The Archive Project

Each year, Portland area youth spend months writing and competing in poetry slam competitions on high school campuses across the city. And each April, 20 finalists compete for the title of city-wide Portland slam champ at Verselandia! in front of an audience of nearly 1,000.    We’re excited to share that the 2025 Verselandia! competition returns to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Thursday, A...

Every year, the Multnomah County Library chooses one book they hope the whole city will read. Between January and April, the Library, and their partner organizations, host events based around the themes of the book, and they distribute thousands of free copies—thanks to the Library Foundation—to readers of all ages from across the county.  Here at Literary Arts, our role is to bring the author to...

This week features a conversation from the 2024 Portland Book Festival, featuring best-selling author Ijeoma Oluo, who is a self-described “writer, speaker, and internet yeller.” She discusses her latest book, Be a Revolution : How Everyday People are Fighting and Changing the World — and How You Can, Too with Portland’s Hanif Fazal, author of An Other World and co-founder of the Center for Equity...

In this episode, we feature the celebrated novelist and screenwriter Alice Hoffman. She’s in conversation with the former Director of the Multnomah County Library, Vailey Oehlke, at the Portland Book Festival in 2016. Hoffman has published over 40 books, including the 2024 novel about Anne Frank’s life, When We Flew Away . Most of her books have been novels, but shas also published short story col...

In this recording, Michael Ondaatje shares his fourth novel, Anil’s Ghost. He begins by giving an overview of the plot, which is set in a civil war-torn Sri Lanka at the end of the twentieth century. The story follows Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, and educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist to investigate human rights violations. A...

This week we are taking you back to Portland Book Festival 2024, with a conversation on the theme of “reconciliation” featuring Renée Watson, discussing her latest book, Skin & Bones , and Joe Wilkins, author of The Entire Sky , plus one of my absolute favorite moderators, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Mitchell S. Jackson. Renée’s novel, Skin & Bones , is about a plus-size B...

This week we are featuring a conversation from the 2024 Portland Book Festival. The incomparable Richard Powers came to Portland to discuss his new novel, Playground , with Literary Arts Executive Director Andrew Proctor.    Any opportunity to spend time with Richard Powers and his vast, unique, amazing mind is a gift. He  discusses how he chose to combine the setting of the ocean with the digital...

When Annie Dillard won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, she was the youngest women ever to do so. She won for a book published the previous year called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek , which is a nonfiction book that meditates on writing, solitude, the natural world, and spirituality. The book had a profound impact at the time of its publication and garnered comparisons to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden....

Every year, the Multnomah County Library chooses one book they hope the whole city of Portland will read. Between January and April, the Library, and their partner organizations, host events based around the themes of the book, and they distribute thousands of free copies—thanks to the Library Foundation—to readers of all ages from across the county. Here at Literary Arts, our role is to bring the...

It’s Valentine’s Day weekend, and love is in the air on The Archive Project. We are featuring two conversations from the 2024 Portland Book Festival with bestselling contemporary romance writers.       In the last few decades, writing romance has become big business. From the Fabio-adorned mass market paperbacks of the 90s to self-published ebooks like Fifty Shades of Gray in the early 2000s, to n...

A life-long Northwesterner, Egan has spent much of his career exploring his home region. One might even say he is the quintessential Pacific Northwest writer. He served as the first Pacific Northwest correspondent for the New York Times and he also wrote one of the definitive books about our region in 1990, The Good Rain . During his eighteen-year tenure at the New York Times, Egan covered everyth...

In this episode, we feature Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation with Omar El Akkad from the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in October 2024.    Coates’ versatility and virtuosity as a writer makes him one of the most singular and important writers at work today. He first rose to national recognition as a staff writer at The Atlantic Magazine, and in particular for an article he wrote in 2014 titled The...

This week’s episode features one of the most highly anticipated conversations from the 2024 Portland Book Festival. Author Rachel Kushner joined the festival with her most recent novel, the Booker Prize finalist Creation Lake , her take on a noir spy thriller. We paired her with Danzy Senna, whose new novel is Colored Television , the story of a struggling novelist attempting to break into H...

This week we have a conversation between one of the ultimate literary power couples: Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt.     Paul Auster passed away in April of 2024. The New York Times obituary called him the “patron saint of literary Brooklyn.” He wrote screenplays, poetry, and nonfiction, but is probably best known as a novelist, and as an novelist his best known work is the New York Trilogy—City of...

This week’s episode features the trailblazing, legendary journalist: Connie Chung, in conversation about her new memoir, CONNIE . In her book, Chung shares the story of her decades-long career as an Asian woman in the white-male-dominated world of broadcast journalism, when she relentlessly pursued stories and fought hard for scoops. Her hard work – her schedule for many years was truly unbelievab...

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 o...

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 & Creati...

“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...

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 f...

“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 Gre...

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 b...

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 Y...

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 everyo...

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...

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...