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!

Writing Fairy Tales

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The fairy tale is a fanciful storytelling genre that uses supernatural elements, personification, transformation, repetitive plot lines, and unambiguously good and evil characters to speak to social and cultural violence, oppression and shifts in power. How do we write an effective, inspiring modern fairy tale? We will read from the original Brother’s Grimm, Italo Calvino’s fairy tales, and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber with the form, tapping into its nuances and reach as we find inspiration for our own fairy tales. Class time will be spent engaged in writing exercises, working with and discussing assigned reading, and sharing our own drafts. November 21 and December 5-19, 2020 Saturdays, 10:00 a.m to noon (4 sessions) Online via Zoom Instructor: Wendy Noonan Wendy Noonan’s poetry has appeared…

$190

Writing Flash Prose

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In this 2-day intensive participants will create a mini scrapbook of vibrant vignettes, short short stories that tell tall tales. Mini epics. Through a series of experimental exercises focusing on key literary and poetic devices, students will bust through standard forms to draft vivid snapshots of life. We will also dig deep. Go behind the scenes, explore and bring to light what lies beneath. This is a generative workshop for flash fiction or non fiction. All genres welcome. Access Program We want our writing classes to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class registrations at a reduced rate. The access program for writing classes covers…

$95

Misinformation, Fake News, and Political Propaganda

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Are you overwhelmed with messages from politicians, news sources and other media? Distinguish truth from fiction using real-world examples of political ads, news headlines, logical fallacies, graphs and charts, the effect of word choice in messaging, statistical data and other types of information. Become your own “fact-checker” and learn how to find accurate information. Registrants will be sent information on how to join event a week before the event date. Made possible by The National Endowment for the Humanities Fund of The Library Foundation.

Free

Poet’s Essay

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

IPRC Creative Workshops for Winter 2021 will be held online via zoom, PST. Register here Somewhere between prose poetry and lyric essay there’s a genre of weird and brilliant writing I’m calling “the poet’s essay.” From Hanif Abdurraqib to Chris Kraus, this genre combines the imagistic musicality of poems with the argumentative structure of an essay. In this six-week generative course, students will explore and discuss examples of essays by poets and have the opportunity to generate work that follows different structures within this exciting genre. Reading list will/may include writers such as Maggie Nelson, Mary Ruefle, Eileen Myles, Joe Wenderoth, Claudia Rankine, Alexander Chee, and others. Open to writers of all levels. Students will leave the class with several starts and a greater understanding of…

$225

Delve Readers Seminar: Nigerian Authors: Abi Dare and Akwake Emezi

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This seminar focuses on two Nigerian authors who rely on the use of foreign languages in their work. In The Girl With the Louding Voice, Abi Dare’s pidgin (broken English) is used in the narrator’s voice throughout the story. Discussions will include topics around class, race and the roles of children as domestics in African culture. In The Death of Vivek Oji, by Akwake Emezi, we will explore the story about the freedom of expressing one’s sexuality as it pertains to Nigerian culture through their eyes. Texts The Girl With the Louding Voice by Abi Dare The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwake Emezi Delve Access Program We want Delve seminars to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our…

$240

Brian Komei Dempster and Jennifer Perrine

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Brian Komei Dempster’s latest book of poems Seize focuses on his experience of raising a son who suffers from intractable epilepsy and pervasive developmental delays. Moreover, the book explores wartime incarceration, domestic/familial/racial tensions, and legacies of trauma and violence—along with paths towards resolution. Through juxtaposition, the poems link seemingly disparate events through a central metaphor: seizure. Dempster will be interviewed by Portland author Jennifer Perrine. Jennifer is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Again (Airlie Press, 2020). Register in advance for this webinar https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_adX_8KcnSaKl2kkhsZP4WQ Brian Komei Dempster’s debut book of poetry, Topaz, was published by Four Way Books in 2013 and received the 15 Bytes 2014 Book Award in Poetry. His most recent book is Seize. He is the editor of both…

Free

Intersections of Identity and Experience

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In this webinar, open to prose writers and poets of all ages and backgrounds, participants will use freewriting, revision, and in-depth feedback as tools to create work that can spark new writing possibilities or build on an existing project. The class will address these types of questions: How do we synthesize our experiences and histories with acts of imagination? How do we break silences and heal from trauma through storytelling? How do we write about intersections between race, gender, sexuality, disability, and other aspects of our identities in effective and nuanced ways? Participants will be encouraged to draw from personal, family, and cultural histories, in a supportive yet critically constructive writing environment. Please register using “ticket” link below. Brian Komei Dempster’s debut book of poetry,…

$40

Hope is the Howl with Lidia Yuknavitch and Pam Houston

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

WHAT: A three-hour online webgasm. WITH: Pam Houston and Lidia Yuknavitch WHEN: Sunday, January 17th, 2021 from 1PM to 4PM PST WHERE: ZOOM! (But of course.) Meeting ID will be provided ahead of time. HOW MUCH: $150. Payment plans are always available, contact Daniel Elder at registration@corporealwriting.com SCHOLARSHIPS: Click here to apply. In this duet collaborative Pam Houston and Lidia Yuknavitch will open up the space of the howl, in our throats and bodies, speaking to our rage and sorrow and fear so that we might bring a reinvented kind of hope to the page differently than we ever have before. Living on the brink globally has brought us to the cusp of new possibilities: how do we go about living our lives differently? how…

$150

Delve Readers Seminar: The “Middle space between languages”: Julia Alvarez and Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This seminar will be an exploration of what Ingrid Rojas Contreras so accurately refers to as, “the middle space between languages,” in her essay, Translation as an Arithmetic of Loss. We will discuss the ways in which the characters in the two novels, Afterlife by Julia Alvarez and Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras, as well as the speakers in the additional poems, navigate the in-betweenness of being bilingual. Each text is a discovery of the ways in which people live both within and between two cultures, languages, and often, identities, and how this shapes their stories. We will also read the Rojas Contreras essay to question what is, both lost and gained, for the characters in the novels whose stories are…

$240

Writing the Non-Fiction Book Proposal

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Writing a book proposal is the best first step to writing a nonfiction book for both adults and young readers. An excellent proposal helps you organize your ideas, understand the competition, and can help you land a publishing contract even before you write the book. This six-week class will take you step-by-step through the major parts of the nonfiction book proposal: the query letter, overview, competitive analysis, marketing and promotion, author background, outline and sample chapter. Bring an idea, and be ready to write. The class includes extensive handouts and questionnaires to guide your work. Class outcomes: By the end of this six week workshop, students will leave with a rough draft of a nonfiction book proposal. More information: Download 10 Reasons to Write a…

$285