The Archive Project

Verghese opens his lecture with the quote “Geography is destiny,” and goes on to discuss growing up in Ethiopia and his journey to becoming a physician and a writer. He says that his “real call to medicine” came through a book—he had a profound epiphany while reading Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham—and has since then realized the power of books to change the course of a person’s life. He disc...

Margaret Atwood’s signature wit is in full force in this landmark lecture on, as she phrases it, “problems of female bad behavior in the creation of literature.” Novels, she argues, are not moral tracts for teaching readers how to behave. One can almost hear her smile when she says that “art is what you can get away with.” Atwood dissects the cultural expectations of female chara...

In a talk that switches conversationally between explaining her influences and reading from a few of her poems, Natasha Trethewey discusses writing her third collection of poetry, Native Guard , her upcoming collection at the time, Thrall , and the ways that personal and national histories intertwine. For her, writing is a pilgrimage and a way of coming to terms with what has happened. She is obse...

Chimamanda Adichie opens her lecture by discussing her childhood as a voracious reader in Nigeria, specifically her experience of reading about and wanting an American “ba-gelle” and her eventual disappointment in discovering these were “really just a dense doughnut.” Her life as a reader and writer brings her “extravagant joy,” and she talks about her rituals, progress, and occasional struggles w...

Wallace Stegner, “the dean of Western writers,” grapples with his process of reconciling the need for conflict and ambiguity in plot with his distaste for mechanical, method-oriented writing. “The writers I admired and still admire were not carpenters, but more like sculptors,” he says. “Their art was and is a real probing of real and troubling human confusions.” He discusses writers as shape-shif...

In this episode, Marjane Satrapi discusses her writing and art, specifically the film production of Persepolis (2000). She first establishes that she makes “comics” not “graphic novels,” dismissing the term “graphic novel” as a marketing ploy among publishing companies. She also establishes that the comic form is not a genre, but an artistic medium—one that allows for narrative structures that are...

Ron Chernow opens his talk with a discussion on being a biographer—from the perils of picking a subject to debates about how much one should reveal about that subject. Specifically, he discusses his research on the life of John D. Rockefeller for his book Titan (1998) and how it is not unusual when writing a biography to encounter “somebody I had not met in any of the earlier biographies. Here was...

In one of the earliest recordings of Portland Arts & Lectures, we hear Calvin Trillin humorously describe his upbringing in Kansas City and the culture shock that he experienced when he entered the WASP society of Yale University. He then focuses on the differences between Kansas City and his current home in New York. Toward the end of his talk, Trillin turns his focus to politics, poking fun...

Francine Prose begins by discussing the differences and similarities between writing fiction and nonfiction, which are not always what one might assume. She finds that both require obsessive attention to detail and clarity. Reading from her novel in progress,  A Changed Man , she remarks that she has “about three hundred more drafts before it’s done.” Using excerpts from...