The Archive Project

Tickets for the 2022 Everybody Reads event with Mira Jacob, author of the graphic memoir GOOD TALK, on Thursday, March 10 are available now. Click here for more info . In this episode of The Archive Project , we celebrate the twentieth year of Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads program . Each year, the Library chooses one book that they hope everyone in Multnomah County will read and...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature the legendary writer, Stephen King, who appeared at the Newmark Theatre for a Literary Arts Special Event in 2006. King first published in 1967 and went on to write some of the most iconic pop culture classics of the last half century, many of which were made into Hollywood films, including The Shining, Misery, and The Green Mile . He wrote over...

This episode of The Archive Project is the second of three in this season’s series with Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Artistic director Nataki Garrett is back on the mic, this time in conversation with playwright Dominique Morisseau, whose new production Confederates will be on the OSF stage, directed by Garrett, in the fall of 2022. Confederates explores racial and gender bias in American through...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong from Portland Arts & Lectures in January 2022. Hong became nationally famous in the spring of 2020 for her essay collection  Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning , a book so searing and powerful it landed her on the cover of  Time  magazine’s 2021 issue featuring the 100 most influential people in the...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature a conversation from the 2021 Portland Book Festival. This live event was moderated onstage by Andrew Proctor, on the theme of “Aftermath,” bringing together the authors of two haunting novels which explore contemporary global events through stories of people in the middle of the crises. Myriam J. A. Chancy’s What Storm, What Thunder follows ten s...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature a talk and conversation with Daniel James Brown from 2021. Brown is probably best known for his international bestseller The Boys in the Boat, first published in 2013. It tells a narrative history of nine working-class Americans who rowed their way to gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. It’s a story of young men who persevere against immense cha...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature editor and poet John Freeman and three writers with roots in the Balkans on the theme CHANGE, through the specific lens of language and translation. Freeman spoke with these three writers who possess links to the Bosnia and the Balkans about language and the way language changes through generations, geography, and translation. We’ll join French a...

In this episode we feature the iconic writer of nonfiction, Joan Didion, from a special event in 2001. She briefly reads from her then new book Political Fictions , and then talks with David Sarasohn from The Oregonian . Didion’s career began in 1956 when she began writing for Vogue . She wrote more than a dozen books of essays and nonfiction, including the 2005 national bestseller The   Year of M...

In this episode, we bring you writer Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights . We hosted Gay in the culminating event of Multnomah County Library’s 2021 Everybody Reads program—an annual shared reading experience that includes city-wide events for readers of all ages. This year, because of the public health restrictions, we brought Ross Gay to Portland virtually. He gave an incredible lecture and...

In this episode of The Archive Project , Robert Bly shares selected poems during his visit to Portland, Oregon in 2006 for Poetry Downtown. Robert Bly is a National Book Award-winning poet who has authored more than 30 collections of poetry. Considered one of the legends of contemporary poetry, Bly is the voice of transcendentalism and meditative mysticism for his generation. Active from 1950 thro...

In this episode, we feature a conversation between Louise Erdrich and Portland-based writer Trevino Brings Plenty from the 2021 Portland Book Festival. Louise Erdrich joined us virtually from Minneapolis for an event in front of a live audience at the Newmark Theater. She is on our most celebrated and writers alive. Her novels include The Night Watchman , which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, The Rou...

In this episode, we launch a special collaboration with Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Throughout this season of The Archive Project , we will feature a series of conversations about OSF’s work, exploring storytelling in the intersections of playwriting, theatre production and performance, and literature. This episode features a conversation between Nataki Garrett, OSF artistic director, and Scarlet...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature a talk by Russell Banks from 1999. Banks was the author twenty-one books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He was twice a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, first in 1985 for his seminal work of fiction Continental Drift , and then again in 1998 for Cloudsplitter . The New York Times lauded his “vivid portrayals of working-class Americans grapplin...

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 Sa...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature Paul Theroux. Theroux is an iconic writer of over fifty books of fiction and nonfiction. Most of his work takes the form of travel writing–a genre he has helped define for the 20th and 21st centuries, as he traveled alone to some of the most remote parts of the world, writing about them with sensitivity, insight, wit, and wonder. He was a global...

This episode of The Archive Project features highlights from the 2021 Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America. Listen to excerpts from longer discussions between novelist Brandon Taylor and Genevieve Hudson, cartoonist Aminder Dhaliwal and OPB’s Tiffany Camhi, and legendary poet Rita Dove and Mary Szybist. The Portland Book Festival presents a diverse range of writers who have recentl...

Grace Bonney, author of the bestselling books  In the Company of Women  and  Design*Sponge at Home , leads this conversation with three of the women from her newest book,  Collective Wisdom: Lessons, Wisdom, and Advice from Women Over 50 . Lisa Congdon, Ngọc Minh Ngo, and Sonoko Sakai discuss their sources of creativity, what makes them feel empowered, and how they view common misconceptions about...

This special podcast-only episode of Literary Arts’  The Archive Project, features a reunion of a panel discussion from the 2017 Portland Book Festival. (In fact, you can hear the original event on The Archive Project   here .) Join poet Kaveh Akbar ( Pilgrim Bell ), memoirist and essayist Melissa Febos ( Girlhood ), and essayist Megan Stielstra ( Once I Was Cool ) and moderator Marisa Siege...

Historical fiction often blurs the lines between truth and story. Authors A. K. Blakemore and Rivka Galchen each have new books out that explore the very real witch trials of the 17th century. But their approach to the subject matter and the characters at the center of each story feel like opposite sides of the same coin. Blakemore’s The Manningtree Witches is set in 1643 and follows the young, si...

This special podcast-only episode of Literary Arts’  The Archive Project, features John Freeman, editor of  Freeman’s , in conversation with French author and translator Jakuta Alikavazovic; Yugoslav-born writer Lana Bastašić; and novelists and memoirist Aleksandar Hemon. All three possess one connection or another to Bosnia. In this conversation, they discuss the Bosnian diaspora, wri...

In this episode, we feature an event from the 2021 Portland Book Festival, moderated by author and editor, John Freeman. The event title keyed off of Freeman’s anthology of the same name:  Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World.  Freeman sat down with authors Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Kawai Strong Washburn to talk about writing and the environment, and th...

In this episode, we feature two conversations from the 2020 Portland Book Festival that both wrestle with the question of how we look after each other when mental and physical health have been compromised. What do we owe each other, and when do we walk away? In the first segment of the show we feature Robert Kolker who joined us to talk about his new work of nonfiction Hidden Valley Road: Inside t...

In this episode, we feature a conversation between novelists Rumaan Alam and Jonathan Lethem from the 2020 Portland Book Festival. There is a rich tradition of the apocalyptic novel. As Alam and Lethem touch on, the urgency in this tradition allows writers to explore what really matters to their characters, and asks what we will keep and what we will forget when push comes to shove. The scope of t...

Portland Book Festival will present virtual programming, brought to you by Bank of America, the week of November 8–12, 2021, and in-person events on Saturday, November 13, 2021. Get your passes now ! In this episode, we feature a conversation with Brit Bennett and Bryan Washington, moderated by Jennifer Baker, at the Portland Book Festival in November 2020. In the New York Times best-selling The V...

Portland Book Festival will present virtual programming, brought to you by Bank of America, the week of November 8–12, 2021, and in-person events on Saturday, November 13, 2021. Get your passes now ! In this episode, we feature Isabel Wilkerson, interviewed by Viet Thanh Nguyen, from the 2020 Portland Book Festival. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Isabel Wilkerson the National Humanities M...