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!

Attic Institute: SPRING Online: Seeing the Story with Fresh Eyes: Revision Workshop w Thea Chacamaty

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Two-hour Seminar: Have you finished a draft of a short story, essay, poem, or novel and are now ready to enter the next phase--the arduous, maddening, and fun process of revision? This two-hour seminar will help you see your work with fresh eyes. To revise in Latin means to “re-see” or to “see again.” Using targeted writing exercises to summon the heart of our writing, we will learn new revision techniques that make the writing new again. Register for this workshop NOTE: To protect everyone during the COVID-19 pandemic, we're offering our workshops via Zoom. All students must first sign up for a free Zoom account. Setting it up is easy. And we can help you with questions, if needed. For each class, you'll receive a Zoom "invitation," from the…

$45 – $64

Oregon BIPOC Writers Publishing Event

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Literary Arts, Ooligan Press, and Portland State University’s English Department partner to present the Oregon BIPOC Writers Publishing Event. This event is designed to connect Oregon’s most talented, diverse writers to the publishers and authors seeking to hear their voices. Pitching a Book 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM (PST) Distilling the important elements of a book into a concise and gripping pitch is a true art. In this presentation, seasoned literary agent Fiona Kenshole lays out the fundamentals of good pitching. This webinar is intended to aid writers in preparing for a pitching session with a publisher or agent later on in the day. Demystifying Book Publishing Panel 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM (PST) So much of the process of getting published, finding an agent,…

Free

Word by Word: A Generative Webinar with T Kira Madden

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

WHAT: A 2-hour online webinar. WITH: T Kira Madden WHEN: Saturday, April 24, 2021 from 1PM to 3PM PST WHERE: ZOOM (But of course.) Meeting ID will be provided ahead of time. This event will be recorded and registrants unable to make it to the session or who wish to revisit it will have access to the video for 48 hours afterwards. HOW MUCH: $100. Payment plans are always available, contact Daniel Elder at registration@corporealwriting.com SCHOLARSHIPS: Ten scholarships are available, prioritized for parents with children at home. Click here to apply. Word by Word with T Kira Madden Why do some stories require 30+ pages to reach a payoff, while others feel fully satisfying in a single paragraph or line? The answer, often, is in…

$100

Delve Readers Seminar: From Another Angle: Marilynne Robinson’s Home, Lila, and Jack

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In this seminar we will read Robinson’s third, fourth, and fifth novels, Home, Lila, and Jack. These novels complete the quartet that begins with Gilead. Home takes up the story of one of that novel’s characters, Jack Boughton. Nemesis of Gilead’s narrator John Ames and son of Ames’s best friend, Rev. Robert Boughton, Jack has returned to his childhood home unexpectedly after a twenty-year absence. Now he, his aging father, and his recently-divorced younger sister Glory must navigate a difficult and often painful reunion, haunted by the mistakes and misunderstandings of the past. Lila tells the story of John Ames’s late-life marriage from the perspective of his young wife, whose quiet gentleness reveals little of her wayward, often lonely history. Lila’s story, and her love…

$240

Delve Readers Seminar: New York City: Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer are two contemporary authors who have explored New York City not only as a space where a person works, transits, and lives, but more as a symbolic space at a certain time that interacts with the fictional characters as if the city were also one of them—a living entity that actively affects the fates and actions of every person that inhabits it. Memory, chance, the double, and disobedience as a way to dig into the self are the literary elements that trigger the plots constructed by these two authors. In this Delve seminar we’ll discuss Auster’s Leviathan (1992), and Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). We will compare how each author recreates New York as a fictional place,…

$240

Elissa Washuta, Kristin Arnett, Morgan Parker, and Tommy Pico: White Magic

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Join Elissa Washuta, Kristin Arnett, Morgan Parker and Tommy Pico for “a Sagittarius group chat” about Washuta’s new book, White Magic. Register in advance for this webinar Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a writer of personal essays and memoir. She is the author of two books, Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere. An adviser for the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington and a nonfiction faculty member in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Elissa lives near Seattle. Website - Twitter Elissa Washuta will give a Pop-Up Reading in Native American Art (Main Building, 3rd Floor). Kristen Arnett…

Free

Looking Back to Look Forward: A Daily Writing Practice

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This class will help you adopt crucial creative habits using your memory of the past to build a practice for the future. Using a series of daily in-class and at-home prompts that focus on ideas of home, trek childhood, and position memory as present, you will generate new work and use research-based ways to bring a sustainable practice into your life. Everyone will have opportunities to give and receive generous feedback on the development of your practice, as well as on your writing. We will pay particular attention to the voice and structure of new work and engage with the common themes that arise out of these prompts: the grief of all families, the complicated solipsism of children, and the way language gives new meaning…

$240

Mary Jo Bang, Joshua Beckman, and Zachary Schomburg

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

An evening of poetry, to celebrate the publication of Fjords Vol. 2 by Oregon Book Award author Zachary Schomburg. Register in advance for this webinar Mary Jo Bang is the author of eight previous books of poetry, including A Doll for Throwing and Elegy, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also published a celebrated translation of Dante’s Inferno, and her translation of Purgatorio will be published in July with Greywolf. She teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis. Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of several books, including Animal Days (Wave, 2021), The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks (Wave Books, 2018), The Inside of an Apple, Take It, Shake, Your Time Has Come,…

Free

Writing Breakage: The Collage Essay

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

in the broken thing, human agency is oddly implied: breakage, whatever its cause, is the dark complement to the act of making; the one implies the other. – Louise Gluck Do you have a nonfiction story or essay that struggles to mold to a traditional structure? Sometimes the most personal stories or essays do not want to follow a linear trajectory. Collage and braided forms of creative nonfiction rely instead on fragmentation, silence and resonance to build suspense and/or complex thinking processes. We will consider how writers weave different story and thought threads into personal writing to access and represent ways of thinking/knowing. Class time will be spent writing, discussing assigned reading and aspects of the form, and finally, responding to each other’s work. Students…

$285

Talking Back: Writing in Conversation with Other Texts

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

for BIPOC writers only We all know that words carry weight, but some words—especially those bound up with the cultural power of political speeches, sacred texts, and canonical literature—can seem overwhelming in their authority. We’ll choose texts that have influenced us—for better or for worse—and use a variety of techniques to respond to them, play with them, challenge them, and upend them. 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 60% of the class tuition. Most writing classses have at least one access spot available. Contact…

$240