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!

Classes & Seminars

  1. Events
  2. Classes & Seminars

Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

Delve Readers Seminar: 9/11 Literatures and the Global War on Terror: 20th Anniversary

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

2021 marks the 20th Anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack and a period classified as the “global war on terror.” In this Delve seminar we will read, reflect, and discuss the literary responses to the immediate and the long-term impacts of the war on terror and the rise of xenophobia, Islamophobia, and the changing socio-political landscape of American life post 9/11. The literary texts that we will read will provide some broad understanding about public anxiety and trauma, particularly for those who experienced 9/11 closely and those that belonged to the Muslim-American communities. We will also unpack various representations and debates surrounding the ways in which the figure of the terrorist, terrorism, torture, racism and Islamophobia have informed the study of the 9/11 genre. Please…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: 9/11 Literatures and the Global War on Terror: 20th Anniversary
$180

Writing Characters Who Take Up Space

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

For all the descriptive writing in the world, it is often difficult to fully realize a physical body in a physical space for a reader. Bodies are so varied, spaces contain so many possibilities, but both bodies and spatial possibilities are often overlooked in writing craft. This class will use ideas presented in Amy Cuddy’s book, Presence: Bringing your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges, Bessel Van Der Kolk’s, The Body Keeps Score, and others, to present new ways of exploring the physical presence of characters on the page, their experiences with themselves, with their environment and with other characters. 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…

Continue readingWriting Characters Who Take Up Space
$190

Inquiry as Narrative w/ Lilly Dancyger

The Corporeal Writing Center 510 SW 3rd Ave #101, Portland, OR, United States

Tuesday, October 12th, 5-8pm Pacific Cost: $150 payment plans available, email Daniel at registration@corporealwriting.com Where: Corporeal Center, 510 SW 3rd Avenue, suite 101, Portland, Or. 97204 Description: There's often so much emphasis on plot and narrative, but there are other ways to move a story forward. Sometimes the most interesting thing isn't what happened, and then what happened next, and then what happened next—but what we have to say about what happened, and how our perspective on a single event can shift and change over time. How the very process of writing about an experience—and the research and inquiry that goes into writing about our own lives—can change our relationship to the thing we're writing about. In this session, we'll talk about how to shape…

Continue readingInquiry as Narrative w/ Lilly Dancyger
$150

Archiving Ancestors, Collective Grief, and the Illusion of Time

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The quiet and stillness of quarantine transported many of us beyond the bounds of time and space. Through our unexpected journeys, we may have traced new threads from ancestral roots to our present moments and felt them stretch towards an unknown somewhere on a vast continuum of time. Loss of place, people, and ways of being from the past, present, and anticipatory future left grief to linger and blur the edges of things. This generative writing series will invite us to craft multi-genre pieces that archive the transcendent, dizzying, perplexing, and new. We will honor our ancestors, known, unknown, and chosen. We will write from the dark blue of sorrow to expand our capacity for joy. We will dissolve the illusion of time to embody…

Continue readingArchiving Ancestors, Collective Grief, and the Illusion of Time
$145

Band of Submitting Writers & Artists

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Band of Submitting Writers & Artists with Katie Collins Guinn WHAT: A two week online creative lab on sending work to literary publications WHEN: Wednesdays, October 13th, & October 20th @4:30-6:30pm PT ACCESS: $100 :: Payment plans always available—contact Daniel at registration@corporealwriting.com Where: The Corporeal Writing Zoom Room :: A Zoom link will be provided. SCHOLARSHIPS: Scholarships are available please click here to apply. So, you’ve written something and/or created some visual art and want to get it out into the world of literary publications, now what? The process of sending out work can be overwhelming, whether you’re just beginning to think about it, or returning to the process, and doing it alone can seem even more daunting. Where do we begin? Who do we…

Continue readingBand of Submitting Writers & Artists
$100

Cusp :: The Vibrant Space Between Fiction and Nonfiction :: A Webgasm

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

WHAT: A three-hour online webgasm with Lidia Yuknavitch and at least one magical guest. (With a 15-minute intermission.) WHEN: Sunday, October 17th, 1PM-4PM Pacific (4PM-7PM Eastern) WHERE: ZOOM. Meeting ID will be provided ahead of time. (Interested in this event but unable to join it live? All registered attendees will receive a link to a recording of it that will be viewable for one week afterwards.) HOW MUCH: $150. Payment plans are available, contact Daniel Elder at registration@corporealwriting.com SCHOLARSHIPS: Scholarships are always available. Click here to apply. Does your writing live in the fluid flux between fiction, nonfiction and poetics? Is your fiction informed, deformed, and reformed through nonfiction? Is your nonfiction inhabited by poetics, images, rhythm, sound? What is the relationship between forms when…

Continue readingCusp :: The Vibrant Space Between Fiction and Nonfiction :: A Webgasm
$150

Premise Course: Do we have the ability to make ourselves free? de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity & Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

(Learn about Premise classes here: https://www.premiseinstitute.com/premisefaq) In her book The Ethics of Ambiguity, the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir asks us to consider what it means to exercise individual freedom and to live in community with others. Where does our individual freedom begin and end? Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Ethics of Ambiguity in 1947, in the wake of Nazi atrocities and totalitarianism. She questions and seeks to define personal ethics and freedom and claims that such freedom can be manifest only when we “will others free.” How do we create a life where we protect our individual freedom and work toward the freedom of our neighbor? Can both forms of freedom truly exist? At first glance, Franz Kafka may seem an odd pairing with Simone…

Continue readingPremise Course: Do we have the ability to make ourselves free? de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity & Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
$150

The Trauma-Informed Creative Writing Classroom

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The creative writing classroom is not an explicitly healing space—yet writers regularly bring their stories of trauma into workshops. What are our obligations to these students as instructors? What are the best practices for managing workshop discussions about potentially triggering material? In this 6-hour intensive, learn when writing heals and harms, discuss syllabus disclaimers and content warnings, identify craft issues common to trauma writing, consider how feedback lands in an activated nervous system, and assess your own self-regulation skills. This class is limited to 15 students. October 23 and 24, 2021 Saturday and Sunday, 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. (two sessions) Online via Zoom Katherine Standefer Katherine Standefer is the author of Lightning Flowers: My Journey To Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life, which…

Continue readingThe Trauma-Informed Creative Writing Classroom
$145

Premise Course: How do illness and pain define the human experience? Zadie Smith’s Intimations and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Illness is a defining aspect of the human experience. In this course we will explore the question: How do illness and pain define and shape the human experience? We’ll read and discuss Susan Sontag’s classic 1978 essay Illness as Metaphor and a selection of essays in Zadie Smith’s newest collection. Participants will read Smith’s essays about Covid and our collective understanding of how disease shapes who we are. Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor: In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as "one of the most liberating books of its time." A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients…

Continue readingPremise Course: How do illness and pain define the human experience? Zadie Smith’s Intimations and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor
$35

Delve Readers Seminar: Herman Melville: Great Shorter Works

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Although Herman Melville is best known for Moby-Dick, he also demonstrated mastery of the novella, and this Delve will explore Melville’s best-known shorter works: Bartleby the Scrivener, famous for the Wall Street denizen who “would prefer not to,” no matter what his employer might want; Benito Cereno, where a captain answering a ship’s call of distress ends up in a situation far more perplexing—and dangerous—than what he had bargained for; and the posthumously-published masterpiece, Billy Budd, a story of the “handsome sailor” whose beauty and simplicity result in tragedy and a crisis of conscience for his captain. In each of the three weeks of this Delve, we will examine one of these shorter works and discuss their position in Melville’s unusual literary career and the…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Herman Melville: Great Shorter Works
$110
Click a category label below to view the calendar with only events in that specific category.