A resource for the PDX literary community. Produced by Old Pal.
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!
Thursday, September 2, 2021 at 11:00 AM the Ledding Library Daylight Book Club will meet via Zoom to discuss Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler. For more information contact Reference Librarian Laura Francillon at francillonl@milwaukieoreogn.gov (link sends e-mail).
Featuring: Ella Decastro Baron, Janeen Armstrong, Lisa Fierer, Mark Sanford Gross, Sue Biggs Come hear 5 wonderful writers read their heart words around grief. The zoom call will last about an hour. Come listen. Join Zoom Meeting
The writing journey, exhilarating and wondrous as it is, can be punctuated with delays and disappointments. Sometimes the demands of daily life or an unexpected crisis can send us into a tailspin. How do we keep writing through chaos or a stressful live event? For many of us, the last year threw various hurdles in the way of our ability to write consistently. Yet, we pressed on. Still, some of us have yet to regain our footing, and need encouragement to keep going. If you are tired of not writing, and want to cultivate the “stick-to-it-ness” necessary for meeting your goals–no matter the challenges–this workshop is for you. Gleaning inspiration and guidance from writers like Annie Dillard, Julia Cameron, and Rumi, along with mining the…
Hey, champ! Thanks for checking out Telltale. We are a monthly curated storytelling event for people that like to get vulnerable and take no shit. We are keen on connection, laughter, heartbreak, poignant moments, and community building. We are in our fifth season now, which is wild. After a number of zoom shows.... WE ARE BACK, PAL! With an all vaccinated staff, we will be doing a series of summer shows outside of our old venue, Chapel Theatre. I said we'd do these shows until things stopped making me mad.... and well.... apparently there's an endless series of things to be angry at in this country. At Telltale, you can expect about 7-10 performers sharing something with you, in the way that feels right to…
Classically trained pianist and singer Natalie Curtis isolated herself for five years after a breakdown just before she was to debut with the New York Philharmonic. Guilt-ridden and songless, Natalie can't seem to recapture the joy music once brought her. In 1902, her brother invites her to join him in the West to search for healing. What she finds are songs she'd never before encountered — the haunting melodies, rhythms, and stories of Native Americans. But their music is under attack. The US government's Code of Offenses prohibits America's Indigenous people from singing, dancing, or speaking their own languages as the powers that be insist on assimilation. Natalie makes it her mission not only to document these songs before they disappear but to appeal to…
“When I sit down and start writing, I feel the given world recede, and I can just play.” —Sam Lipsyte Remember when you were a little kid, playing on the floor for hours and hours? Our best writing days are often imbued with that same sense of timelessness, freedom, wonder, and escape—in other words, our work often works best when it feels like play. In this generative writing course, we will tap into a playful mindset—by using silly rules, obstructions, oblique strategies, games, dreams, ephemera, constraints, and more—to unlock problematic works and/or generate new material. You will leave this class with more than a dozen techniques for starting a new project, breaking a block, or working through something sticky in a piece of writing. This…
Annie Bloom's welcomes back Portland author Warren Easley for a livestream reading from his latest Cal Claxton mystery, No Witness. Please register in advance for this Zoom event: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcvf--uqDMvH9P-uEId5ogzubxmVBQwpVd7 About No Witness: Running a one-man law practice in the heart of Oregon's wine country, Cal Claxton hires a young, undocumented man as an assistant, hoping to give him an opportunity to create more stability for himself and his family. Timoteo Fuentes is a bright, hardworking student by day and Cal's legal clerk by night, juggling both roles with determination and grit. When one of Timoteo's family members is brutally murdered, the migrant community is reluctant to cooperate with the police investigation for fear of deportation. Devastated by the loss and nervous about engaging with the…
Incite: Queer Writers Read is a curated, bimonthly reading series for Queer writers. Incite’s hope is to create conversation, connection, and greater understanding both within the Queer community and with other communities. Hosted by Vinnie Kinsella and Jennifer Perrine. The theme for September is “History Lessons.” Register for this event in advance. Alan Rose is the author of The Legacy of Emily Hargraves (2007), a gay paranormal mystery, Tales of Tokyo (2010), a modern quest novel based on his years of living and working in Japan, and a novella The Unforgiven (2012), a complex psychological thriller that explores the relationship between memory and guilt. Alan's most recent novel, As If Death Summoned, was published by Amble Press, an imprint of Bywater Books, on World AIDS Day,…
Why do we resist the commonness of humanity? Morrison's Beloved and Bluest Eye (Learn about Premise classes here: https://www.premiseinstitute.com/premisefaq) In The Origin of Others, Toni Morrison wrote, “For the stranger is not foreign, she is random; not alien but remembered; and it is the randomness of the encounter with our already known—although unacknowledged—selves that summons a ripple of alarm. That makes us reject the figure…makes us want to own, govern, and administrate the Other. We deny her personhood.” Within Morrison’s novels, audiences are given front row seats to the exploration of a phenomenon she believed needed examined via language, images, and experiences. In this course, we will read and discuss “othering” as presented in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved. Is “othering” as inherent a…
Join us for Killer Book Club. This book club features all things murder in fiction and nonfiction including mysteries, thrillers, horror, true crime and more. We will meet second Thursdays. Our September meeting of the Killer Book Club will be on September 9th at 6:30pm. We will discuss For Your Own Good by Samantha Downing. About the Book: Teddy Crutcher has won Teacher of the Year at the esteemed Belmont Academy, home to the best and brightest. He says his wife couldn't be more proud--though no one has seen her in a while. Teddy really can't be bothered with the death of a school parent that's looking more and more like murder or the student digging a little too deep into Teddy's personal life. His…