The Archive Project

In one of the earliest recordings of Portland Arts & Lectures, Paul Theroux talks about the definition of travel writing and how, oftentimes, the best travel writing can take place at home. He declares that it is always about discovery and learning something new, whether about oneself or others. Theroux is fascinated with people who go through some kind of struggle or ordeal that forces them to test their limits. He tells personal anecdotes about his life and his travels through China. Although he admits to being initially intimidated by the country, Theroux learned as much as he could about Chinese history and culture, and explains in his lecture how the journey led him to several self-discoveries of his own.

In a travel book, a character might either be the person writing the book or the people in the country where the person is traveling. Travel writing is often a form of autobiography, and has nothing to do with the place that the person appears to be writing about.”

“You can’t suffer without finding something spiritual about yourself.”

“Travel writing is about discovery. It’s impossible to write anything in which there’s no discovery.”

Paul Theroux is an American travel writer and novelist. He was born in Massachusetts as the third of seven children. He left Medford immediately after high school and eventually joined the Peace Corps, where he was sent to Africa, which he would return to many times throughout his life. Theroux’s highly acclaimed novels include Blinding Light, Hotel Honolulu, My Other Life, Kowloon Tong, and The Mosquito Coast. His renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Dark Star Safari, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and The Happy Isles of Oceania. He currently lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod with his wife, Shelia. (source: www.paultheroux.com)

With his signature humor and intellect, Hitchens begins by asking his audience to consider whether morality is innately human or divinely imposed, citing examples of people committing horrific crimes in the name of religion. He denounces the moral relativism of religions and argues that atheists also have strong moral convictions and high principles. His intellectual commentary continues along the lines of his bestselling book, God is Not Great, as he argues that the mythology of religions is not only absurd but, in many instances, destructive. For Hitchens, the beauty and miracle of life in the universe is even more pronounced when it isn’t attributed to and ruled by a “celestial dictatorship.”

Everything we’re made of—cheer up, we’re not just materialists here—everything we’re made of is stardust. You don’t have to despair and become a bored old morose materialist. You still have irony. You still have music, love, sex, landscape, Chinese food, philosophy—which is much more consoling than mere incantation—and you still have the sense of wonder that comes from the extraordinary beauty and symmetry of the universe, and the wonderful kinship that we’re beginning to find out that we also have through our genome.”

“What is claimed by religion is the power to bind and to loose, to save or to condemn—to offer real salvation, to make the promise of paradise or the threat of hell. A great deal rests on it. The religious are claiming to know more than, in my opinion, any primate or mammal can possibly know.”

“I’m sometimes grouped with a tendency or a faction called the new atheists. There’s nothing particularly new about what we say.”

“But for the idea that we are not allowed to know any of this, without divine permission, that it only comes to us as a gift, that we are mere passive recipients of wisdom and that without submission to this celestial dictatorship we wouldn’t even know how to behave well to one another—I think it’s time to go a bit beyond ridicule and beyond indignation and to say very staunchly that we will resist that and that we will enforce and protect our constitution and its patrolling of the frontier between church and state and its liberty of conscience and its long record of people who have been willing to die to uphold, that as I try and put it, ‘Mr. Jefferson, on that wall of separation, build up that wall!’”

Christopher Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, England in 1949. He attended Oxford and was the first person in his family to go to a university. He moved to the United States in 1981, where he wrote for The Statesman and met Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and James Fenton. Hitchens has said, “They persuaded me that it wasn’t enough just to make the point; that style was substance, and that there was something in language itself.” Hitchens also wrote for The Nation, Vanity Fair, and Slate.

Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor, and co-editor of over thirty books, including five collections of essays. His own books, several of which were scathing critiques of public figures, include The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish (1990), The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995) and No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (1999). He has a reputation as an outspoken polemicist, and was perhaps best known for his 2008 book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, a finalist for the National Book Award. He was on book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22: Some Confessions and Contradictions, in 2010 when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Hitchens passed away in 2011.

Frank McCourt blends satire with honesty as he tells his audience about what led him to becoming a teacher. He begins by discussing the jobs he had before being admitted into New York University, noting that his experience training attack dogs in Germany for the US Army was particularly helpful for his career as a teacher. McCourt also talks extensively about his education in Ireland while he was growing up there, and explains how Catholicism and sin occupied most of his education. By the time he became a teacher, he says, he had stopped going to Confession, but explaining Catholic beliefs became one of the things that engaged his students the most. He also discusses his difficulties with teaching, especially with learning how to control the classroom. He gives a passionate argument that teachers in America are undervalued, and that it will be impossible to fix the American education system without a higher regard for teachers.

 “You’re looking at a man who has a very strong sense of sin. It gives you something to write about.”

“In the high school classroom you’re a drill sergeant, a Rabbi, a shoulder to cry on, a disciplinarian, a singer, a low level scholar, a clerk, a referee, a clown, a counselor, a dress code enforcer, a conductor, an apologist, a philosopher, a collaborator, a tap dancer, a politician, a therapist, a fool, a traffic cop, a Priest, a mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, a bookkeeper, a critic, a psychologist—you’re everything.”

[Advice to emerging writers] “The best thing to do is get a notebook and start scribbling, scribbling, scribbling; just like a sculptor with the marble, something will emerge from it later on. It’s like training for the marathon: if you don’t use it every day, you lose it. Writing a book is similar, mentally and psychologically, to training for a marathon.”

Frank McCourt (1930-2009) was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a family with seven children. His family returned to Ireland due to the Depression, but they continued to struggle with poverty. His father abandoned them when McCourt was in his early teens. At nineteen, he returned to the U.S., served in the Korean War, and graduated from Brooklyn College. He wrote the bestselling memoir Angela’s Ashes, which won a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Award. McCourt taught high school English for thirty years, and he received the Ellis Island Family Heritage Award for Exemplary Service in the Field of the Arts and the United Federation of Teachers John Dewey Award for Excellence in Education.

Elizabeth Strout describes this lecture as “Why I think fiction matters.” She declares that in good fiction, a reader finds “the truest things,” and says that she wants to talk about what that phrase means and why it is important to discover. Strout goes on to describe the human experience as necessarily lonely, and she explains how fiction gives us access to the experiences of others; she believes that in this way, fiction facilitates the compassion necessary for understanding ourselves and others. Throughout this discussion of fiction, Strout provides illustrative and humorous anecdotes about her youth and her development as a writer.

“My point is this: we think we know our neighbors; we really think we know our loved ones, our children, our best friends who share confidences with us. But I think my mother was right: we never really do know. It’s always made me very sad and very frustrated. So, basically, I’ve spent my life being plagued ceaselessly with the question, ‘What does it feel like to be another person?’ And I think fiction is one of the places that we come closest to knowing what it might feel like be another person.”

“Reading is celebration of the mystery of ourselves.”

Elizabeth Strout was born in Portland, Maine, and grew up in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire. From a young age, she was drawn to writing things down, keeping notebooks that recorded the quotidian details of her days. She was also drawn to books and spent hours of her youth in the local library lingering among the stacks of fiction. During the summer months of her childhood, Strout played outdoors, either with her brother, or, more often, alone, and this is where she developed her deep and abiding love of the physical world: the seaweed covered rocks along the coast of Maine and the woods of New Hampshire with its hidden wildflowers.

During her adolescent years, Strout continued writing avidly, having conceived of herself as a writer from early on. She read biographies of writers and was already studying—on her own—the way American writers, in particular, told their stories. Poetry was something she read and memorized; by the age of sixteen, Strout was sending out stories to magazines. Her first story was published when she was twenty-six.

Strout attended Bates College, graduating with a degree in English in 1977. Two years later, she went to Syracuse University College of Law, where she received a law degree along with a Certificate in Gerontology. She worked briefly for Legal Services before moving to New York City, where she became an adjunct in the English Department of Borough of Manhattan Community College. By this time, Strout was publishing more stories in literary magazines as well as Redbook and Seventeen. Juggling the needs that came with raising a family and her teaching schedule, she found a few hours each day to work on her writing. (source: www.elizabethstrout.com/about/)

“Fiction is there to let us know we’re not alone. Whatever we’ve thought and felt has probably been thought and felt before.”

“What I try to do when I work is find that sentence that can resonate with the dignity that the human experience deserves, a sentence of muscularity that can hold both the gravity and the felicity of returning us to those more primitive emotions. For me, it means finding the right sound that conveys the combination of truth and compassion.”

A.L. Kennedy gives an amusing lecture about her journey to becoming a writer, beginning with an anecdote about learning to read as a child and how excited she was: instead of telling anyone at school that she could read, Kennedy kept it to herself and therefore only read books that she wanted to read. She also talks about the “oral culture” in Scotland and how big of a role storytelling plays there. Throughout her speech, Kennedy reads excerpts from other writers (such as C.S Lewis) when she wants to show examples of new worlds being created. Her writing began because she wanted to invent her own realities, and she talks extensively about discovering her ability to be a writer and how that changed her life and perception of language.

A.L. Kennedy was born in Dundee in 1965. She is the author of fifteen books: six novels, six short story collections, and three works of nonfiction. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her new book All The Rage—a collection of short stories—was published by Jonathan Cape in spring 2014.  It will soon appear in the US and Canada. She is also a dramatist for the stage, radio, TV, and film. She writes for a number of UK and overseas publications and has a blog with The Guardian Online. (source: https://www.a-l-kennedy.co.uk/)

“I’ve gone through a strange couple of years, which has made me reevaluate why I started writing—because I never intended to write, because frankly it’s a ludicrous thing to want to do all the time.”

In an off-the-cuff lecture, McBride strolls through his childhood in a busy household of twelve to his time at Oberlin College as an undergrad and Columbia as a budding journalist. His vibrant writing career placed him at People magazine, where his sole job was to cover Michael Jackson. Later, he moved on to The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. McBride explains why he left the journalism world to tour the country as a professional musician and composer for nearly eight years. During this time he began to revisit his roots and write about his mother, a venture that turned into his first novel The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother. During his lecture, McBride weaves in his opinion on racial issues in America’s past and present, leading to share his inspiration for researching John Brown, the hero of his latest novel The Good Lord Bird.

James McBride grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, New York. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Music Composition and a Master’s degree in Journalism from Columbia University. He has worked as a staff writer for People, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post before quitting his writing career to spend eight years as a professional musician and composer. His first book, The Color of Water, is a memoir in which the narrative alternates between his own story and exploration of his racial identity and his white mother’s story. McBride explained that this work took fourteen years to write, as his mother slowly revealed herself to him. The memoir has sold over two million copies and was on The New York Times bestseller list for over two years. He went on to write two more novels, and his third, The Good Lord Bird, won the 2013 National Book Award. McBride holds several honorary doctorates and is Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Saul Bellow declares the title of his talk to be “The Decline of Something or Other” and begins by reading a text he has been working on about boyhood, nostalgia, and growing up as a voracious reader with similar-minded friends. In Chicago, he explains, the adults frowned upon this “intoxication with literature” and treated most culture and the arts with indifference. He proceeds to explain the important role that the arts play in society—especially the novel, which he calls “a very special sort of privileged communication in which every reader gets the inside story.” He defends the arts, especially their relationship with science, and says novelists are engaged in the study of human consciousness and self-awareness, but “we, mankind, are a slippery subject.”

“Let me make a pitch now for the novel. More fully than any other kind of book, the novel allows us to contemplate the possibilities of life, of human passion and human emotion, the tragedy of human character, the sweetness of human spirits—or their baseness. The novel is a very special sort of privileged communication in which every reader gets the inside story.”

“Here is my argument as concise as I can make it: the greatest mental achievement of modern times is the achievement of science…But the generally unspoken premise of the novelist is that there is much about human existence that is not explained by victorious science. It simply does not describe human creatures as we are. Too much is left out.”

Saul Bellow was born on June 10, 1915 in Lachine, Quebec, Canada and moved with his family to Chicago in 1924. He studied at Northwestern University and became a merchant marine during WWII, at which time he completed his first novel, Dangling Man (1944). He had a long career in academia, punctuated by numerous award-winning novels, including The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Humboldt’s Gift. Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. He died in 2005.

Verghese opens his lecture with the quote “Geography is destiny,” and goes on to discuss growing up in Ethiopia and his journey to becoming a physician and a writer. He says that his “real call to medicine” came through a book—he had a profound epiphany while reading Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham—and has since then realized the power of books to change the course of a person’s life. He discusses his journey into medicine, which also informed his development as a writer—specifically during the early days of caring for AIDS patients who were returning to their hometowns at the end of their lives. He wrote a paper in response to this experience, stating “I felt that the cold language of science didn’t begin to capture the tragic nature of this voyage, didn’t begin to capture the heartache of the families, didn’t begin to capture my own grief at witnessing this again and again.” He compares the bedside medical exam to a ritual, calling it an important practice “worthy of our best efforts” that shouldn’t be eclipsed by technology.

“I was also discovering the beautiful thing about books; that is, those quiet, inner moments of awakening are far, far more profound than outward declarations of intent.”

There are few who combine a career as physician, teacher, and author as well as Abraham Verghese, whose name is a frequent byline in newspapers, magazines, and other media forums across the world, including National Public Radio, the New England Journal of Medicine, the New York Times, The Guardian, and The Times of India.

His work as a physician informs his writing, and the reflection that comes through his writing helps him empathize with his patients—to see them individually, as human beings who are suffering, fearful and in need not just of treatment, but of comfort and reassurance. Imagining his patients’ experience has driven his work throughout his medical career. His emphasis on empathy and healing is the focus of his talks, nationally and internationally, and he stresses the importance of the patient-physician relationship in an era when advances in medical technology often tend to de-personalize patient care.

“When you write fiction, you can make up, you can go into the grave and come back, you can do anything you want, you can have a dead person tell the story. But, you have to work twenty times harder on page one to suck the reader in and make them forget that this is a made-up story, make them forget everything about their life, make them enter your world and live through three generations and finally get done and realize it’s still Tuesday. That’s how hard you have to work.”

Margaret Atwood’s signature wit is in full force in this landmark lecture on, as she phrases it, “problems of female bad behavior in the creation of literature.” Novels, she argues, are not moral tracts for teaching readers how to behave. One can almost hear her smile when she says that “art is what you can get away with.” Atwood dissects the cultural expectations of female characters—often a polarity of virtuous or monstrous—noting the struggles that feminist writers face when confronting these conventions. Citing examples such as Euripides’ Medea, Toni Morrison’s The Beloved, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter, and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Atwood confronts traditional female literary tropes and the evolution of female characters throughout history. Her insights on the task of negotiating between what the reader, the writer, and even the character may think of as “good” and “bad,” as well as the necessity of creating multi-dimensional female characters, make this a must-listen for readers and writers alike.

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master’s degree from Radcliffe College. Atwood is the author of more than 40 volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and nonfiction, but is best known for her novels, including The Edible Woman (1969), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the Booker Prize in 2000. Her latest work is a book of short stories called Stone Mattress: Nine Tales (2014). Her newest novel, MaddAddam (2013), is the final volume in a three-book series that began with the Man-Booker prize-nominated Oryx and Crake (2003) and continued with The Year of the Flood (2009). Her nonfiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, was adapted for the screen in 2012. Atwood’s work has been published in more than 40 languages. She currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson. (Biography courtesy of margaretatwood.ca/biography)

There is a widespread tendency to judge such characters [in books] as if they were job applicants, or public servants, or perspective roommates, or somebody you would consider marrying. Let me underline the fact that the characters in novels are none of the above—and if they were, we would all be in deep trouble.”

“Novels are made of language, and language, being human, is messy. In short, the novel is ambiguous and multifaceted, not because it is perverse, although it may be that as well, but because it attempts to grapple with what was once referred to as ‘the human condition,’ and it does so using a medium that is as slippery as a greased lawyer, as stretchy as an old-time panty girdle, and as hard to pin down as a bowl of Jell-O—namely, the language itself.”

“The creation of a bad female character doesn’t mean that women should lose the vote.”

In a talk that switches conversationally between explaining her influences and reading from a few of her poems, Natasha Trethewey discusses writing her third collection of poetry, Native Guard, her upcoming collection at the time, Thrall, and the ways that personal and national histories intertwine. For her, writing is a pilgrimage and a way of coming to terms with what has happened. She is obsessed with learning about the South and its oppressive history because it is a part of her own history, and much of her work touches on slavery and black history in the South, specifically the history of the native guard and other black regiments. While she thinks figuratively about the inability to return to her past, she also discusses how it is literally impossible, with Hurricane Katrina’s damage on her hometown in Gulfport, Mississippi drastically changing her idea of home. Memory also remains an obsession for Trethewey, and she seeks to memorialize her mother in the same way she memorializes the South.

“When I wrote Theories of Time and Space, I was thinking very figuratively about the impossibility of returning home, of going back to those places we’ve left behind. Not because the places are gone or forever changed, but because we are.”

“Whoever has the power to tell the story has all the power.”

“When I’m writing, one of the things that I love is how I discover things that I hadn’t known before. And so for me, research is always a part of what I’m doing. Whenever I get stuck in a poem, it’s probably because I don’t know enough.”

Natasha Trethewey is a former US poet laureate and the author of five collections of poetry, as well as a book of creative nonfiction. She is currently the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. In 2007 she won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection Native Guard.