The Archive Project

This episode of The Archive Project features author Salman Rushdie reading from and discussing his 1999 New York Times bestseller The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Just one year after almost a decade in hiding from the Iranian government, Rushdie made his first public appearance in Portland, discussing the ideas, both mythical and musical, that inspired this New York Times bestseller. In his remaking of the myth of Orpheus, Rushdie tells the story of Vina Apsara, a pop star, and Ormus Cama, an extraordinary songwriter and musician, who captivate and change the world through their music and their romance. Beginning in Bombay in the fifties, moving to London in the sixties, and New York for the last quarter century, the novel pulsates with a half-century of music and celebrates the power of rock ‘n’ roll. In this episode, Rushdie discusses the musical and mythological influences that inspired this ambitious work of magical realism.

“The thing that I wanted to do most of all was to write a love story. And to find a way of writing a contemporary love story that was neither gushily sentimental nor fashionably cynical, but which could face up to great passion and try and make sense of it. And so, in my usual perverse way, while trying to write a modern story I found myself thinking about an ancient myth.”

Salman Rushdie is the author of several novels, including Grimus, Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and Shalimar the Clown. He has written collections of short stories, including East, West, and co-edited with Elizabeth West a collection of Indian literature in English, Mirrorwork. He has also published several works of nonfiction, among them The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, and Joseph Anton, a memoir of his life under the fatwa issued after the publication of The Satanic Verses. His fourteenth novel, Victory City, released in 2023.

On April 5, 2016, former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove was honored as Oregon State University’s Stone Award winner. The Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement honors a major American author who has created a body of critically acclaimed work and been a dedicated mentor to succeeding generations of young writers. In her acceptance interview with OSU Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing Karen Holmberg, Dove addresses her writing process, adapting her work to the stage, and facing fear through poetry, among other subjects.

“I think by facing it—not trying to conquer it, but by facing it and entering it—I feel a little less afraid of it. I feel like I’m getting to know the fear. I mean, half of fear—well, half of anything—is the fear of the unknown.”

Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize winner and former U. S. Poet Laureate, is the only poet honored with both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts. Her recent works include Playlist for the Apocalypse, Sonata Mulattica, and the National Book Award-shortlisted Collected Poems: 1974-2004. In 2021 she was awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2023 she received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She lives in Charlottesville, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia.

“I don’t think there’s any shame is subterfuge. I don’t think that tacking it straight on is everybody’s thing—and in fact, what is really frustrating is if you have a fear, or you have an emotion you really want to get out, and you try to pour it out and it isn’t a good poem…One of the things I think a young poet can do is to go at it sideways, to tell it slant.”

“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”

In this episode of The Archive Project, Yann Martel reads selections from his novel Life of Pi, which received the Man Booker Prize in 2002 and was later adapted into a feature film. Between readings, Martel shares information about his writing process and his overarching philosophy behind the book. At the conclusion of the reading, he answers a series of questions from the audience, including the number one inquiry on everyone’s mind: Just how will reading this novel make a person believe in God? 

“I must say a word about fear: It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.”

Yann Martel was born in Spain in 1963, the son of Canadian parents studying graduate courses abroad. Both of his parents went on to join the Canadian Foreign Service, and Martel divided his childhood between Costa Rica, France, Spain, Mexico, and Canada. This wanderlust continued into his adulthood, when he traveled to Iran, Turkey, and India before taking up residence in Montreal. 

Martel worked a variety of odd jobs in his early 20s—including tree planter, dishwasher, and security guard—before devoting himself to writing at age 27. He gained international attention in 2002 for his second novel and third publication, Life of Pi, a fantasy adventure about a boy stranded in a lifeboat with a host of zoo animals, most notably a tiger. Life of Pi won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and was made into a feature film in 2012, winning 4 academy awards. 

Martel’s other works include We Ate the Children Last, a collection of short stories, and the novel Beatrice and Virgil, which was a New York Times best seller and winner of the Financial Times Fiction of the Year Award. In 2012, he published 101 Letters to a Prime Minister, a collection of correspondences to the prime minister of Canada. His latest novel, The High Mountains of Portugal, was published in 2016. He currently lives in Saskatchewan. 

“The proof of God is not in the story. The proof of God is that there are stories.” 

In this episode of The Archive Project, we take you behind the scenes at the 2024 Portland Book Festival, hosted by Literary Arts in downtown Portland on November 2, 2024. The festival featured over 100 writers in more than 50 events throughout the day.

Our editor and producer Matthew Workman is stepping in front of the microphone for this one, guiding you through the festival as he searches for festival authors and asks them to share their book recommendations. You’ll not only get a behind the scenes look at the festival, but you’ll get plenty of books to add to your own to-read list or maybe for gift inspiration this season.

In this episode, we’ll hear from Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe, author of Thunder Song.

Tracy O’Neill, author of Woman of Interest.

Mat Johnson, author of Invisible Things.

Lupita Aquino, known as @Lupita.Reads on Instagram and TikTok.

Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth.

Margaux Meganck, author of the childrens picture book Speck.

And Brian Evenson, author of Good Night Sleep Tight.

With the holiday season upon us, we hope you get some gift-giving inspiration from this weeks episode. You’ll also get a peek behind the scenes at the festival, where authors geek out about their fellow authors.

We hope you enjoy this taste of Portland Book Festival! Stay tuned for more episodes from Portland Book Festival later this season.

“I’m always thinking: This is the story I know, but what is the story I haven’t been told?” 

In this episode, we revisit a 2021 Portland Arts & Lectures conversation with novelist Madeline Miller. When we hosted Miller in January 2021, she had not one but two books on the New York Times Best Seller list: The Song of Achilles and Circe. Both books are retellings, in novel form, of ancient Greek myths. But they are also more than simply retellings. Her books are the reinterpreting of myths that reveal new truths from these ancient stories.

Of Circe: “This is the story of a woman finding her power, finding her voice, finding her art. And I love that her art [her witchcraft] was such a significant part of her growth as a character.” 

Miller’s work matters because of the way it is iconoclastic. It’s easy to think that Greek myths, and their received interpretations, are immutable and fixed in the history of literature. But Miller reminds us that these stories have always had multiple versions depending on who is doing the telling and what agenda might be behind a particular version. She questions who is centered in the story and who is not, what details are left out and what is embellished? This notion that a storyteller makes choices is important to really understanding, as readers, the mechanics of all stories. Her work also speaks to the power of these Greek myths. For millennia, these myths have been retold, reinterpreted, and remain vibrant and relevant stories for each generation. You only need to look to the incredible popularity of Miller’s work for evidence of this today.

In the second part of the episode, Miller is joined in conversation by Oregon Book Award-winning writer Omar El Akkad.

“Part of what I wanted to do in writing these stories is I really wanted to strip away the part that sometimes makes people feel alienated. or that they feel is very elitist or not relevant. I wanted to make these novels the type of thing that have ‘goodies’ for the people who know these stories, but are really meant to invite everyone in.”

Madeline Miller is the author of The Song of Achilles, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012, was shortlisted for the Stonewall Writer of the Year 2012, and was translated into twenty-five languages, and Circe, which won the 2019 Indie Choice Award, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was named on numerous Best Books of 2018 lists. Madeline holds an MA in Classics from Brown University, and she taught Latin, Greek and Shakespeare to high school students for over a decade. She has also studied at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, and at Yale School of Drama, where she focused on the adaptation of classical texts to modern forms. Her essays have appeared in publications including the Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Lapham’s Quarterly and NPR.org. She lives outside Philadelphia.  

Omar El Akkad is an author and a journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work earned Canada’s National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. His latest novel, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, is set to release in early 2025. 

In this episode of The Archive Project, we revisit a rare public appearance by one of Oregon’s greatest entrepreneurs, Phil Knight, for the release of his 2016 memoir, Shoe Dog. In this candid and riveting memoir, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company’s early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world’s most iconic and profitable brands. 

“I think one of the things that is unique about Nike is that when we go to work on Monday morning and one of our athletes has performed at a high level, everybody in the company—from clerks to the CEO—is lifted by that.” 

In 1962, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed $50 from his father and created a company with a simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost athletic shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his lime green Plymouth Valiant, Knight grossed $8,000 his first year. Today, Nike’s annual sales top $30 billion, and the Nike swoosh has become one of the most ubiquitous and recognizable symbols in the world today. But the man behind the swoosh has long remained a mystery. Now, for the first time ever, Knight tells his story, interviewed on stage by New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik. Hear first hand from Knight as he shares his journey toward building one of the world’s most iconic brands. 

“A lot of people say, ‘Well, you created a culture’—but it wasn’t me. Basically, it kind of bubbles up from the people. You can’t dictate a culture…it comes from within. I’ve got fingerprints on the culture, but it is by no means dictated by me.” 

Special thank you to Nike Inc., Oregon Health & Science University, Weiden + Kennedy, and The University of Oregon for supporting this event. 

Phil Knight, cofounder of shoe giant Nike, retired as chairman in 2016 after 52 years at the company. Mr. Knight earned an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Oregon. During his tenure as CEO (1964–2004), Nike became one of the most successful companies in the world. He lives in Oregon with his wife Penny. 

In 1989, an unknown writer named Amy Tan published a novel entitled The Joy Club, and the career of a major American writer was born.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we are reaching deep into the archive to 1991, when we hosted Tan because there’s something very special about hearing from a writer at the very beginning of their career. At the time, The Joy Luck Club had been on the New York Times bestseller list for two full years and the movie of the book was in development, with Tan as the writer and producer. There was lots of anticipation about what this writer would do next. Of course, Tan has gone on to have an incredible literary career, publishing half a dozen novels, including the bestseller The Bonesetter’s Daughter, books for children, nonfiction, and most recently a memoir called Where the Past Begins.

In this talk, Tan takes us back through her life to talk about her parents who immigrated from China in 1949, how Mandarin influenced the ways she wrote—and writes—in English, and how she “found her voice by not finding it.” She also talks about her early days first as a freelancer and novice fiction writer when someone told her, upon hearing the premise of the short story that would become The Joy Luck Club, that “no one wants to read about Chinese mothers.”  Of course, we now know that millions of readers in 35 counties actually did.

Amy Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life, Saving Fish from Drowning, and two children’s books, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat, which was adapted into a PBS television series. Tan was also a co-producer and co-screenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club. Her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and her work has been translated into thirty-five languages. She lives with her husband in San Francisco and New York.

This episode features Malcolm Gladwell in conversation about his newest book, Revenge of The Tipping Point. He spoke with Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor in front of a live audience in downtown Portland in October 2024.

The Tipping Point hit shelves in 2000 and became a true cultural phenomenon, spending a whopping 334 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and turning everyone—from your priest to your barista—into budding social scientists. Multiple New York Times bestsellers followed, including Blink and Outliers, and in 2018, Gladwell co-founded Pushkin Industries, which that seeks to “expand the possibilities of spoken word audio,” and launched his wildly popular podcast, Revisionist History.

In both his books and his podcasts, Gladwell reveals a world of hidden connections, everyday illusions, and overlooked details. He illuminates patterns in our policy and culture, and identifies the tiny tics that drive group behavior, introducing terms like, the Law of the Few, and the 10,000-hour rule into the larger cultural lexicon.

Now, twenty-five years after The Tipping Point, Gladwell has returned to the ideas that first made him a household name. His new book, Revenge of The Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering, finds him once again exploring epidemics and viral behavior. This time, he is driven by a somewhat darker inquiry. We see the consequences of contagious phenomena and rethink the two most significant epidemics of our time: the opioid crises and Covid. Don’t worry, we are still treated Gladwell’s tremendous curiosity and humor, delving into such topics such as cheetah reproduction and the world’s most successful bank robbers.

It is his most serious and personal book to date. With Revenge of The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell again proves himself one our finest storytellers. But more importantly: He helps us reimagine the stories that we tell about ourselves.

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers — The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces the podcasts Revisionist History, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood, and Broken Record, where he, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musicians across a wide range of genres. Gladwell has been included in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list and touted as one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers.

This episode features readings and conversations from an event entitled “I See My Light Shining.”  The event was a part of the Elders Project, which is sponsored by Columbia University and features interviews with African Americans from across the country. Here in Portland, acclaimed writer Renée Watson interviewed dozens of Portlanders about their lives for the project.

Through the episode, we’ll take you through the event and hear the stories of some of the elders Watson interviewed. In this episode, we interview Watson about growing up in a predominantly black neighborhood in Northeast Portland, and how that community shaped her as a person.

The event was hosted by Watson, and our guide for the episode is The Archive Project producer Matthew Workman.

Renée Watson is a #1 New York Times Bestselling author. Her young adult novel, Piecing Me Together, received a Coretta Scott King Award and Newbery Honor. Her children’s picture books and novels for teens have received several awards and international recognition. Many of her books are inspired by her experiences growing up as a Black girl in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry and fiction center around the experiences of Black girls and explore themes of home, identity, body image, and the intersections of race, class, and gender.

Watson was a writer-in-residence for over twenty years teaching creative writing and theater in public schools and community centers throughout the nation. She founded I, Too Arts Collective, a nonprofit that was housed in the Harlem brownstone where Langston Hughes lived the last twenty years of his life. The organization hosted poetry workshops for youth and literary events for the community from 2016-2019.  Watson is on the Council of Writers for the National Writing Project and is a member of the Academy of American Poets’ Education Advisory Council.

Watson grew up in Portland, Oregon, and splits her time between Portland and New York City.

This episode features a great event from the 2023 Portland Book Festival on the relationships between humans and animals, and on our ideas about the meaning of animals.  

Erica Berry is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, winner of the 2024 Oregon Book Award in creative nonfiction. Erica is based in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, and teaches in Literary Arts Writers in the schools program.  

Sabrina Imbler is the author of How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, which was the winner of the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology. Sabrina writes about creatures and the natural world for Defector. Like me, you might have first encountered Sabrina’s work when their New York Times article “When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid from a Clamp, That’s a Moray” went viral in 2021.  

 As curious and insightful non-scientists writing about the natural world, Sabrina and Erica each fully embrace their subjectivity in their nonfiction, their own personal perspectives. Both writers explore the human tendency to see ourselves in the natural world: We must accept our own animal-ness to know ourselves.  

Our moderator is Elena Passarello, whom you might know as the announcer on Live Wire Radio, and who is also “on the animal beat” thanks to her book of essays, Animals Strike Curious Poses, which won the 2018 Oregon Book Award in creative nonfiction.  

Erica Berry is a writer based in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. She has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, where she was a College of Liberal Arts Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The Yale Review, Outside Magazine, Catapult, The Atlantic, Guernica, and elsewhere. Winner of the Steinberg Essay Prize and the Kurt Brown Prize in Nonfiction, she has received fellowships and funding from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Tin House, the Ucross Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. A former Writer-in-Residence with the National Writers Series in Traverse City, Michigan, she is currently a Writer-in-the-Schools with Literary Arts in Portland. Wolfish is her first book. 

Sabrina Imbler is a writer for Defector, a sports and culture site, where they write about creatures and the natural world. Their first full-length book, How Far the Light Reaches, won a 2022 LA Times Book Prize. Their chapbook Dyke (geology) was selected for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature program. Sabrina lives in Brooklyn with their partner, a school of fish, and their cats, Sesame and Melon  

Elena Passarello is an actor, essayist, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018, and has been translated into German, Italian, French, and Mandarin. She is the author of the essay collections Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses, the latter of which won the 2018 Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction and made the Best Books of 2017 lists in the New York Times, Guardian, and Publisher’s Weekly. Passarello teaches creative writing at Oregon State University and appears weekly on the PRX radio variety show Live Wire.