- Alfred A. Knopf
Are your bookworm senses tingling? It’s probably because Literary Arts recently launched something called The Archive Project, making recorded lectures from a wide variety of writers like Wallace Stegner and Marjane Satrapi available for for free on their website. The Archive Project is ongoing, and Literary Arts plans to release new old material over the next two years.
Here’s Literary Arts:
A retrospective of some of the most engaging talks from the world’s best writers over the first 30 years of Literary Arts in Portland. In conjunction with our 30th anniversary, Literary Arts is rolling out an archive of the most sought-after talks from our Portland Arts & Lectures series. Each month, we’ll be publishing new lectures available for streaming on this website for free. With over 250 original lectures by the most creative and articulate minds of our generation, these discussions offer special moments between world-famous authors and our local literary community. Literary Arts is proud to announce that OPB will broadcast selected recordings of our Portland Arts & Lectures every Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. on OPB radio starting on October 15. Click here to visit the show’s homepage on opb.org.
That may read like a niche-y indoor kid thing to celebrate—AND IT IS—but it’s also nice to see one of our biggest literary organizations making these archives accessible and publicly available. People are busy. Readings often happen on weekday nights, and though in-person readings are indeed a magic time to see your favorite author in action, you can’t exactly haul Zadie Smith around in your car while doing errands. But you can do that with Literary Arts’ recorded lectures. Or you can just wait for the January Glooms, when you’ve already marathon-watched all of Gilmore Girls but do not feel like going outside. That’ll be the perfect time to pour a beverage of your choice, shroud yourself in a blanket Emperor Palpatine-style, and press play, no questions from your fellow audience members needed.
Pro-tip: I suggest starting with Chimamanda Adichie‘s talk, which takes on fiction, the writing process (she wards off bad writing days by reading writers she loves), and her early misconceptions about bagels.