This week on The Archive Project, we bring you a lecture from the 2003/2004 season of Portland Arts & Lectures, featuring renowned memoirist and short story writer Tobias Wolff. Best known for his memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, Wolff has also published award-winning fiction, mostly short stories, and in this lecture is discussing his 2003 novel, Old School, which was a finalist for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

In his lecture, Wolff explores the balance and conflict between writing memoir and writing fiction, that push and pull between autobiography and imagination, or as he says, “the pressure of the personal life on the imagined life that we write.” It’s a humorous lecture with an inviting mix of personal anecdotes and some more professorial analysis of influences like Leo Tolstoy and Flannery O’Connor–and ideal something-for-everyone kind of talk.

Wolff went on to publish Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories in 2008, and in 2014, Wolff was awarded the Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement from Oregon State University, and in 2015 President Barack Obama presented him with the National Medal of the Arts for his contributions as an author and educator.

“A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.” – Old School

Tobias Wolff lives in Northern California and teaches at Stanford University. He has received the Rea Award for excellence in the short story, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.