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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…

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$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,…

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$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…

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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…

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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
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