The Archive Project

Isabel Allende begins her lecture with stories about writing her new book, Island Beneath the Sea, focusing specifically on the connections between the histories of Haiti and New Orleans. The inspiration for the book came after Allende visited New Orleans and was intrigued by the Haitian refugees who created their own identities in Louisiana. She tells how her research into the plantations and the stories of Haitians imported as slaves made her physically sick, and she was worried until her husband reassured her that it would pass as soon as she finished. “He is a wonderful man,” she added. “He is like a wife. Everybody should have a wife.” Island Beneath the Sea begins on a plantation caught in the midst of violence, fear, and revolution. The obsession of the book, and of the main character, is freedom.

“Every story is like a seed that I have in the belly. Some of the seeds grow, some don’t. And when they start to grow, they sort of end up choking me, and then there’s a moment when I’m ready to write it.”

“Writing this book has been a long journey, and a fascinating one, and a very tiring one. Now I want to write an erotic novel, but I have to wait until my mom dies.”

“Life has no endings. Life is just walking in circles.”

Isabel Allende is a Chilean author whose 20 books have been translated into 35 languages and sold more than 65 million copies. Allende has received 14 international honorary doctorates and 50 awards in more than 15 countries. Her books have been adapted into two international movies, as well as plays, musicals, operas, ballets, and radio programs. The Isabel Allende Foundation empowers women and girls worldwide. Her newest novel is The Japanese Lover, forthcoming in fall of 2015 from Simon & Schuster. (source: www.isabelallende.com)

John Dunne begins his lecture by discussing how two people can experience the exact same thing and come away with completely different observations—specifically how writers betray the image the subjects hold of themselves. He gives anecdotes about a shared experience with Richard Rhodes and quotes Henry James, saying, “If a writer talks about writing without quoting from Henry James . . . then you should get your money back.” Joan Didion then takes the stage to talk about being a journalist and her dislike for the term “literary journalist.” She goes on to discuss the ethics of being a journalist and the questions she asks herself when she writes. Didion emphasizes the importance of revealing one’s opinion as a writer: “This is the tricky part, because most of our press conventions rest on . . . not expressing opinion or bias: in other words, a quite spurious objectivity.” She shares stories from her experiences in the White House pressroom and discusses the challenges of writing about American politics due to the pressure to maintain a conventional narrative.

“What the writer does is observe, and then he filters; observation is nothing without an intelligence to translate it.” –Dunne

“Taking the long view obligates the writer to listen.” –Didion

“Writers are people: they have opinions, they have attitudes, and the fact that these opinions . . . too often remain unspoken . . . tends to come between the page and the reader like so much marsh gas.” –Didion

John Gregory Dunne was an American screenwriter, journalist, and novelist. He was born into a wealthy Irish Catholic family in Hartford, Connecticut, and studied at Princeton University. He married Joan Didion in 1964 and they began writing together for the Saturday Evening Post, as well as collaborating on the screenplays “The Panic in Needle Park,” “A Star Is Born,” and “True Confessions,” the latter an adaptation of Dunne’s novel. Dunne was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and his final novel, Nothing Lost, was published shortly after his death in December of 2003.

Joan Didion is best known for her novels and essays. She was working as an editor at Vogue when she wrote her first novel, Run, River, and married John Gregory Dunne. Her second novel, Play It As It Lays (1970), was nominated for a National Book Award. More recently, Didion is known for The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), written in response to the death of her husband and her daughter’s illness. It won the National Book Award for nonfiction. Didion’s memoir, Blue Nights, was published by Knopf in 2011.

Ruth Ozeki discusses her novel A Tale for the Time Being, specifically the phrase “time being” and its several meanings. Ozeki tells the story of discovering her main character, Nao, and her journey toward figuring out all the various narrative elements of her novel. It was a long, circuitous route: world affairs, books, and life experiences all influenced the characters and events Ozeki wrote about, and she struggled to decide who Nao was writing her journal for: “It was my job, as a novelist, to figure this out.” She also philosophizes extensively about the way we view time, asserting that, “All that exists, all that we can ever know, is the present moment.” She cites Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher Dogen Zenji and uses filmmaking techniques to discuss our experience of time, arguing that viewing time as a quantifiable commodity is unhealthy. At the conclusion of her talk, Ozeki leads the entire audience through a meditation exercise.

“I find [Dogen Zenji’s] view of time to be quite astonishing. It’s so expansive and generous. It means there’s always enough time if you just slow down. If you just slow down and take your time, you will have plenty of opportunities to do something beneficial.”

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the award-winning author of three novels, My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, and A Tale for the Time Being, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her critically acclaimed independent films, including Halving the Bones, have been screened at Sundance and aired on PBS. A longtime Buddhist practitioner, Ozeki was ordained in 2010 and is affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center and the Everyday Zen Foundation. She lives in British Columbia and New York City. She currently teaches creative writing at Smith College, where she is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities in the Department of English Language and Literature.

“Our bodies and minds are rarely together in the present moment at the same time, and this skews the alignment between being and time and causes all sorts of suffering, which is what makes us humans such anxious and unsettled time-beings.”

“[Writing A Tale for the Time Being] took an achingly long time, but I think it illustrates an important point, that novels are time-beings too. They take the time they take.”

Gore Vidal is interviewed by Lauren Kessler, answering several questions about his political writings and the power of writers in America, specifically Mark Twain and Noam Chomsky. Vidal says he strongly dislikes systems, especially the press, whom he calls “part of the corporate ownership of the country.” He goes on to discuss his work, including a comparison of his novel, The Smithsonian Institution, and its fantasy elements to his historically accurate nonfiction books, Lincoln, Burr, and Julian. When asked about his writing process, Vidal compares it to sex, saying, “You need a lack of self-consciousness. You just do it.” He says he writes to find out what will happen next, claiming he was halfway through writing Myra Breckenridge before he realized Myra had been a man. An attentive audience can be heard laughing and applauding throughout the conversation.

“I think anyone with writer’s block should say, ‘Well, thank god, I don’t have to do it. I’m not a writer.’ You’re condemned, really, to a kind of life of slavery. But I do it as naturally as I breathe.”

“Lack of self consciousness, I think, is the first thing a writer must learn. You just do it, you know. I’ve never done anything else.”

“To paraphrase John Quincy Adams: The United States is not designed to go forth and slay dragons in other lands. She could become Dictatress of the world, but we will have lost our soul.”

American writer Gore Vidal is known for many popular screenplays, plays, novels, and other literary works. He wrote and published more than 200 essays and 24 novels throughout his lifetime, and his career path included a venture into politics, a stint as a popular talk-show guest, and even running for political office. Among Vidal’s most famous works are his historical novels Julian (1964), Lincoln (1984), and the controversial social novel, Myra Breckinridge (1968). His political nonfiction, United States: Essays 1952-1992, won the National Book Award, and his memoir, Palimpsest (1995), was a bestseller. His screenplay for Ben-Hur (1959) won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Vidal died at his home in Hollywood, California, on July 31, 2012 from complications due to pneumonia. After his death, The New York Times described Vidal as “an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile or gotten more mileage from their talent.”

Award-winning poet Terrance Hayes begins by reading from his most recent collection, Lighthead, opening with “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy.” He is relaxed and conversational about his writing, pausing between poems to discuss why he chose to write about specific ideas and to define words that, he says, “only people east of the Mississippi would understand.” (For example: muscadine.) Many of the poems he reads lean toward the autobiographical side, often commenting on race and culture in America or creating portraits of the South. Hayes ends by answering several questions from the audience about his work and influences, and he reads a few more poems upon request.

Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), winner of the 2010 National Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include Wind In a Box (Penguin, 2006), Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Pres, 1999). Hayes’ honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a United States Artists Zell Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. How To Be Drawn, his new collection of poems, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2015. (Source: terrancehayes.com)

You can spend your whole life / doing no more than preparing for life and thinking, / “Is this all there is?”

“Not what you see, but what you perceive: / that’s poetry.”

“Maybe art’s only purpose is to preserve the self.”

“I always return to the idea of pulling a sentence, stretching a sentence out. That’s one of the ways of surprising myself.”

Jane Hirshfield reads poems from her new collection at the time, After, which was named a ‘best book of 2006’ by The Washington Post. The poem she begins with— “Theology”—immediately establishes Hirshfield as a writer in tune to the frequencies of the natural world, observing life and death, animals and humans, through a stunning montage. Between poems, Hirshfield shares the meaning of her collection: After is meant to encompass the idea of continuity after death. Each poem is an elegy, paying tribute to the subject by picking it apart and examining what it’s made of, thus making it seem infinite. Hirshfield’s language is quiet but complex, painting images of the natural world that echo the meaning and beauty of existence.

Jane Hirshfield is a prize-winning poet, translator, and essayist. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Come, Thief; After; and Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her newest books are a collection of poetry, The Beauty (2015), and a book of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015). Hirshfield’s honors include The Poetry Center Book Award; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; two Commonwealth Club’s California Book Awards; two Northern California Book Reviewers Awards; and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. In 2012, she received the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Orion, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, seven editions of The Best American Poetry, four Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and several other publications. In fall 2004, she was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets. In 2012, she was elected as a Chancellor of the Academy. (Source: barclayagency.com)

A good poem smuggles us past the border of our own hesitation.”

“These are poetic assays—poems that look at their subject with the mind of examination and dismantling to see what they’re made of, what the imagination can find in them.”

“You can’t look at the external without bringing in the internal, subjective self. And you can’t look at the inner world without doing so by means of the outer, objective world. Each of them cross mantles with each other.”

“We don’t actually have much agency. We have some choices, but not many.”

During his lecture, award-winning poet Li-Young Lee reads seven of his poems: “Station,” “The Children’s Hour,” “Have You Prayed?,” “Self-help for Fellow Refugees,” “Immigrant Blues,” “Trading for Heaven,” and “Virtues of the Boring Husband.” He introduces each poem with anecdotal information, including his philosophies about romantic love and its connection to finding God. In the Q&A afterward, Lee talks about the psychological and physiological processes involved in reading a poem and the role that personal identity plays in poetic composition.

“Now I realize . . . our original condition can’t be summed up somewhere back in time. That can’t be true. It must be here and now, or nowhere.”

“Before you fall in love, before you find somebody who loves you, you’re isolated, and terrified, and lonely. Then you fall in love, and you are overwhelmed, and inhabited by giant feelings and thoughts and cosmic-sized angels walking in and out of you. And you can’t articulate these feelings to anybody. And then you find that you can’t even articulate them to the beloved, and you’re more lonely than when you started. But I have a theory about that . . . romantic love may be, ultimately, supposed to bring you to a place where you encounter God. It’s a way to wean you from the world, and then from the beloved—the mortal beloved—to discover an immortal beloved. But I might be wrong.”

Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His family settled in the United States in 1964. He is the author of Rose (1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award; The City in Which I Love You (1990), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; The Winged Seed (1995); Book of My Nights (2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; and Behind My Eyes (2008). Lee has been the recipient of the Lannan Literary Award; the Whiting Writers’ Award; the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award; the I. B. Lavan Award; three Pushcart Prizes; grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1998, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from State University of New York at Brockport. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, with his wife, Donna, and their two sons. (Source: poets.org)

In one of the earliest recordings of Portland Arts & Lectures, Oregon writer Barry Lopez begins his lecture with stories about his travels in the Arctic, where he struggled with the language barrier but discovered a word that spoke volumes to him: isumatug, which translates roughly to “storyteller” or “the person who creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself.” Throughout his talk, Lopez focuses on using stories as a way to “get out of the self” and find one’s way back into the universe. According to Lopez, writing about a human’s connection to landscape is one of the most significant things a storyteller can do—it’s not always just an environmentalist’s way to share a political message. Lopez discusses the differences between exterior and interior landscapes, along with the mysteries that they both hold, and defines “story” as the way these two types of landscapes are connected.

Barry Lopez was born in 1945 in Port Chester, New York. He grew up in Southern California and New York City and attended college in the Midwest before moving to Oregon, where he has lived since 1968. He is the author of Arctic Dreams, for which he received the National Book Award; Of Wolves and Men, a National Book Award finalist; and eight works of fiction, including Light Action in the Caribbean, Field Notes, and Resistance. Lopez’s essays are collected in two books, Crossing Open Ground and About This Life. He contributes regularly to Harper’s, Granta, The Georgia Review, Orion, Outside, The Paris Review, and Manoa, among others. His work has also appeared in dozens of anthologies, including Best American Essays, Best Spiritual Writing, and the “best” collections from National Geographic, Outside, The Georgia Review, The Paris Review, and others. His most recent books are Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape and Outside. Lopez is a recipient of several awards, including the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; Guggenheim, Lannan, and National Science Foundation fellowships; and Pushcart prizes in fiction and nonfiction. (source: www.barrylopez.com)

When you really begin to work with story, you see that it is infinitely complex—the more simple it becomes, the more complex it really is revealed to be.”

“Publishing is not a business of trying to serve the most minds; it is a business of trying to take the best of what we are capable of making clear and giving it to as many people as have need of it or sense that in it they find a reflection of the order that they’re trying to establish in the world for themselves.”

“I don’t mean to make a distinction between fiction and nonfiction, but between the inauthentic and the authentic.”

“Part of what you’re trying to do as a reader—or a writer, rather—is respect the mystery of the exterior landscape: you’re never going to get it all.”

In this episode, we feature a conversation with Stephen Sondheim. Considered “one of the greatest songwriters in the history of musical theater,” Sondheim died at the age of 91 on November 26, 2021.

Sondhiem’s storied career includes mentorship by another icon of musical theater from a previous generation, Oscar Hammerstein. The first show for which Sondhiem would write the music and lyrics was Saturday Night in 1954 and from there he would go on to collaborate on some of the most influential musicals ever made including West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, and Into The Woods. Sondheim won every conceivable award, including the Pulitzer Prize, eight Grammys and eight Tonys, as well as an Academy Award. His work has stood the test of time, with current revivals of his shows on and off Broadway, and a movie version of West Side Story, directed by Stephen Spielberg.

In this episode we feature Sondhiem in a conversation with Frank Rich who was the drama critic of the New York Times from 1980 to 1993, and then an Op-Ed columnist from 1994 to 2011.  It was during his time as drama critic that Rich became friends with Sondhiem. What makes this conversation so incredible is the intimacy and rapport these two writers have with each other. Rich asks Sondheim about the evolution of his career, touching on the stories behind his best-known works and their adaptations.

Their appearance for Portland Arts & Lectures in 2008 was one of only a very few appearances the two ever made together.

“If you’re doing a musical that tells a story through song, then you’ve got to find a way of translating one medium into another.”

Stephen Sondheim was a composer and lyricist who collaborated on more than a dozen landmark shows (from which have come many standard songs) and who was the single most influential force in bringing the Broadway musical into the modern age. Beginning in his twenties, Sondheim contributed the lyrics to two classic collaborations with the playwright Arthur Laurents and the director-choreographer Jerome Robbins: West Side Story (1957; music by Leonard Bernstein) and Gypsy (1959; music by Jule Styne). The first Broadway show he produced as both composer and lyricist, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), had an even longer run than its predecessors. As Sondheim’s lyrics have entered the American language—from “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” to “The Ladies Who Lunch”—so too has his music liberated Broadway from traditional songwriting conventions. It is impossible to find a new musical of artistic ambition today that hasn’t been influenced by his breakthroughs in remaking the rules that once governed the traditional Broadway musical. Many of his musicals have been made into movies, including the Tim Burton-directed adaptation of Sweeney Todd. Sondheim won every conceivable award, including the Pulitzer Prize, two Grammys, an Oscar, and eight Tonys. He also won a special award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theater, The Kennedy Center Honors, the MacDowell Medal, the President’s Medal for the Arts, and the Praemium Imperiale (referred to as the “Nobel Prize of the Arts”). Sondheim passed away on November 26, 2021.

Frank Rich started as a Times Op-Ed columnist in January 1994. From 1999 to 2003, he was also a senior writer for The New York Times Magazine, a dual title that was a first for The Times. Rich joined New York magazine in June 2011 as writer-at-large, writing monthly on politics and culture and editing a special monthly section anchored by his essay. Among other honors, Mr. Rich received the George Polk Award for commentary in 2005. He has also written The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush’s America (2006), and his drama reviews were collected in Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993. Since 2008, Rich has also been a creative consultant at HBO and is an executive producer of Veep and Six by Sondheim, the Peabody Award-winning documentary about Stephen Sondheim.

“There has to be an emotional action in a song. I’ve always had very specific ideas as to what should happen in the number, either physically, or emotionally, or in terms of the other characters.”

“Many songs are just static. I try to write non-static songs.”

Robert Stone begins by comparing morality and art, describing the former as “a neo-Gothic structure: immense, ornate, and sterile” and the latter as “like a black panther…radical, the appealing cousin of crime. Never a dull moment with art.” He discusses the relationship between truth and beauty, and emphasizes the importance of fiction. “Storytelling is not a luxury to humanity,” he says, “it’s almost as necessary as bread. We cannot imagine ourselves without it, because the self is a story.”

He goes on to discuss writing his books and how his travels influenced the political and social aspects of those narratives. Several times he repeats “the first law of heaven: nothing is free.” This lecture is transcribed in the Literary Arts anthology, The World Split Open (Tin House, 2014).

Robert Stone’s novel Dog Soldiers (1974) won the National Book Award. His other novels include A Flag for Sunrise (1981), which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award; Children of Light (1986); and Bay of Souls (2003). He also published a memoir, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, in 2007. His latest novel, Death of the Black-Haired Girl, was published in fall of 2013. He lives in Key West, Florida. (source: The World Split Open)Laughter represents a rebellion against chaos, a rejection of evil, and an affirmation of balance and soundness.”

“There is no brown temple where morality resides. There is no high wire above where the artist whirls in freedom. If there’s a wire, it’s the wire we’re all on out here—the one that we live on—with only each other for company. Our having each other is both the good news and the bad.”

“Fiction is an agent against loneliness, an appeal to community, a bet on the possibility of spanning the gulf that separates one human being from another. “