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

For details regarding specific events please contact the organizers or venues. If you are an organizer or venue and would like to reach out to us please feel free to contact us or submit an event using our submission form. We’d love to hear from you!

Fall 2019: Memoir Boot Camp

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland

Complete the first draft of a memoir in just eight weeks. This class is for writers who are ready to commit to an aggressive writing schedule and explore aspects of memory-based writing in a supportive environment. You should have some prior experience in writing nonfiction, as well as a specific project to which you will devote these eight weeks. Participants will present their work to the class for discussion three to four times. Natalie Serber is the author of the story collection Shout Her Lovely Name (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) a New York Times Notable Book of 2012 and a summer reading pick from O, the Oprah Magazine, and an Oregonian Top 10 Books of the Pacific Northwest and an Indie Next Pick. Her memoir, Community Chest, was…

$455

Fall 2019: Contents Under Pressure: Experiments in Poetic Form

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland

What happens when someone puts severe restrictions on the way you write? What if Edgar Allen Poe wanted to write “The Raven,” but couldn’t use the letter E? Participants will look at some poems created under these kinds of extreme constraints, and we’ll write to learn what happens when we accept such outrageous challenges. Jennifer Perrine is a 2019 Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient. She is the author of three books of poetry: No Confession, No Mass; In the Human Zoo; and The Body Is No Machine. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Valparaiso Fiction Review and Salt Hill, and in the Broadsided Press folio “Bearing Arms: Responding to Guns in American Culture.” Her honors include the 2017 K. Margaret Grossman Fiction Award, the…

$135