The Archive Project

At the age of sixty-four, long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad became the first person to swim the 111 miles from Cuba to Key West without a shark cage, a Herculean feat that had eluded her when she made the attempt three decades earlier, in peak form. Nyad discusses her new memoir, Find a Way , a passionate story of this heroic adventure and the extraordinary life experiences that have served to carv...

One of the most acclaimed contemporary historians presents a fresh, startling new look at the Salem witch trials, the first great American mystery. In The Witches: Salem, 1692 , Pulitzer Prize winning author Stacy Schiff examines the religious, social, and political context of the Massachusetts Bay Colony that doomed year, the only moment when women played the central role in American history. Sch...

Acclaimed chef and food writer Ruth Reichl discusses the highlights of her career as a food writer, including how she got her start, her current work, and some of the lessons she has learned along the way. She explains how the many illusions of the fine dining world have taught her a lot about herself. An acclaimed chef and food writer, Ruth Reichl served as a restaurant critic for  The &#160...

Critically acclaimed, best-selling authors Jon Krakauer ( Missoula, Into the Wild , and more) and Barry Lopez ( Outside: Stories, Arctic Dreams, and more) are known for writing about human nature in confrontation with the natural world: from summiting Everest to our relationships with wolves and everything in between. In this conversation at the 2015 Portland Book Festival (formerly Wordstock), th...

Robert Pinsky begins his lecture by discussing the physicality of poetry. He compares poetry to other modern mediums of creativity and argues that poetry is uniquely intimate because it only reaches full expression in the body of the recipient. Pinsky goes on to discuss the special position of poetry in America: that it often produces ideas on an individual level before they are absorbed into syst...

A William Stafford devotee and former mentee, Naomi Shihab Nye opens her lecture by reading from Stafford’s “Time for Serenity, Anyone?” She then discusses the countless ways his work has inspired her and the poets around her. Afterwards, she reads several poems from her most recent collection at the time, Fuel: Poems , many of which focus on the simplicity of everyday life and which contain...

Mary Gordon begins the lecture by discussing how writers of autobiography or memoir often depend on memory to portray the truth. In the case of her own writing, Gordon says memory takes the form of specific images that have stuck with her throughout the years. She reads a selection of excerpts from her work that focus on an image or a concrete moment embedded in her childhood memories. She goes on...

This episode of The Archive Project features Azar Nafisi, author of the acclaimed Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books . In her lecture, Nafisi discusses Iranian literature and how it serves as a source of identity. She examines the fundamentalist Muslim identity in comparison to the national identity, concluding that people must focus on the literature of a nation in order to truly underst...

In this episode of The Archive Project , Israeli writer Amos Oz discusses Israeli Literature, Hebrew as a spoken and written language, the influence of the Holocaust on literature, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. “I love Israel, even at times that I don’t like it. In fact, I love Israel even at times that I cannot stand it. And Israel, as I’m sure you know, ladies and gentlemen, Israel...

Michael Pollan begins his lecture by praising Portland for being one of the incubators of true healthy eating before moving on to discuss the new American food culture. He describes how many Americans have developed an unhealthy obsession with being healthy, which has actually backfired, as evidenced by the obesity epidemic. He labels the prevailing American ideology as “nutritionalism,” which pla...

Ursula Le Guin begins her discussion with Margaret Atwood in 2010 by saying, “I emailed Margaret about six weeks or so ago and said, ‘What are we going to talk about?’ and she replied, ‘I expect we will talk about 1) What is fiction?; 2) What is science fiction?; 3) The ones who walk away from Omelas—where do they go?; 4) Is the human race doomed?; 5) Anything else that strikes our fancy.’” The tw...

Maxine Hong Kingston appears as part of the Portland Arts and Lectures series not long after many of her belongings and writings were lost in the Oakland firestorm of 1991. Her lecture, entitled “Another Person of Peace,” is about her rediscovering herself as a person and a writer following the fire. Kingston discusses the inspiration behind her book that was lost to the flames, which was to mirro...

Wideman and McMillan begin their lecture with a discussion of the projects they are working on and how they decide what material to write next. McMillan then reads an excerpt of her writing, speaking through the voice of one of her female characters. Wideman follows by reading a segment called “Picking Up My Father From the Springfield Station.” Each writer talks about his or her inspiration: in W...

Portland poet and essayist Doug Marx moderates this lecture between former Poet Laureate Robert Hass and Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. Hass and Milosz read and discuss a variety of their poems. Marx periodically asks questions about each poet’s inspiration and their composition process, and Hass and Milosz’s answers often lead to the reading of additional excerpts. “When I said ‘pleasur...

Wright begins his lecture by elaborating on his recent journalistic investigation into the history of Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard. Wright seeks to answer two overarching questions: 1) Where do new religious ideas come from? and 2) why would anybody believe them? Although he focuses on Scientology, Wright also emphasizes the fundamental needs that drive people to all organized religions: hope, p...

Barthelme begins his lecture with a series of readings, including a story about his family’s quest for a dog, his reflections on being a father, the study of angels, and a conversation with Goethe in which he compares music, art, and nationalities to common day objects. Barthelme also previews a selection of excerpts from his forthcoming novel The King , a retelling of Le Morte D’Arthur thro...

Oliver Sacks begins his lecture by sharing a series of anecdotes about his patients, such as one man who could not recognize faces or objects and mistook his wife for a hat—the inspiration for the title of one of his books. Additional stories include a man with a head injury who lost his sense of smell and a woman who had no left-sided sensory perception. He discusses the relationship between neur...

  Former Executive Director of Literary Arts Julie Mancini gives a speech about the early days of Literary Arts during our 30th birthday celebration on September 8, 2014. She shares memories from her fifteen-year career, including the ways in which she helped convince world-famous writers such as Joan Didion to visit Portland. Sharing feedback from visiting authors, Mancini chronicles how Por...

Mark Doty reads from his new book, Deep Lane, and discusses his poetic influences, including Walt Whitman and Deborah Digges. These mentors, and the themes and ideas from their works, appear throughout Doty’s poems. Other themes include animals and observations on the natural world. Doty also shares several poems about New York and concludes his reading with a generous Q&A session with the aud...

Mitchell S. Jackson begins with a round of thanks, sometimes unconventional, to all those who influenced his journey to stand before thousands of people in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, as a successful author. He mentions that after he was incarcerated as a young man, he began the process of revision, and he goes on to discuss the differences between editing and revision. “Editing is fixing th...

Kazuo Ishiguro begins the interview by talking about growing up in a Japanese family in England and watching the British with “amused distance,” stating, “I was taught to respect British customs, but they were just that: values and customs that the natives adhered to.” His family finally decided that they would not return to Japan when he was 15, but he says that he first began writing novels with...

Joyce Carol Oates takes the audience on a dreamlike, philosophical journey as she discusses the origins of art and stories. She poses several hypothetical questions, touching on the purpose of human existence and the reasoning behind our desire to create art. Oates explores these questions by tracing the evolution of the writer: the writer as a child, the writer in school, and so on. She is fascin...

Carlos Fuentes gives a talk titled “After the Cold War: The Rise of a New Agenda.” It is the keynote address for a conference intended to help Oregonians put into a global perspective the cultural, economic, and political significance of the emerging Hispanic population of Oregon and the United States. Fuentes discusses the changes taking place in the world since the end of World War II, mainly fo...

Isabel Allende begins her lecture with stories about writing her new book, Island Beneath the Sea, focusing specifically on the connections between the histories of Haiti and New Orleans. The inspiration for the book came after Allende visited New Orleans and was intrigued by the Haitian refugees who created their own identities in Louisiana. She tells how her research into the plantations and the...

John Dunne begins his lecture by discussing how two people can experience the exact same thing and come away with completely different observations—specifically how writers betray the image the subjects hold of themselves. He gives anecdotes about a shared experience with Richard Rhodes and quotes Henry James, saying, “If a writer talks about writing without quoting from Henry James . . . then you...