Melissa Febos (left), Hua Hsu (right)
Sheehan Beowulf, Devlin Claro / OPB
On this episode of “Literary Arts: 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 and New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu about his memoir, “Stay True.”
We paired Melissa and Hua for this festival event because their books share themes of adolescence and coming of age, of exploring identity through art-making and finding your voice, and of searching for and finding your people, finding belonging and a community. Melissa and Hua each speak about how processing the large and small events and emotions of their lives through writing has been a way they understand their lives and a way to find meaning.
They also both talk about how writing about events or traumas in their past, including revisiting writing from their younger selves, has helped them realize how their relationship to that event or trauma changes over time. I think that you hear in these conversations that for Melissa and Hua, writing about their experiences created a new compassion for their younger, messier, angrier, selves.
Bio:
Melissa Febos is the bestselling author of four books, including “Girlhood”—LAMBDA Award finalist and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and “Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative.” Her fifth book, “The Dry Season,” is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf. Her awards and fellowships include those from the Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The British Library, The Black Mountain Institute, MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has recently appeared in The Paris Review, The Sun, The New York Times Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Best American Essays, Vogue, and New York Review of Books. Febos is an associate professor at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.
Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and an associate professor of English at Vassar College. Hsu serves on the executive board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He was formerly a fellow at the New American foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his family.
Tiffany Camhi is a multimedia journalist focusing on arts, culture and environment reporting. You can hear her throughout the state of Oregon on OPB. She spent six years at KQED Public Radio in the San Francisco Bay Area as a host, producer, reporter and all-around audio gopher. Tiffany is an alumni of the City University of New York, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. When Tiffany’s not on the radio you can usually find her riding a motorcycle...or trying to figure out a way to talk about motorcycles on the radio.
Jenn Chávez is a radio host, announcer and producer with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Jenn has been making radio in Portland for over a decade. Prior to joining OPB in 2017, she hosted and produced the local news radio show “The Five Quadrants of Portland” on XRAY-FM, reporting on issues impacting underrepresented communities. She has a BA in literature and writing from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She spent her younger days as a film-nerdy video store clerk, and remains a source of unsolicited movie recommendations.