The Archive Project

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature Lauren Groff from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in early 2023 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Groff is the author of six books of fiction, the last three of which, Fates and Furies , Florida , and Matrix were all national bestsellers and all finalists for the National Book Award. One of the many delights in reading Groff’s books is t...

This week’s episode of The Archive Project features a conversation from the 2022 Portland Book Festival. Portland-born writer Mitchell S. Jackson interviewed Leila Mottley about her debut novel, Nightcrawling . Jackson is the author of the novel The Residue Years and the nonfiction book Survival Math . He is the winner of a Whiting Award and he received the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for hi...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we bring you an event from the 2022 Portland Book Festival, which took place on Saturday, November 5, 2022. The hour is split into two halves of thematically related conversations. Up first, OPB’s Tiffany Camhi interviews writer Melissa Febos about her essay collection, Girlhood ; in the second half of the show, OPB’s Jenn Chavez speaks with music critic an...

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 fi...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature a discussion on late writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s legacy of pacifism and environmentalism. Our moderator is Theo Downes-Le Guin, Ursula’s son and literary executor. Theo is in conversation with Oregon-based writers Juhea Kim, author of the novel Beasts of a Little Land , a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Michelle Ruiz Keil, a...

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 of The Archive Project , we reach back to the year 2000 to highlight one of the best conversations about writing found in our archives: A special event with Amy Bloom and Michael Cunningham. Amy Bloom had just published a collection of stories entitled, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You , and Cunningham had published one his most important and bestselling novels, The Hours, j...

This episode of The Archive Project features notable funny woman, Elaine May, in a talk from 1997. Elaine May may be one of the most important Broadway and Hollywood stars you’ve never heard of. In 2019, The New York Times wrote a long appreciation of her in which they referred to her ability to “fuse verbal and physical comedy” as possibly singular, and called her a “criminally underappreciated f...

In this episode, we feature an event from the 2020 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 the...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature a conversation from Pickathon 2022. Literary Arts partnered with the Pickathon music festival to program on-stage author readings, and for a live recording of The Archive Project at the Lucky Barn stage. At The Archive Project live, Oregon poet laureate Anis Mojgani led a wide-ranging conversation with Portland-based multidisciplinary writers and...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature Scottish novelist Douglas Stuart, winner of the Booker Prize for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain . He speaks about his new novel, Young Mungo , with Portland-based author and Oregon Book Award winner Omar El Akkad. They discuss the desire and longing at the heart of the story of the love between two working class young men from different religious...

This week’s episode of The Archive Project features Reza Aslan discussing his new book, An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville . Aslan was interviewed by Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor at the 2022 Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America, which took place on Saturday, November 5 in downtown Portland. Iran has been in the news...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature Leslie Marmon Silko in conversation with Molly Gloss from a special event in 2010, at Portland State University’s Lincoln Hall. While Leslie Marmon Silko had begun to publish poems and short stories in the 1960s, it was her iconic and ground-breaking novel, Ceremony , published in 1978, that established her as one our greatest living writers. Sin...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature Abdulzarak Gurnah from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in September 2022.  He joined us as part of the American launch of his most recent novel Afterlives . He had just won the Nobel prize for literature, after a long and distinguished career as a novelist in Britain, thought he was relatively unknown here in the United States. In his talk,...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature two virtual events form the 2021 Portland Book Festival with very different subjects, that take place nearly 1000 years apart, but that both feature powerful female protagonists and heroes changing their worlds. In the first half of our show, we feature Julia Cooke, author of  Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am . She is...

Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America, returns to downtown Portland on Saturday, November 5, 2022 with a full day of all-ages fun, including author panels, readings, an extensive book fair, kids’ activities, music, food trucks, and more. More info and passes here . Tune in for this special podcast-only release of The Archive Project for 2022 Portland Book Festival. Acclaimed,...

Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America, returns to downtown Portland on Saturday, November 5, 2022 with a full day of all-ages fun, including author panels, readings, an extensive book fair, kids’ activities, music, food trucks, and more. More info and passes here . Tune in for this special podcast-only release of The Archive Project for 2022 Portland Book Festival. This episod...

Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America, returns to downtown Portland on Saturday, November 5, 2022 with a full day of all-ages fun, including author panels, readings, an extensive book fair, kids’ activities, music, food trucks, and more. More info and passes here . Tune in for this special podcast-only release of The Archive Project for 2022 Portland Book Festival. Karen Eva C...

Portland Book Festival returns to downtown Portland on Saturday, November 5, 2022 with a full day of all-ages fun, including author panels, readings, an extensive book fair, kids’ activities, music, food trucks, and more. More info and passes here . As part of our celebration of National Poetry Month, this week on The Archive Project we feature excerpts from three Portland Book Festival virt...

Portland Book Festival returns to downtown Portland on Saturday, November 5, 2022 with a full day of all-ages fun, including author panels, readings, an extensive book fair, kids’ activities, music, food trucks, and more. More info and passes here . In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature a reading and conversation about the pandemic lockdowns and how people tried to get through...

Portland Book Festival returns to downtown Portland on Saturday, November 5, 2022 with a full day of all-ages fun, including author panels, readings, an extensive book fair, kids’ activities, music, food trucks, and more. More info and passes here . In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature a conversation from the 2021 Portland Book Festival. This live event was moderated onstage b...

Portland Book Festival returns to downtown Portland on Saturday, November 5, 2022 with a full day of all-ages fun, including author panels, readings, an extensive book fair, kids’ activities, music, food trucks, and more. More info and passes here . 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...

Portland Book Festival returns to downtown Portland on Saturday, November 5, 2022 with a full day of all-ages fun, including author panels, readings, an extensive book fair, kids’ activities, music, food trucks, and more. More info and passes here . This episode of The Archive Project features highlights from the 2021 Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America. Listen to excerpts f...

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...

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...