This episode features Charles Yu at Portland Arts & Lectures on February 29, 2024.  

Charles Yu first rose to national prominence in 2007 when his debut collection, Third Class Superhero was recognized by the National Book Foundation’s prestigious “Five under 35” program.    

Yu has published three more books of fiction, including Interior Chinatown, which won the National Book Award in 2020. He has forged a diverse writing career that not only includes award winning books, and publishing in places like the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Wired, but also writing for television including shows on HBO and FX.  His work is considered profoundly original, both genre-busting, formally experimental, and also accessible and laugh-out-loud funny, earning him comparisons to Douglas Adams and Philip K Dick.  

In his talk, Yu does what he does best: With his signature self-deprecating, ironic and playful humor, Yu deconstructs the “lecture” genre and by doing so reveals profound insights into what it means to be human and to try to make meaning out of our lives.  

Hailed for his sharp wit and incisive social commentary, Charles Yu is an acclaimed author and screenwriter whose work is as inventive as it is moving. Interior Chinatown, his fourth and most recent novel, is at once a satirical meditation on immigration, assimilation, and Hollywood stereotyping of Asian Americans and a touching portrait of a family.  

A National Book Award winner and a “Most Anticipated Book” by Entertainment Weekly, TIME, The Rumpus, and others, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, who has been cast in the role of “Generic Asian Man” in the ongoing procedural cop show “Black and White,” as he struggles to transcend the rigid and reductive roles available to those who look like him. Both extensively researched and startlingly original,  Interior Chinatown is a profound and topical exploration of the weight of stereotypes, racism, and assimilation in American culture.  

Charles Yu’s previous novel,  How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, was a New York Times Notable Book and a TIME Top 10 Fiction Book of 2010. In his lectures, Yu speaks passionately about a variety of topics, including writing about characters in the margins, representation in Hollywood, and the role of science fiction in his work. 

Charles Yu is a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, and he was nominated for two Writers Guild of America Awards for his screenwriting work on the HBO series, Westworld. In addition to writing for Westworld, Yu has been on writing staffs for shows on FX and AMC. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications. Together with TaiwaneseAmerican.org, he established the Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Writing Prizes, in honor of his parents. He lives in Southern California. 

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 Writers in the schools program.  

Sabrina Imbler is the author of How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, which was the winner of the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology. Sabrina writes about creatures and the natural world for Defector. Like me, you might have first encountered Sabrina’s work when their New York Times article “When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid from a Clamp, That’s a Moray” went viral in 2021.  

 As curious and insightful non-scientists writing about the natural world, Sabrina and Erica each fully embrace their subjectivity in their nonfiction, their own personal perspectives. Both writers explore the human tendency to see ourselves in the natural world: We must accept our own animal-ness to know ourselves.  

Our moderator is Elena Passarello, whom you might know as the announcer on Live Wire Radio, and who is also “on the animal beat” thanks to her book of essays, Animals Strike Curious Poses, which won the 2018 Oregon Book Award in creative nonfiction.  

Biography: 

Erica Berry is a writer based in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. She has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, where she was a College of Liberal Arts Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The Yale Review, Outside Magazine, Catapult, The Atlantic, Guernica, and elsewhere. Winner of the Steinberg Essay Prize and the Kurt Brown Prize in Nonfiction, she has received fellowships and funding from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Tin House, the Ucross Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. A former Writer-in-Residence with the National Writers Series in Traverse City, Michigan, she is currently a Writer-in-the-Schools with Literary Arts in Portland. Wolfish is her first book. 

Sabrina Imbler is a writer for Defector, a sports and culture site, where they write about creatures and the natural world. Their first full-length book, How Far the Light Reaches, won a 2022 LA Times Book Prize. Their chapbook Dyke (geology) was selected for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature program. Sabrina lives in Brooklyn with their partner, a school of fish, and their cats, Sesame and Melon  

Elena Passarello is an actor, essayist, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018, and has been translated into German, Italian, French, and Mandarin. She is the author of the essay collections Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses, the latter of which won the 2018 Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction and made the Best Books of 2017 lists in the New York Times, Guardian, and Publisher’s Weekly. Passarello teaches creative writing at Oregon State University and appears weekly on the PRX radio variety show Live Wire. 

To close out the celebration of National Poetry Month, this episode features poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil at the final event of the 2023-24 season of Portland Arts & Lectures.  

 Nezhukumatathil is an accomplished poet: Literally every one of her four published poetry collections is prize-winning, and she is the first-ever poetry editor of Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of the Sierra Club.    

  In 2020, she turned to prose with a book of essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments, which combines personal memoir with reflections on the natural world. World of Wonders was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in non-fiction and was named Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year. It’s one of those books that will change the way that you see the world around you – the animals, the plants, and the human animals. And who could argue against approaching our own lives, and the lives of others, with a little more wonder?    

  The San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “The nature writing we have been exposed to has been overwhelmingly male and white, which is just one reason that Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s latest essay collection is a breath of fresh air. What makes her work shine is its joyful embrace of difference, revealing that true beauty resides only in diversity.” 

The lecture is followed by an audience Q&A moderated by Amanda Bullock, Literary Arts’s Senior Artistic Director.  

Nezhukumatathil will publish a new essay collection, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Other Jamborees, on April 30, 2024. 20

We continue to celebrate National Poetry Month with a deep dive into Verselandia!, the annual city-wide high school poetry slam championship. In this week’s episode of The Archive Project, we’ll hear from some of the 2023 competitors, and we’ll follow a few 2024 hopefuls as they compete in their school slams.   

Verselandia! was founded by a visionary team of Portland public high school librarians and educators who ran individual poetry slams at their schools. As the competitions grew, Literary Arts became a partner and the producer of the championship event in April 2012. Now, during the last week of April, National Poetry Month, our annual Verselandia! Youth Poetry Slam Championships draws 1,000 people to cheer on youth poets at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.  

We’ll hear from some of those youth poets over the next hour.   

A quick note to listeners: Portions of this episode contain mature themes that may not be suitable for all audiences.  

Our guide on the road to Verselandia! is our Archive Project producer and editor, Matthew Workman.  

Verselandia! 2024 will take place Thursday, April 25 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in downtown Portland, and we hope you will join us. Get tickets here.  

This week, we continue to celebrate National Poetry Month with a conversation from the 2023 Portland Book Festival.

Jane Hirshfield is one of our most important living poets, and last year she released The Asking, a new and selected volume. Hirshfield has published ten volumes of poetry, two now-classic essay collections on the craft of poetry, and she has co-translated four books presenting world poets from the deep past.

Hirshfield is in conversation with her friend and fellow poet, Major Jackson, host of The Slowdown podcast and newsletter, who also released a new and selected, titled Razzle Dazzle, which collects two decades of his work. Hirshfield and Jackson share a send of the global and the personal, and a love of language.

Our moderator is a celebrated poet himself, Matthew Zapruder, whose most recent book is the memoir Story of a Poem.

They talk about the experience of revising the past to create these overviews of their work, and their excitement about the new poems. Hirshfield talks honestly about how emotional it was to revisit her past work and therefore a version of her past self, which Jackson described as a kind of time travel. They also talk about our present moment, and the role of art when there is so much urgency in the world at large—the importance of poetry, of art, to bear witness to that urgency.

Bios:

Writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections and is one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. Hirshfield’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s also the author of two now-classic collections of essays on the craft of poetry, and edited and co-translated four books presenting world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield’s work, which has been translated into seventeen languages, appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019.

Major Jackson is the author of six volumes of poetry. His honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The poetry editor of the Harvard Review and the host of the podcast The Slowdown, Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently I Love Hearing Your Dreams, forthcoming from Scribner in September 2024, as well as two books of prose: Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine, and was the Editor of Best American Poetry 2022. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.

April is National Poetry Month, and we are celebrating with a collection of some of our favorite poetry moments over the years at Literary Arts. We will hear from a Portland high school student, the United States poet laureate, an Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient, a Nobel Prize winner, and more.  

Ada Limón, U.S. poet laureate, speaks at Portland Arts & Lectures in April 2023 about how important reading poetry has been to her in connecting to herself and to the natural world, and how she came to poetry as young girl.    

Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney shares one of his early poems and the story behind it at Portland Arts & Lectures, two decades before Ada Limón, in 2002. And Danica Leung, who was a junior at Lincoln High School at the time, reads her poem at Verselandia 2021.    

Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient Genevive DeGuzman moderates a conversation from Portland Book Festival 2022 featuring Shelley Wong, author of As She Appears, and Tayi Tibble, author of Poukahangatus, talking about ancestry, identity, and pop culture references in their work.  

In 2022, Literary Arts hosted an event with the Alano Club of Portland and their Artists in Recovery series. At that event, poet Hanif Abdurraqib shared work from his then-forthcoming, but now just-published, new book There’s Always This Year. And Li-Young Lee appeared at Portland Arts & Lectures in 2008, and shared his poem, “Virtues of the Boring Husband.”

Biography: 

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His most recent book, A Little Devil in America, was the winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burns Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Award. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize and nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us was named a book of the year by NPR, Esquire, BuzzFeed, O: The Oprah Magazine, Pitchfork, Chicago Tribune, among others. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist, and longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune for Your Disaster, won the Lenore Marshall Prize. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School. 

Genevieve DeGuzman writes poetry and fiction. She has been a recipient of fellowships and grants from Oregon Arts Commission, PEN America, Literary Arts, Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency, Vermont Studio Center, and Can Serrat, among others. Most recently, Genevieve was awarded the 2022 Oregon Literary Fellowship and was featured in the Cultural Landscape Series portraiture project for Oregon ArtsWatch. As a poet, Genevieve won the Atticus Review contest selected by Roberto Carlos Garcia and earned nominations for the Best New Poets anthology. Her work appears in Folio, Iron Horse Literary Review, Nimrod, RHINO, phoebe, Strange Horizons, and has been featured in the Poetry Moves program for C-TRAN. Born in the Philippines, raised in Southern California, she now lives in Portland, OR. 

Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney was raised in County Derry, and later lived for many years in Dublin. He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, and edited several widely used anthologies. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the “most important Irish poet since Yeats.” Heaney taught at Harvard University (1985-2006) and served as the Oxford Professor of Poetry (1989-1994). He died in 2013. 

Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His family settled in the United States in 1964. He is the author of Rose (1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award; The City in Which I Love You (1990), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; The Winged Seed (1995); Book of My Nights (2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; and Behind My Eyes (2008). Lee has been the recipient of the Lannan Literary Award; the Whiting Writers’ Award; the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award; the I. B. Lavan Award; three Pushcart Prizes; grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1998, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from State University of New York at Brockport. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, with his wife, Donna, and their two sons. 

Danica Leung graduated from Lincoln High School in 2022. She performed her poem at Verselandia! 2021. 

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her most recent book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. As the Poet Laureate, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world. 

Tayi Tibble (Te Whānau ā Apanui/Ngāti Porou) was born in 1995 and lives in Wellington, New Zealand. In 2017, she completed a master’s degree in creative writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, where she was the recipient of the Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing. Her second book of poetry, Rangikura, was published in the United States in 2024. Her first book of poetry is Poukahangatus.   

Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (YesYes Books, May 2022), winner of the 2019 Pamet River Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award, and the chapbook RARE BIRDS (Diode Editions, 2017). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2021, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center. She is an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and lives in San Francisco. 

We’re reaching back into the archive to 2009 to bring you a powerful talk by Karen Armstrong, originally broadcast in 2016.  

Armstrong has written 30 books on faith and the major religions, studying what Islam, Judaism and Christianity have in common, and how these faiths shaped world history and drive current events. A former nun, Armstrong wrote her first book, Through the Narrow Gate, about her seven years in a convent, and then later, The Spiral Staircase, about her subsequent spiritual awakening. 

She first rose to prominence with her book A History of God in 1993 and later landed on the bestseller list with her book Islam: A Short History, which was published in 2000, one year before the 9/11 attacks.  

Armstrong came to Portland in 2009 to talk about her book The Case for God.  She makes a deeply felt argument for faith not based in absolutes, which she argues leads to violence, but in compassion and acceptance, and for a view of God, regardless of the religion, that accepts our limits of our own knowledge.  Rooted in history, and a lifetime of learning, and drawing on religions from all over the world, this is a fascinating talk that was urgent in 2009, and remains urgent today. 

Biography: 

A former Catholic nun who left the convent to study literature, Karen Armstrong is an authority on world faiths, religious fundamentalism, and monotheism. Her poignant and captivating talks, spark worldwide debate and healthy discussion. Armstrong’s bestselling books include The Battle for God, The Spiral Staircase, The Great Transformation, and The Bible: A Biography. Publishers Weekly called her book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, “Provocative and supremely readable…[Armstrong] sweeps through religious history around the globe and over 4,000 years to explain the yoking of religion and violence and to elucidate the ways in which religion has also been used to counter violence.” She was a key advisor on Bill Moyers’ landmark PBS series on religion, has addressed members of the U.S. Congress, and was one of three scholars to speak at the UN’s first ever session on religion. The Sunday Times calls her “a bridge between religions.” 

This episode of The Archive Project features a conversation between 2020 Oregon Book Award winners Kesha Ajose Fisher and Ashley Toliver, with Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani. Much of their conversation focuses on craft—writing from the space of the unknown, writing as self-discovery, the role of time in the creative process—but they also discuss what it is like to cultivate a diligent writing practice while juggling motherhood, family, and all the other human demands during these especially trying times. These three are among some of the most exciting writers at work today, and their conversation provides insight and depth into how a creative piece of work makes its way into a reader’s hands. 

“To me, writing is an act of listening. Most of the time what I hear I don’t understand, but I write it anyway.” – Ashley Toliver

Biography: 

Kesha Ajose Fisher was born in Chicago and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. She now lives in Oregon with her family. Kesha’s debut collection of fictional stories, No God Like the Mother, focuses on the lives and realities of women who have been tasked with holding up the sky, all while the world whispers “you’re doing it wrong”. Fisher has won the 2020 Oregon Book Award for Fiction and The Phoenix Literary Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award for Short Fiction in both 2011 and 2012. Her writing has been published in several online and print collections, and in such publications as Multicultural Familia Magazine, the Alchemy Literary Magazine, and twice in Beyond Black & White Magazine. She works in social services, is a vocal advocate for immigrants and refugees, and she champions equality and education while opposing the poverty that plagues humanity. 

Ashley Toliver is the author of Ideal Machine (Poor Claudia, 2014) and Spectra (Coffee House Press, 2018). A poetry editor at Moss., her work has been supported by fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. She received her MFA from Brown University in 2013. 

Anis Mojgani is the current Poet Laureate of Oregon. A two-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, he has been awarded residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, AIR Serenbe, The Bloedel Nature Reserve, The Sou’wester, and the Oregon Literary Arts Writers-In-The-Schools program. The author of five books of poetry, he has done commissioned work for the Getty Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum, given multiple TEDx talks, and April 2021 will see the premiere of his first opera libretto, Sanctuaries. Anis’ work has appeared on HBO, National Public Radio, and as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series; and in the pages of such journals as Rattle, Platypus, Winter Tangerine, Forklift Ohio, and Bat City Review. Originally from New Orleans, Anis currently lives in Portland Oregon. 

In this episode, we bring you a talk from Ruth Ozeki. It was the culminating event of the 2023 Everybody Reads program.

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. At Literary Arts, our role is to bring the author to town for a talk in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.

The 2023 Everybody Reads program featured Ruth Ozeki and her novel A Tale for the Time Being.

Ozeki is the author of four novels, several of which have been international bestsellers. She is also a filmmaker, a teacher, and, astonishingly, also an ordain Zen Buddhist Priest. In many ways, all of these facets of her professional and spiritual life can be found shaping and influencing A Tale for the Time Being.

Ozkei’s talk is both fascinating and refreshing for her candor about how hard the work of writing fiction can be— a process for her that is, by her own account, frustrating, time consuming, mysterious, and deeply rewarding. The story of how A Tale for the Time Being was completed— and it almost wasn’t— is a ten-year journey interrupted and upended by personal and world events, and sustained by the voice of Nao, the main character, that kept talking to Ozeki the whole time.

“Here’s a tip for emerging writers […] when a character deigns to speak to you, you must stop whatever it is you are doing and write down what they are saying, otherwise they will go an find another writer to talk to.”

Get you copy of A Tale for the Time Being from Bookshop.org

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the award-winning author of three novels, My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, and A Tale for the Time Being, which was a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and has been published in over thirty countries. The Los Angeles Times called the novel “exquisite,” the Washington Post called it a “dazzling tapestry of metaphor and meaning,” and the Oprah Magazine declared it “masterfully woven.” Her latest novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness. Her nonfiction work includes a memoir, The Face: A Time Code, and the documentary film, Halving the Bones. She is affiliated with the Everyday Zen Foun­dation and teaches creative writing at Smith College, where she is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities.

The 2024 Everybody Reads book is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. For information about how to engage with the program, visit the Multnomah County Library’s web site. Gabrielle Zevin will be in Portland on Thursday, April 4 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall for the culminating event of the 2024 Everybody Reads Program. For information about tickets, visit literary-arts.org.

This week we have a conversation featuring Naomi Alderman, who joined us for Portland Book Festival in November 2023 for the very first event for her new novel, The Future. Alderman is the author of the mega best-seller, Barack Obama-endorsed, Margaret Atwood-mentored novel The Power. She talks with interviewer Omar El Akkad about the pressure she felt writing this follow-up, about a handful of friends who plot a daring heist to save the world from the tech billionaires who are threatening it. Bookpage called it “A daring, sexy, thrilling novel that may be the most wryly funny book about the end of civilization you’ll ever read.”

The conversation explores different modes of storytelling, from novel writing, of course, and Alderman also shares her experience working on the TV adaptation of The Power and having to approach her own story in a different way once more people became involved. Alderman is also a successful video game designer, and she and El Akkad make a great case about the storytelling in video games.

“Hillary Mantel said, “A novel brings the news.” I love that thought. I’m very interested in novels that speak to what’s happening now.”

Naomi Alderman is the bestselling author of The Power, which was the winner of the 2017 Baileys’ Women’s Prize for Fiction. It was longlisted for the 2017 Orwell Prize and chosen as one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, Entertainment Weekly and the San Francisco Chronicle. The Power topped Barack Obama’s list of his favorite books from 2017 and has been translated into more than thirty languages. Naomi grew up in London and attended Oxford University and UEA. Her latest book, The Future, was released in November 2023.

Omar El Akkad is an author and a journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work earned Canada’s National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. His latest novel is What Strange Paradise, which won the 2022 Ken Kesey Award for Fiction

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature legendary actor, filmmaker, and writer, Tom Hanks. Hanks was joined on stage at the Keller auditorium in May 2023 by fiction and screenwriter Jon Raymond.

What’s great about this conversation is that the through line involves Tom Hanks’s longtime make-up artist Danny Stripeke; because in many ways it reveals why Hanks is such an incredible storyteller and a magnetic personality. In the spring of 2023, Hanks had published his second work of fiction and his first novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece. It isn’t a novel about how to make films, nor one about the celebrities who act in them. It’s about the hundreds of people you never see on screen, but are the ones who actually make the film: the gaffers, and electricians, the producers and directors, the prop crew, and yes the make-up artists.

In this conversation, Hanks talks about his childhood and the long journey of his career, one in which he has been actor, producer, director and writer. With humor and reverence, he retells the stories of the incredible cast of characters he has met along the way, while also talking about the chaos and absurdity of shooting a film and the surprises in the process, both thrilling and sometimes disappointing, that come with the massive, collaborative undertaking of making cinema.

Tom Hanks has won Academy Awards for best actor for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. He has starred in, among many other films, Big, Sleepless in Seattle, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile, Cast Away, Catch Me If You Can, Captain Phillips, Bridge of Spies, Sully, Toy Story, The Post, and It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. He is also the author of a best-selling collection of stories, Uncommon Type.

Jon Raymond is the author of the novels The Half-Life, Rain Dragon, and Freebird, and the story collection Livability, winner of the Oregon Book Award. He has collaborated on six films with the director Kelly Reichardt, including Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves, First Cow, and the forthcoming Showing Up, numerous of which have been based on his fiction. He also received an Emmy Award nomination for his screenwriting on the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce directed by Todd Haynes and starring Kate Winslet. He was the editor of Plazm Magazine, associate and contributing editor at Tin House magazine, and a member of the Board of Directors at Literary Arts. His writing has appeared in Zoetrope, Playboy, Tin House, The Village Voice, Artforum, Bookforum, and other places. He lives in Portland, Oregon.