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

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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…

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$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,…

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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…

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$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…

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$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Moby-Dick

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

There are Great American Novels and then there is Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece. Have you read it years ago and forgotten it already? Have you thought you should read it? Should you read it right now? All signs point to “yes.” Melville is great, he is strange, he is important, and Moby-Dick stands atop the mainmast of American letters. It’s a novel, a poem, an opera, a play, the subject of countless New Yorker cartoons…and maybe it’s a story about a whale and a man, Captain Ahab, who has the most single-minded agenda of any fictional character ever. The novel is also great fun. Join Literary Arts Delve guide Christopher Lord aboard the Pequod for a six-week adventure that may stay with you for…

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$240

Delve Readers Seminar: The Madwoman in the Attic and the Monstrous Feminine

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The “mad woman in the attic” is a common trope in gothic literature, but who is she? And how did she end up there? Integral to the gothic genre are stories of madness and haunting, which often serve as metaphors for social violence, race, gender and class warfare, and the abject. Stereotypically, the female protagonist in gothic literature plays the role of victim, but what about when she participates in her own monstrosity? In this seminar, we will explore some lesser known gothic novels with female protagonists who became “monstrous”, and explore the intersections between horror, mental illness, psychoanalysis, sexual repression, and gender identity in these female authored 20th century gothic works. Texts: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson Wide Sargasso…

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$240

From Concept to Object: The Zine as a Creative Conduit

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Self-published, limited distribution, one-of-a-kind works of text and images, zines have been a subculture mainstay for decades and continue to evolve. This workshop will recontextualize this definition as it relates to filmmaking today and examine how zines can become tools in exploring, developing, and materializing your ideas. We will look at examples of filmzines and explore how they can help you get started on a project with no equipment or funding, be a gateway to other mediums, and allow you to visualize an idea from your head to the page. Being works of art in and of themselves, we will touch on the history of the zine and the merits of physical objects in the creative process. Join Mila Matveeva, illustrator, film producer, and zine-maker,…

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$60

Show:Tell Middle Grades Print Camp

Alder Commons 4212 NE Prescott St., Portland, OR, United States

This summer we’re partnering with Alder Commons on after school camps that will take place rain or shine in their ample and dynamic outside spaces! Check out the offerings and dates for camp below. Sliding scale and no-cost spots available. Reach out to showtell@iprc.org to inquire. Safety Considerations: We’ll be limiting enrollment to 10 campers per session, and doing all of our learning and making in outside spaces, and we will be practicing social distancing. We ask that campers bring masks. For more information about IPRC Youth Summer Camps, please email Alley Pezanoski-Browne at showtell@iprc.org. Middle Grades Print Tuesday, June 1st – Thursday June 3rd 3 – 5:30pm Registration form here Get ready to print the world in this exploratory print-making workshop with printmakers and visual artists Marissa Perez and Daniela…

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$200 – $250

Refuse the Given World: Generating Short Fiction Through Play

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“When I sit down and start writing, I feel the given world recede, and I can just play.”- Sam Lipsyte In this generative short fiction writing course, we will tap into that playful mindset—by using silly rules, obstructions, oblique strategies, games, dreams, collage, odd perspectives, glimmers and more—to unlock problematic stories and/or generate new material. Stories from short fiction and flash writers including Jayne Anne Phillips, Jess Arndt, Gary Lutz, Amy Hempel, Sandra Cisneros, Ben Marcus, Isaac Babel, Carmen Maria Machado, and others will guide our discussions and exercises. 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…

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$290

Craft Conversations: Character

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

If you are interested in taking a dive into how to make full, complicated, compelling characters in your work, if you want your reader to be thinking about your people (even if that character is you) long after they finish your novel, story, or memoir, if you want to deeply engage your reader, you must develop characters that drive the story, that matter to the reader, that we can root for, that rise up off the page. For this conversation I’ll bring, readings, handouts, exercises and practical ideas. We will look at protagonists, as well as at secondary characters and the important jobs they have in making a story come to life. Access Program We want our writing classes to be accessible to everyone, regardless…

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$75
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