LitPDX seeks to amplify marginalized voices, and welcomes all, their ideas, their events, and their words.

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Steel Yourself Before You Reveal Yourself

Online N/A, Portland

A good journalist reports the story, but never becomes the story. But as essayists and non-fiction writers, we're not journalists. Sometimes our lives are, in fact, the story. What does it mean to write about ourselves and our lives, and then, to publish that writing? What does it mean when people read that writing, and discuss it—and us—publicly, as well as privately? Alexander Chee (How To Write an Autobiographical Novel), Morgan Jerkins (This May Be My Undoing), and Joseph Osmundson (Virology, forthcoming 2022) will discuss the choice to write about ourselves and dive into the public discourse as both writer and subject, and how to prepare for the unique scrutiny that comes with essay, memoir, and autobiographical writing. They will also offer tools to help…

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$10

Author Talk: Good Morning, Midnight with PSU alumna Lily Brooks-Dalton

Online N/A, Portland

Join fellow alumni and friends for a Q&A with alumna author of Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton, MFA '16. The talk will be moderated by Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, Gabriel Urza. The PSU Alumni Book Club will finish reading Good Morning, Midnight at t he end of September. All PSU alumni and friends of PSU are welcome to join the Book Club. Learn more at https://www.pdx.edu/alumni/book-club

Free

Inquiry as Narrative w/ Lilly Dancyger

The Corporeal Writing Center 510 SW 3rd Ave #101, Portland

Tuesday, October 12th, 5-8pm Pacific Cost: $150 payment plans available, email Daniel at registration@corporealwriting.com Where: Corporeal Center, 510 SW 3rd Avenue, suite 101, Portland, Or. 97204 Description: There's often so much emphasis on plot and narrative, but there are other ways to move a story forward. Sometimes the most interesting thing isn't what happened, and then what happened next, and then what happened next—but what we have to say about what happened, and how our perspective on a single event can shift and change over time. How the very process of writing about an experience—and the research and inquiry that goes into writing about our own lives—can change our relationship to the thing we're writing about. In this session, we'll talk about how to shape…

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$150

Jonathan Franzen in Conversation With Maria Semple / Ticketed Event

Online N/A, Portland

Jonathan Franzen’s gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the first novel in his new magnum opus trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies. It’s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless — unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high school class,…

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$30

Archiving Ancestors, Collective Grief, and the Illusion of Time

Online N/A, Portland

The quiet and stillness of quarantine transported many of us beyond the bounds of time and space. Through our unexpected journeys, we may have traced new threads from ancestral roots to our present moments and felt them stretch towards an unknown somewhere on a vast continuum of time. Loss of place, people, and ways of being from the past, present, and anticipatory future left grief to linger and blur the edges of things. This generative writing series will invite us to craft multi-genre pieces that archive the transcendent, dizzying, perplexing, and new. We will honor our ancestors, known, unknown, and chosen. We will write from the dark blue of sorrow to expand our capacity for joy. We will dissolve the illusion of time to embody…

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$145

Fantasy Book Club (REMOTE)

Online N/A, Portland

The Books Around the Corner Fantasy Book Club meets monthly on the second Tuesday of every month at 6:30PM. We would like to extend an invitation to all of our fantasy loving customers. Join us on Tuesday October 12th at 6:30pm for our Books Around the Corner Fantasy Book Club. We will discuss Star Eater by Kerstin Hall. About the book: All martyrdoms are difficult. Elfreda Raughn will avoid pregnancy if it kills her, and one way or another, it will kill her. Though she's able to stomach her gruesome day-to-day duties, the reality of preserving the Sisterhood of Aytrium's magical bloodline horrifies her. She wants out, whatever the cost. So when a shadowy faction approaches Elfreda with an offer of escape, she leaps at the opportunity. As their spy, she gains…

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$26.99
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