made into a feature film only three years after its publication. In addition to his 30 years as a high school English teacher, McCourt served in the Korean War. He died in 2009 at the age of 78.

One of the important ways that I knew the world was through images. The memories that seemed both most potent and most trustworthy to me were memories that had their genesis in images.” – Mary Gordon

“We want to flatten things out. We want things to be as simple as possible. It seems to me the great growth in the appetite for fundamentalism is an appetite to make things simpler than they really are, because the complexity of life can be unbearable to us.” – Mary Gordon

“When you left Ireland, you left forever. They had an Irish wake. That meant you were going to die; you might as well be dead.” – Frank McCourt

“American kids feared failing or getting a B minus…or not being able to get a date for the prom, but we feared hell. We had more cosmic aspirations.” – Frank McCourt

This episode of The Archive Project features Azar Nafisi, author of the acclaimed Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. In her lecture, Nafisi discusses Iranian literature and how it serves as a source of identity. She examines the fundamentalist Muslim identity in comparison to the national identity, concluding that people must focus on the literature of a nation in order to truly understand a culture. She also reflects on her life in England and her personal need to preserve Iran in her memory, and how that drive ultimately lead her to fall in love with fiction.

“The worst crime you can commit is to be blind towards others—to impose the dreams you have on the reality of other people.”

“Fiction is so important because against the fragility and fickleness of life, literature preserves all the passing moments that are constantly dying and we are constantly losing.”

“The way I discovered what Nabokov calls a ‘portable world’ is of course through literature and art. I didn’t know much about England, and my classmates didn’t know much about Iran, but I knew about Great Expectations, and I knew about Pride and Prejudice—so that is how I made my home in England and, later, in America.”

Azar Nafisi is an acclaimed writer, journalist, teacher, and activist. Her most famous book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is a memoir about her experience as an educator during the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The book spent 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into 32 languages. Nafisi’s teaching experience includes Oxford University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Tehran, where she advocated for Iranian intellectuals and youth, specifically young women. Nafisi was dismissed from the University of Tehran in 1981 for her refusal to wear the mandatory Islamic veil. She returned to the United States in 1997 and began working on Reading Lolita in Tehran, writing, “I left Iran, but Iran did not leave me.” Nafisi’s essays have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and her 1999 cover story for The New Republic, “The Veiled Threat: The Iranian Revolution’s Woman Problem,” has been reprinted into several different languages. Her 2014 book, The Republic of Imagination, examines the vital importance of fiction in a democratic society and serves as a long-awaited companion piece to Reading Lolita in Tehran.

In this episode of The Archive Project, Israeli writer Amos Oz discusses Israeli Literature, Hebrew as a spoken and written language, the influence of the Holocaust on literature, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

“I love Israel, even at times that I don’t like it. In fact, I love Israel even at times that I cannot stand it. And Israel, as I’m sure you know, ladies and gentlemen, Israel is neither a country, nor a nation. Actually, it is a fiery collection of arguments. A noisy assembly of 5.6 million citizens, 5.6 million Prime Ministers, 5.6 million prophets and Messiahs, each with his or her own personal formula for instant redemption.”

“I know the word compromise has a terrible reputation in English, especially on the West Coast. This is the place of idealists, and they regard compromise as lack of principles, lack of backbone, lack of integrity, lack of devotion, lack of everything. Let me tell you, in my vocabulary, the word compromise is synonymous to the word life itself. And the opposite of compromise is not integrity, and the opposite of compromise is not idealism—the opposite of compromise is fanaticism and death. Where there is life, there is compromise. Compromise, not capitulation.”

“In the 50s, pulses of guilt and dread and uneasiness and social anger and political rebelliousness reappeared in the literature and very strongly. Since the 60’s, roughly, one can decipher a significant comeback of themes, melodies that used to be attached to the previous generations. That basic Hebrew context seems to reappear vigorously on the scene with poets and novelists who are survivors of the Nazi massacre…the persistent fear of an approaching disaster, longings for far away places, skepticism, irony, even self-hatred. Political siege conceived as an emotional siege, persistent, tormented sense of moral ambiguity, and ultimately, the pulses of a secret theological quest.”

Amos Oz, born Amos Klausner, is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose work examines Israeli culture. Educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Oxford, Oz served in the Israeli army during three separate stints and joined the Israeli peace movement following the Six-Day War in 1967. It was at this time that he began advocating for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Oz’s fiction combines realism with irony, resulting in a critical, unapologetic tone. He credits Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio with his choice to write about his own experiences and point of view. “The written world,” he wrote in his memoir, “always revolves around the hand that is writing, wherever it happens to be writing: where you are is the center of the universe.” Oz has published 38 works of fiction and nonfiction, has had his work translated into 42 languages, and has won literary prizes from around the world. In addition to writing, Oz has worked as a teacher and a laborer and is currently a professor emeritus at Ben-Gurion University.

Michael Pollan begins his lecture by praising Portland for being one of the incubators of true healthy eating before moving on to discuss the new American food culture. He describes how many Americans have developed an unhealthy obsession with being healthy, which has actually backfired, as evidenced by the obesity epidemic. He labels the prevailing American ideology as “nutritionalism,” which places primacy on the mysterious “nutrient” and requires expert insight to navigate. Next, Pollan questions the assumption that the sole reason to consume food is to be healthy and encourages people to eat for pleasure, community, and spirituality as well. He goes on to describe the ways in which the food industry has benefitted from Americans’ obsession with scientific research and “miracle” ingredients. He addresses ways in which Americans can improve their current eating habits and provides suggestions for where to eat, when to eat, and how to consume natural ingredients. Pollan concludes his lecture by emphasizing the intimate relationship between all levels of the food chain.

Michael Pollan is an American journalist, activist, and professor. He is the author of four New York Times bestselling books on food and healthy eating, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Botany of Desire, which was later adapted into a PBS documentary. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan writes, “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” going on to argue, “The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world.” In 2009, Pollan was named one of Newsweek’s top 10 “New Thought Leaders,” and in 2010 he was listed as one of the world’s 100 most influential people by TIME magazine. He went on to be awarded the Distinguished Service Award from the National Association of Biology Teachers in 2012 and the Premio Nonino prize in 2013. He teaches at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and serves as the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism.

Because nutrients are invisible—I mean, who’s ever seen a nutrient? Who’s ever tasted a nutrient?—they’re therefore slightly mysterious, and like many unseen things, you need experts to help you mediate your relationship to them. It’s a little bit like a religion.”

“Your personal health is not bordered by your body. You’re not a machine taking in either good or bad fuel. Your health is linked—your health depends on—the health of the whole food chain, of which you are a part.”

“Make no mistake, we are now teaching children how to become fast food consumers. We’re teaching them how to eat chicken nuggets and tater tots in ten minutes.”

Ursula Le Guin begins her discussion with Margaret Atwood in 2010 by saying, “I emailed Margaret about six weeks or so ago and said, ‘What are we going to talk about?’ and she replied, ‘I expect we will talk about 1) What is fiction?; 2) What is science fiction?; 3) The ones who walk away from Omelas—where do they go?; 4) Is the human race doomed?; 5) Anything else that strikes our fancy.’” The two women examine these questions and talk through their answers. They delve into their writing processes and motives, creating many humorous analogies for the act of writing, whether they connect it to naked chickens, salted slugs, or dark boudoirs.

“If we knew everything ahead of time, we wouldn’t write the book. It would be paint by numbers and there wouldn’t be any discoveries.” – Margaret Atwood

“Rereading a book is much better than reading it. A good book reread is better than a good book read.” – Ursula Le Guin

“All doors are doors to the future, if you go into them.” – Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; The MaddAddam Trilogy; The Heart Goes Last; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. In 2019, The Testaments won the Booker Prize and was longlisted for The Giller Prize. She lives in Toronto.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in 1929 in Berkeley, and passed away on January 22, 2018 in Portland, Oregon. She published 21 novels, 11 volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, 12 books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many honors and awards including the Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, and PEN-Malamud. Her most recent publications are Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2010 and The Unreal and the Real: Selected Short Stories, which received the 2012 Oregon Book Award for Fiction.

We are incredibly saddened by the news of her passing, are so grateful and honored to have known her, and thank her for her transformative contributions to international literature. Our thoughts are with her family, friends, loved ones, readers, and writers everywhere.

Maxine Hong Kingston appears as part of the Portland Arts and Lectures series not long after many of her belongings and writings were lost in the Oakland firestorm of 1991. Her lecture, entitled “Another Person of Peace,” is about her rediscovering herself as a person and a writer following the fire. Kingston discusses the inspiration behind her book that was lost to the flames, which was to mirror the Books of Peace that appeared in China hundreds of years ago. Coincidentally, these books were also burned, though deliberately so because of how threatening they were to the reigning powers. Kingston discusses the irony of her own book of peace burning and talks through possible methods of creating The Fifth Book of Peace. She spends some time reading from the eighteen pages she wrote after the fire, documenting her reaction to losing her home, her possessions, and her writing, and discussing how she learned to rebuild.

Turning the bend, I looked up and saw that my house was gone. It was not that I recognized the place that it had stood or any familiar piece of it or its neighbors, but that the landscape was everywhere utterly changed. I had come to the ash moon of a planet that passes through the sun.”

“If a woman is going to write a book of peace, it is given her to know devastation.”

“Ideas have an invisible existence that protects them, pervious to fire and bombs. If the fire had killed me, do my ideas live without me thinking and breathing?

Wideman and McMillan begin their lecture with a discussion of the projects they are working on and how they decide what material to write next. McMillan then reads an excerpt of her writing, speaking through the voice of one of her female characters. Wideman follows by reading a segment called “Picking Up My Father From the Springfield Station.” Each writer talks about his or her inspiration: in Wideman’s case, it’s his father’s life; in McMillan’s case, it’s her mother’s life. They discuss their portrayal of race, family, and identity in their work. The theme of empathy holds a strong undercurrent throughout the lecture, specifically the ability of writers to get under people’s skins in order to understand them and the social significance of this act.

“There’s nothing more political than a radical act of the imagination.” – John Edgar Wideman

“If you can’t step out of your own world, there’s no way you can have any compassion or empathy for anyone else.” – Terry McMillan

Terry McMillan is the best selling author of Waiting to Exhale, which gained national attention following its publication in 1992 and was later adapted into a film directed by Forest Whitaker and starring Whitney Houston. Her 1998 novel, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, experienced even greater commercial success and was adapted into a film starring Angela Bassett. McMillan is credited with pioneering the black urban romance novel and bringing popular awareness to the existence of an audience eager for novels and movies that feature black middle-class identity, specifically the interior world of black female professionals.

Like, McMillan, John Edgar Wideman’s novels often focus on black urban life. He spent the first ten years of his childhood in Homewood, a predominantly black community of Pittsburgh. Homewood became the setting for many of his novels, including Sent for You Yesterday and Philadelphia Fire, which each won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His memoir, Brothers and Keepers, which examines his relationship with his incarcerated brother, was nominated for a National Book Award. Wideman was the second black American to receive a Rhodes scholarship to the University of Oxford. He went on to found the African American Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania and currently serves as a professor at Brown University.

“The worst thing that’s happening in our country is our failure of imagination, our collective inability to get inside one another’s skins. And that follows from our history, from the history of slavery, the history of inequality. We don’t want to think about that too much. We’d rather float all sorts of myths that explain away our inconsistency and our inhumanity. And so memory and imagination are rather dangerous, because they say, ‘Look at yourself. Think about yourself.’” – John Edgar Wideman