The Archive Project

With his signature dry humor, Bill Bryson discusses incidents throughout his life that later became part of his nonfiction books. He begins with the story of hiking and his fear of bears, saying that one should “always go hiking with someone who can’t run as fast as you can.” He says that Oregonians have a well-developed, sophisticated sense of humor and notes the similarities to the dry humor in Iowa, where he was raised, and England, where he has lived for several years. Bryson also discusses his fear of flying in small planes and relates an amusing story about a trip to a refugee camp in Kenya where he flew through a storm and was sure he was going to perish. Finally, he discusses how the people he writes about have reacted to being featured in his books, specifically his friend Stephen Katz whom he hiked the Appalachian Trial with and then wrote about in the bestseller A Walk in the Woods.

Bill Bryson’s bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, A Walk in the Woods, and Notes from a Small Island, which was voted the book that best represents Britain in a national poll. His acclaimed book on the history of science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Royal Society’s Aventis Prize as well as the Descartes Prize, the European Union’s highest literary award. He has written books on language, on Shakespeare, and on his own childhood in the hilarious memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. His most recent bestseller is At Home: a Short History of Private Life, and his most recent critically lauded book is One Summer: America 1927, which chronicles a forgotten summer when America came of age and changed the world forever. He was born in the American Midwest and lives in the UK. (source: www.billbryson.co.uk)

It wasn’t until I left the [Appalachian] trail and did additional research and started thinking about things that I realized there were instances along the way that might make a fuller story. Then I actually got a sense that there could be a book about this whole thing.”

“There’s nothing better in the world than to discover books for yourself, rather than have them thrust on you. It’s such a feeling of excitement when you discover something that you think is really good rather than just confirming someone else’s opinion.” 

“The great thing about coming from America is that almost anything that’s worthwhile will follow you to wherever you go. Culturally, we are very lucky that America goes everywhere, so there isn’t anything, very much, that you miss.”

Ursula K. Le Guin opens with the question, “Where do you get your ideas from?” and replies with her favorite response, from Harlan Ellison: “He says he gets his ideas from a mail-order house in Schenectady.” Le Guin goes on to seriously address the question, because “unanswerable questions are just what fiction writers like to answer.” She discusses the process of all artists’ work, of the connection between experience and imagination, and the tendency for Americans to prefer realism in their novels and to put genre fiction in the literary ghetto. She warns against the dismissal of fantasy: “People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.” She goes on to explain the importance of reading, and how this virtual experience not only feeds writers’ imaginations, but is also a wholly different experience than viewing stories onscreen. She ends with a profound meditation on the nature of rhythm in the world and the way art breaks down barriers between people. This lecture is transcribed in the Literary Arts anthology The World Split Open (Tin House, 2014).

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in 1929 in Berkeley, and lives in Portland, Oregon. As of 2013, she has 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. (from www.ursulakleguin.com)

This is a very radical job, dealing with the ideas you get if you are an artist and take your job seriously, this shaping a vision into the medium of words. It’s what I like best to do in the world, and what I like to talk about when I talk about writing.” 

“Fiction results from imagination working on experience. We shape experience in our minds so that it makes sense. We force the world to be coherent, to tell us a story.” 

“Literature is a communal enterprise…The stuff from other people’s books gets into us just as our own experience does, is composted and transmuted and transformed by the imagination just as actual experiences are, and comes forth entirely changed.”

Kopple opens by talking about being grateful that documentaries are moving into the mainstream, with audiences appreciating these “real-life, nonfiction films.” She then tells about her journey to becoming a filmmaker, which started while she was studying political science in college and, instead of writing a paper, decided to make a short film showcasing people who’d had lobotomies. “My professor was outraged,” she said. “I got a D….but I was hooked.” Kopple goes on to discuss her process making several films, including Winter Soldier, Harlan County, USA, American Dream, Fallen Champ: the Untold Story of Mike Tyson, Century of Women, Wild Man Blues, and My Generation. She emphasizes her desire to portray people in truthful ways—to delve deeper than the headlines and expose her audiences to new perspectives that they would never see otherwise.

Barbara Kopple is a two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker. A director and producer of narrative films and documentaries, her most recent project is the documentary Running from Crazy, which examines the personal journey of writer, model and actress Mariel Hemingway, the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, as she strives for a greater understanding of her complex family history. Barbara has received several awards, including the Human Rights Watch Film Festival Irene Diamond Award, National Society of Film Critics Award, the SilverDocs/Charles Guggenheim Award, , the White House Project’s EPIC Award, the International Documentary Association Career Achievement Award and the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize. In 2010, Barbara received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from American University. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Director’s Guild of America, New York Women in Film and Television, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and actively participates in organizations that address social issues and support independent filmmaking. (source: www.cabincreekfilms.com)

I had parents who did everything, and still do, everything they could for me, and gave me a real sense of self so I could take risks. And I decided that I really wanted to do films that were so far from what I understood and what I knew to sort of bring me closer and make me able to communicate.”

“What was the most important thing for me, really, was to go beyond the headlines, and go beyond the tabloids, and really find out who this kid is, and what he’s about, in a way that nobody else could. And something that I really like to do is to look under a blanket where you’re not supposed to see, and pull things out, and that’s what I tried to do in the Mike Tyson piece.”

Journalist and documentary filmmaker Sebastian Junger begins his lecture by stating that he had no idea he was going to be a war reporter. Starting out as an anthropology major, Junger spent several years as a tree-climber until he cut open his leg with a chainsaw and began questioning his path in life. “There was a war in Bosnia,” he says, “and I just went.”

Junger talks about his work reporting on combat in Afghanistan just before and during the U.S. invasion and how this intense experience informed both his writing and his life. He notes his own strange fascination with war, which fuels his war reporting, explaining it as a desire to understand why humans think war is both horrifying and entertaining. Specifically, Junger shares anecdotes about his experience with a unit in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, famous for being the most combat-heavy area in the Afghan War, giving vivid description of combat and every man’s brushes with death, including his own. Throughout the evening, Junger delves into the complex nature of war, the brotherhood that develops amongst soldiers, and society’s responsibilities to these soldiers.

Sebastian Junger is the internationally acclaimed bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, A Death in Belmont, and Fire. As a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a contributor to ABC News, he has covered major international news stories in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and other locations around the globe. He has been awarded the National Magazine Award and an SAIS Novartis Prize for Journalism. The Perfect Storm stayed on the New York Times’ bestseller list for more than three years, set sales records, and became a major motion picture from Warner Bros.

For over a year, Junger and photojournalist Tim Hetherington embedded with the battle company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team in the remote and heavily contested Korengal valley of eastern Afghanistan. Reporting on the war from the soldiers’ perspective, Junger spent weeks at a time at a remote outpost that saw more combat than almost anywhere else in the entire country. The professional result is twofold: the book WAR and a documentary, Restrepo, that won the 2010 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

Junger’s work has also been published in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, and Men’s Journal. He has reported on the LURD besiegement of Monrovia in Liberia, human rights abuses in Sierra Leone, war crimes in Kosovo, the peacekeeping mission in Cyprus, wildfire in the American West, guerilla war in Afghanistan, and hostage-taking in Kashmir. He has worked as a freelance radio correspondent during the war in Bosnia. He ccurrently lives in New York City and on Cape Cod. (source: www.sebastianjunger.com)

I realized war is a lot of things. It’s horrifying, but it’s also very exciting, you know. It’s profound, and it’s also very meaningless. It’s a lot of things. And I realized that if I wanted to be a war reporter, I couldn’t step outside the tent for the unpleasant stuff.”

“That is what makes war so complicated. You can’t package it in a neat liberal or conservative package and dispense with it. War insists on being puzzled over and engaged with. It’s incredibly elusive. It’s like love, like one of these things that’s eternal and ancient and completely elusive, and you’ll never fully understand it.”

“There are two things that we all have complete control over, that can’t be taken away from us, and that you’re not born with: courage and compassion.”

Three months after the catastrophic earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat begins her lecture with a proverb from the country she grew up in: “We remember, but we move forward.” She mentions Haiti’s nickname, terre glissée or “slippery ground,” and expounds on the metaphoric and literal connotations of that phrase. With the devastation still on everyone’s mind, Danticat tells of both her own and her family’s experiences during and after the earthquake, mentioning that her cousin Maxo was killed. She witnessed bodies in the rubble and an “altered human landscape” of so many people with injuries. After the quake, Haitians would simply call it “the thing,” or “the devil dancing,” or even onomatopoeias like “gudugudu.” Referencing several other Haitian writers throughout her lecture, such as Dany Lafferière, Danticat discusses the role of the artist who comes from a place of loss, including the importance of bearing witness.

“There is poetry often in Haitian language, through proverbs, through the way that we try to interpret tragedy.”

“I kept wondering, would there be poetry amidst the Haitian ruins?”

“Nou led, nou la; we are ugly, but we are here.”

“The Angel of Death is more democratic [than God]; everybody goes.”

Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including Claire of the Sea Light, a New York Times notable book; Brother, I’m Dying, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist; Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; and The Dew Breaker, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the inaugural Story Prize. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She lives in Miami.

Toni Morrison begins her lecture by saying she wants to discuss two of her books in particular—Beloved (1987) and Jazz (still forthcoming at the time)—and the progression of her writing. She considers the impact of history on both novels. In discussing Beloved, Morrison touches on the pornography of writing about violence as a voyeur and how she worked to keep the focus on the characters themselves, not the institution of slavery. For Jazz, Morrison discusses the genre’s contradictions, its place in the cultural psyche, and how the Jazz Age “was a period when black people placed an indelible hand of agency on the cultural scene.” All of this, she says, was part of her sustained investigation of “self-regard, in both racial and gendered terms.” Morrison also discusses the interior, imaginative freedom that jazz fostered and how this agency changed the course of cultural history in America.

Toni Morrison was born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. She was an avid reader, and her favorite authors included Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. Morrison attended Howard University and wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye, while teaching there and raising two children. She went on to become the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Sula, Song of Solomon, Jazz, and Home. In 1988, she won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for Beloved, and in 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best American novel published in the previous twenty-five years. In 1993, Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her most recent book, The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, Meditations, was published in February of 2019. Morrison passed away in August of 2019.

 The embrace of history and fiction is what I was concerned with—or rather, the effort to disentangle the grip of history, while remaining in its palm, so to speak.

We move from data to information, to knowledge, to wisdom. And separating one from the other, being able to distinguish among and between them, that is knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category of intelligence. That’s generally what serious education is about.

It’s impossible to hear that sort of blues cry without acknowledging in it the defiance, the grandeur, the agency that frequently belies the wale of disappointed love. And it may be through that agency—and the even more powerful assertiveness of what we call Jazz, which uses those gestures—that is how compromise becomes reconciliation. It’s also the way in which imagination fosters real possibilities. If you can’t imagine it, you can’t have it.

In a lecture titled “Finding the Known World,” featured in the collection The World Split Open (Tin House 2014), Edward P. Jones opens up about his original fascination with writing and the simple images that inspired him to write an entire novel. In the early 1990s, he became interested in the way slavery and Black history are depicted in America. He read dozens of books on the subject as a means to begin “building a novel.” In the end, Jones discovered that it was his own imagination and heart that fueled his writing, not the books of research and history that he tried to memorize. When Jones lost his job, he spent all his time writing and creating stories. From there, he invented the entire landscape that his stories are set in.

“The reader I tried to satisfy, day after day, was me. But who was I to say whether what I had produced was any good? We are all, in the end, capable of bad taste at any time. Especially when the dominant voice we hear is the one in our head.”

“I suppose it is inevitable that a Black person writing about slavery leads to speculation that the writer has some agenda. I know this is not true about me…I had no issues I wanted to present. I always felt, from the first words to the last, that I was telling a simple story about complex people who usually tried to do the best they could but who often came up short.”

“At heart, I’m just a fiction writer and not a historian. The facts I need are in the imagination, the facts and the truth of a world of what I make up.”

“I do not say this in any grandiose way, but as a simple storyteller, I became responsible for all the people I imagined. I became a god of the world I was creating.”

Edward P. Jones was born in Washington, D.C., in 1950. He attended the local public schools and won a scholarship to Holy Cross College. Seven years after he graduated from college, he earned his MFA at the University of Virginia. After a series of jobs, he began working for a tax newsletter—first as a proofreader and then eventually as a columnist, a position he held for more than ten years. During this time, Jones kept on writing. His first short story was published in Essence in 1976. Since then, he has had stories published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Callaloo. He has taught creative writing at the University of Virginia, George Mason University, the University of Maryland, and Princeton University. Jones’s first collection of short stories, Lost in the City, was published in 1992 and won the PEN/Hemingway Award; it was also shortlisted for the National Book Award and won the Lannan Foundation Award. His first novel, The Known World (2003), received the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and he was named a MacArthur Fellow for 2004. All Aunt Hagar’s Children, Jones’s latest collection of short stories, was published in 2006. (Source: The World Split Open)

Chinua Achebe begins his presentation by reading a passage from his 1987 novel, Anthills of the Savanna, as well as several of his poems. The photographer Robert Lyons, who Achebe collaborated with to produce the book Another Africa, joins him on stage. Lyons discusses the role that photography plays in developing stereotypes in African cultures, and he explains his approach to depicting the complexities of the huge, diverse continent. Both Achebe and Lyons talk about their work to broaden the general public’s perspective on Africa.

“I’ve made it my life’s work to talk about my home, because I couldn’t find—in the books I read, in the pictures I saw, in the thinking that I encountered—any awareness of myself. This is really how my interest in writing came about. Because, you see, every people have their story, and, we in Africa, we’re in the unfortunate position of not having our story in the gallery of world stories. And this struck me even as a child.”

“Speed is violence. Power is violence. Weight, violence. The butterfly seeks safety in lightness, in weightlessness, undulating flight.” (from Achebe’s poem “Butterfly”)

Chinua Achebe was born in Eastern Nigeria in 1930. He went to the local public schools and was among the first students to graduate from the University of Ibadan. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation as a radio producer and Director of External Broadcasting, and it was during this period that he began his writing career. Achebe was the author, co-author, or editor of some seventeen books, among them five novels: Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). He was the editor of several anthologies as well, including the essay collections Morning Yet on Creation Day and Hopes and Impediments, and the poetry collection Beware Soul Brother. He was also the editor of the magazine Okike and founding editor of the Heinemann series on African literature, a list that now has more than three hundred titles. Achebe is often called the father of modern African literature. He has received 25 honorary doctorates from universities throughout the world. (Source: The Paris Review The Art of Fiction No. 139)

With self-deprecating humor and insight, Colson Whitehead discusses his youth as “a bit of a shut-in” and his development as a writer, poking fun at his early misconceptions about the profession, stating, “Half the reason I got into the writing business was so I could sit on my ass all day.” He goes on to tell anecdotes about the successes that helped his career flourish, as well as his plans for the future. Toward the end of his lecture, Whitehead gives a lengthy reading from his then-upcoming novel, Sag Harbor.

Colson Whitehead was born in 1969 and raised in Manhattan. After graduating from Harvard College, he started working at the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, books, and music. His first novel, The Intuitionist, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and a winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award.

John Henry Days (2001) followed and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. The Colossus of New York (2003) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) was a recipient of the PEN/Oakland Award. Whitehead’s reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications, such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper’s, and Granta. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, A Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. (Source: www.colsonwhitehead.com)

I was a bit of a shut-in. I would have preferred to have been a sickly child, but it didn’t work out that way. I always like it when I read a biography of somebody, like Joyce, or whatever, and it says, ‘They were a sickly child, forced to retreat into a world of imagination.’ It sounds so wonderful. Instead, I just didn’t like going outside.”

“So then I stated thinking about it scientifically. The average book of literary fiction sells, like, 5,000 copies. 5,000 copies, if you’re lucky. Now, assume that everyone loves the book—doesn’t just throw it into the trash in disgust—and, in addition, makes 10 other people read it, who also love it. Let’s say this book has 50,000 readers—50,000 people who love it. But there are 4.5 billion people in the world. You made an impact in the lives of .00—a lot more zeros—01 % of the population. You’re not even a gnat trying to get the attention of an elephant; you’re a microbe in the butt of a gnat trying to get the attention of an elephant.”

“I really don’t like the precocious teenager in fiction. I never really took to Catcher in the Rye. Looking back, if we just gave Holden Caulfield some Prozac and an Xbox I think he’d be better off, and we could save a lot of trouble.”

Nikky Finney, the 2011 National Book Award winner for poetry, tells a full-house audience that her grandmother’s words have always guided her work as a poet: “To tell a lie is a sin of the highest order.” She gives extensive, fascinating introductions for each of her long-form narrative poems before performing them. Her subjects include family ties, the writing life, oppression, maternity, solidarity, class disparity, and the plight of Black women in America. Both her poems and her commentaries about them are powerful and moving.

“The influence of my grandmother, who was a farming woman in South Carolina, who probably went as far as the tenth grade or so, but who was the most brilliant woman I ever knew, because she mixed her head knowledge with her belly knowledge, and she never let me forget that. And she did make me tell the truth—or else. And I’m still trying to do that with my work. I’m really trying very hard not to skirt the hard things, but to still say them as beautifully as I know how. Because, who needs someone to rant up on a podium? None of us. But who needs somebody at a podium and a microphone to tell the truth for once: we all do. So I thank my grandmother, every day of my life, for not letting me off easy in that way—because I see so many people lying easily today, like it means nothing.”

“I read poetry in Philly for the first time ever. She started walking up, all the way, from in back of the room. From against the wall she came, big coats, boots, eyes soft as candles in two storms blowing. Something she could not see from way back there, but could clearly hear in my voice. Something she needed to know before pouring herself back out, into the icy city night. She came close, to get a good look, to ask me something she found in a strange way missing, from my black woman poetry. Side stepping the crowd, ignoring the book signing line, she stood there waiting, for everyone to go, waiting like some kind of representative. And when it was just the two of us, she stepped into the shoes of her words: ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘You write real soft, spell it out kind. No bullet holes, no open wounds in your words; how do you do that? Write, like you’ve never been hit before.’ I could hardly speak, all my breath held ransom by her question.”

Nikky Finney was born in South Carolina, within listening distance of the sea. A child of activists, she came of age during the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements. At Talladega College, nurtured by Hale Woodruff’s Amistad murals, Finney began to understand the powerful synergy between art and history. Finney has authored four books of poetry: On Wings Made of Gauze (1985), Rice (1995), The World Is Round (2003), and Head Off & Split (2011). The John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Southern Letters and Literature at the University of South Carolina, Finney also authored the fiction work Heartwood (1997), edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. Finney’s fourth book of poetry, Head Off & Split, was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for poetry.