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 Hollywood. We invited Oregon-based writer Mat Johnson, whose most recent book is the fantastic Invisible Things, to moderate their conversation.  

This conversation was titled “Deceit and Dark Humor.” Both novels featuring protagonists who are knowingly lying to the people around them: Kushner’s narrator is a spy tasked with infiltrating an anarchist cooperative in France and is actively deceiving everyone she encounters, while Senna’s protagonist, Jane, spirals into more and more lies as she tries to create a television show with a big-shot Hollywood producer.  

We have a special treat at the end of the episode. Another feature of Portland Book Festival is the annual launch of our Writers in the Schools anthology, featuring creative writing from Portland-area public high school students. We’ll hear from two students:  

William Nobles, Franklin HS, short story Ceiling Man  

Ari Romero, junior at Lincoln HS, piece called Missing the Mark  

Rachel Kushner is the author of Creation Lake, her latest novel, The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection, and the internationally bestselling novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books are translated into twenty-seven languages.  

Danzy Senna is the author of four previous works of fiction, including the bestselling Caucasia and, most recently, Colored Television, as well as a memoir. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.  

Mat Johnson is a Philip H. Knight Chair of the Humanities at the University of Oregon. His publications include the novels Invisible Things, Loving Day, and Pym, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the graphic novel Incognegro. Johnson is the recipient of the American Book Award, the United States Artists James Baldwin Fellowship, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. 

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 Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, all published in the mid-1980s–which he discusses in this conversation, along with his early career as a translator of poems from the French.   

Siri Hustvedt is a novelist and essayist; her essays include the collections A Pleas for Eros and the memoir The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. Her novels include The Summer Without Men and The Blazing World.  In this conversation she talks about the book she was writing at the time, The Sorrows of an American.   

Auster and Hustvedt were married in 1982. They came to Portland in January of 2006 and interviewed each other. At times it feels as if you are eavesdropping on an especially intelligent dinner table conversation. Their respect for each other’s work is delightful to hear – and several of the questions they remark they’ve never asked the other! It’s a rare opportunity to listen in on two great minds in conversation. 

Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Bloodbath Nation, Baumgartner, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. Among his other honors are the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, and the Premio Napoli for Sunset Park. In 2012, he was the first recipient of the NYC Literary Honors in the category of fiction. He was also a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions), the PEN/Faulkner Award (The Music of Chance), the Edgar Award (City of Glass), and the Man Booker Prize (4 3 2 1). Auster was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He died at age seventy-seven in 2024. 

Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, three collections of essays, a work of non-fiction, and six novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her most recent novel The Blazing World was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won The Los Angeles Book Prize for fiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. 

In this episode, we feature the bestselling writer and physician, Abraham Verghese.  This was his second appearance at Portland Arts and Lectures.  He first joined us in 2012 to talk about his first novel, Cutting for Stone, which spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list.  He came back twelve years later to discuss his second novel, also a bestseller, the Covenant of Water – a sprawling, intergenerational family story that spans most of the 20th century and takes place in Karala, India.  

While Verghese was made famous by these two novels, his writing career actually began with two works of nonfiction, both memoirs that center his life as a doctor – My Own Country and The Tennis Partner.    

In this talk Verghese pulls together all the strands of his life; his parents move from India to Ethiopia, his escape as a young person from a brutal regime to America, his training as a doctor in India, and his medical career in America. Verghese talks about how books initially lead him to medicine and how medicine lead him back to writing books.  We come to understand how these two vocations are connected and deepen the other in his life.  It’s a fascinating tour of the unique career of a brilliant artist and scientist.   

Abraham Verghese is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of the NBCC Award finalist My Own Country and the New York Times Notable Book The Tennis Partner. His most recent book, Cutting for Stone, spent 107 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than two million copies worldwide. It was translated into more than twenty languages and is being adapted for film by Anonymous Content. Verghese was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama, has received six honorary degrees, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives and practices medicine in Stanford, California where he is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor in the Stanford University School of Medicine. A decade in the making, The Covenant of Water is his first book since Cutting for Stone. 

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 unbelievable, with six days of work on multiple programs at her own request — Her hard work, which she connects to her Chinese family tradition, catapulted her onto the co-anchor chair on the CBS Evening News and made her a household name.

Chung relates her battles and her victories with wit and humor and doesn’t hold back from calling out the sexism and racism she endured throughout her career. The book is also a portrait of an era in broadcast news where the lines between serious investigative journalism and tabloid fodder became blurred, a line Chung was often forced to walk against her will.

Journalist Lisa Ling, of CBS News, said, “For generations of Asian Americans, Connie Chung will always be our superhero. Someone who looked like us who, on a national stage, held our most important political leaders accountable. She was bold, aggressive, and unafraid. So many of us pursued broadcast journalism because she singularly showed us it was possible. I didn’t think I could respect her any more than I already do, but this most candid account of her journey reminds us that Connie Chung is nothing short of a true American icon.”

Connie Chung was interviewed by Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor, in front of a live audience in September 2024.

Connie Chung, pioneer news anchor and reporter was the first woman to co-anchor the CBS Evening News, the flagship news broadcast on CBS. Connie was only the second woman to anchor any network evening broadcast in television history.

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 of the myth of Orpheus, Rushdie tells the story of Vina Apsara, a pop star, and Ormus Cama, an extraordinary songwriter and musician, who captivate and change the world through their music and their romance. Beginning in Bombay in the fifties, moving to London in the sixties, and New York for the last quarter century, the novel pulsates with a half-century of music and celebrates the power of rock ‘n’ roll. In this episode, Rushdie discusses the musical and mythological influences that inspired this ambitious work of magical realism.

“The thing that I wanted to do most of all was to write a love story. And to find a way of writing a contemporary love story that was neither gushily sentimental nor fashionably cynical, but which could face up to great passion and try and make sense of it. And so, in my usual perverse way, while trying to write a modern story I found myself thinking about an ancient myth.”

Salman Rushdie is the author of several novels, including Grimus, Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and Shalimar the Clown. He has written collections of short stories, including East, West, and co-edited with Elizabeth West a collection of Indian literature in English, Mirrorwork. He has also published several works of nonfiction, among them The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, and Joseph Anton, a memoir of his life under the fatwa issued after the publication of The Satanic Verses. His fourteenth novel, Victory City, released in 2023.

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 & Creative Writing Karen Holmberg, Dove addresses her writing process, adapting her work to the stage, and facing fear through poetry, among other subjects.

“I think by facing it—not trying to conquer it, but by facing it and entering it—I feel a little less afraid of it. I feel like I’m getting to know the fear. I mean, half of fear—well, half of anything—is the fear of the unknown.”

Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize winner and former U. S. Poet Laureate, is the only poet honored with both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts. Her recent works include Playlist for the Apocalypse, Sonata Mulattica, and the National Book Award-shortlisted Collected Poems: 1974-2004. In 2021 she was awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2023 she received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She lives in Charlottesville, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia.

“I don’t think there’s any shame is subterfuge. I don’t think that tacking it straight on is everybody’s thing—and in fact, what is really frustrating is if you have a fear, or you have an emotion you really want to get out, and you try to pour it out and it isn’t a good poem…One of the things I think a young poet can do is to go at it sideways, to tell it slant.”

“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 book. At the conclusion of the reading, he answers a series of questions from the audience, including the number one inquiry on everyone’s mind: Just how will reading this novel make a person believe in God? 

“I must say a word about fear: It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.”

Yann Martel was born in Spain in 1963, the son of Canadian parents studying graduate courses abroad. Both of his parents went on to join the Canadian Foreign Service, and Martel divided his childhood between Costa Rica, France, Spain, Mexico, and Canada. This wanderlust continued into his adulthood, when he traveled to Iran, Turkey, and India before taking up residence in Montreal. 

Martel worked a variety of odd jobs in his early 20s—including tree planter, dishwasher, and security guard—before devoting himself to writing at age 27. He gained international attention in 2002 for his second novel and third publication, Life of Pi, a fantasy adventure about a boy stranded in a lifeboat with a host of zoo animals, most notably a tiger. Life of Pi won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and was made into a feature film in 2012, winning 4 academy awards. 

Martel’s other works include We Ate the Children Last, a collection of short stories, and the novel Beatrice and Virgil, which was a New York Times best seller and winner of the Financial Times Fiction of the Year Award. In 2012, he published 101 Letters to a Prime Minister, a collection of correspondences to the prime minister of Canada. His latest novel, The High Mountains of Portugal, was published in 2016. He currently lives in Saskatchewan. 

“The proof of God is not in the story. The proof of God is that there are stories.” 

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 festival authors and asks them to share their book recommendations. You’ll not only get a behind the scenes look at the festival, but you’ll get plenty of books to add to your own to-read list or maybe for gift inspiration this season.

In this episode, we’ll hear from Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe, author of Thunder Song.

Tracy O’Neill, author of Woman of Interest.

Mat Johnson, author of Invisible Things.

Lupita Aquino, known as @Lupita.Reads on Instagram and TikTok.

Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth.

Margaux Meganck, author of the childrens picture book Speck.

And Brian Evenson, author of Good Night Sleep Tight.

With the holiday season upon us, we hope you get some gift-giving inspiration from this weeks episode. You’ll also get a peek behind the scenes at the festival, where authors geek out about their fellow authors.

We hope you enjoy this taste of Portland Book Festival! Stay tuned for more episodes from Portland Book Festival later this season.

“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 Greek myths. But they are also more than simply retellings. Her books are the reinterpreting of myths that reveal new truths from these ancient stories.

Of Circe: “This is the story of a woman finding her power, finding her voice, finding her art. And I love that her art [her witchcraft] was such a significant part of her growth as a character.” 

Miller’s work matters because of the way it is iconoclastic. It’s easy to think that Greek myths, and their received interpretations, are immutable and fixed in the history of literature. But Miller reminds us that these stories have always had multiple versions depending on who is doing the telling and what agenda might be behind a particular version. She questions who is centered in the story and who is not, what details are left out and what is embellished? This notion that a storyteller makes choices is important to really understanding, as readers, the mechanics of all stories. Her work also speaks to the power of these Greek myths. For millennia, these myths have been retold, reinterpreted, and remain vibrant and relevant stories for each generation. You only need to look to the incredible popularity of Miller’s work for evidence of this today.

In the second part of the episode, Miller is joined in conversation by Oregon Book Award-winning writer Omar El Akkad.

“Part of what I wanted to do in writing these stories is I really wanted to strip away the part that sometimes makes people feel alienated. or that they feel is very elitist or not relevant. I wanted to make these novels the type of thing that have ‘goodies’ for the people who know these stories, but are really meant to invite everyone in.”

Madeline Miller is the author of The Song of Achilles, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012, was shortlisted for the Stonewall Writer of the Year 2012, and was translated into twenty-five languages, and Circe, which won the 2019 Indie Choice Award, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was named on numerous Best Books of 2018 lists. Madeline holds an MA in Classics from Brown University, and she taught Latin, Greek and Shakespeare to high school students for over a decade. She has also studied at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, and at Yale School of Drama, where she focused on the adaptation of classical texts to modern forms. Her essays have appeared in publications including the Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Lapham’s Quarterly and NPR.org. She lives outside Philadelphia.  

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, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, is set to release in early 2025. 

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 brands. 

“I think one of the things that is unique about Nike is that when we go to work on Monday morning and one of our athletes has performed at a high level, everybody in the company—from clerks to the CEO—is lifted by that.” 

In 1962, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed $50 from his father and created a company with a simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost athletic shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his lime green Plymouth Valiant, Knight grossed $8,000 his first year. Today, Nike’s annual sales top $30 billion, and the Nike swoosh has become one of the most ubiquitous and recognizable symbols in the world today. But the man behind the swoosh has long remained a mystery. Now, for the first time ever, Knight tells his story, interviewed on stage by New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik. Hear first hand from Knight as he shares his journey toward building one of the world’s most iconic brands. 

“A lot of people say, ‘Well, you created a culture’—but it wasn’t me. Basically, it kind of bubbles up from the people. You can’t dictate a culture…it comes from within. I’ve got fingerprints on the culture, but it is by no means dictated by me.” 

Special thank you to Nike Inc., Oregon Health & Science University, Weiden + Kennedy, and The University of Oregon for supporting this event. 

Phil Knight, cofounder of shoe giant Nike, retired as chairman in 2016 after 52 years at the company. Mr. Knight earned an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Oregon. During his tenure as CEO (1964–2004), Nike became one of the most successful companies in the world. He lives in Oregon with his wife Penny. 

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 York Times bestseller list for two full years and the movie of the book was in development, with Tan as the writer and producer. There was lots of anticipation about what this writer would do next. Of course, Tan has gone on to have an incredible literary career, publishing half a dozen novels, including the bestseller The Bonesetter’s Daughter, books for children, nonfiction, and most recently a memoir called Where the Past Begins.

In this talk, Tan takes us back through her life to talk about her parents who immigrated from China in 1949, how Mandarin influenced the ways she wrote—and writes—in English, and how she “found her voice by not finding it.” She also talks about her early days first as a freelancer and novice fiction writer when someone told her, upon hearing the premise of the short story that would become The Joy Luck Club, that “no one wants to read about Chinese mothers.”  Of course, we now know that millions of readers in 35 counties actually did.

Amy Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life, Saving Fish from Drowning, and two children’s books, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat, which was adapted into a PBS television series. Tan was also a co-producer and co-screenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club. Her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and her work has been translated into thirty-five languages. She lives with her husband in San Francisco and New York.