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!
We are thrilled to be hosting Emme Lund for the launch of the paperback edition of her novel The Boy with a Bird in His Chest. Emme will be in conversation with Stacy Brewster, who is the author of the story collection What We Pick Up.
Vanity Fair (“A Novel without a Hero”), by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848), belongs on the same shelf with other towering novels of the Victorian age: Bleak House, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, and The Way We Live Now. Its protagonist, Becky Sharp, is one of the most tantalizing, bewitching, infuriating, charming, scheming, and amoral characters in all of literature, and as we watch Becky negotiate poverty, war, marriage, and scandal, the reader constantly wonders: do I like her? Should I like her? Is she evil, or just practical? And what won’t she do to survive? In this five-week Delve, we will explore Thackeray’s brittle, cynical, and witty masterpiece of social manners, and see how the pressures of class, money, and Empire shape the lives of ordinary people…
We'll read books nominated for the Beverly Cleary Children's Choice Award. Join us the 1st Thursday of the month, 4-4:45pm, October-April, in the Community Room. October 6, 2022 Welcome to Book Buddies! Meet your Book Buddies, make a craft and share your favorite book titles. November 3, 2022 The Powwow Dog by Joseph Bruchac December 1, 2022 Our Friend Hedgehog: the Story of Us by Lauren Castillo January 5, 2023 Mindy Kim and the Yummy Seaweed Business by Lyla Lee February 2, 2023 Here Comes Lolo by Niki Daly March 2, 2023 Puppy Problems by Paige Braddock April 6, 2023 VOTING PARTY! Vote for your favorite book from this list and help choose the winner of the Beverly Cleary Children's Choice Award! To learn more about the Beverly Cleary Children's Choice Award, visit https://ola.memberclicks.net/bccca-home (link is external)
Join us every Saturday for kids’ storytime. Today we’re reading I Don’t Care by Julie Fogliano. Buy the Book
Cultivating a Sustainable Writing Practice Instructor: Alissa Hattman This workshop is offered via Zoom PST Register here Class Meetings: 1 Saturday, Jan. 7th; 1-4pm $15 – $75 sliding scale *6 no-cost spots available; BIPOC & 2S prioritized Our practice—how we labor as writers—is highly personal. When we create a writing habit, it helps to consider our individual creative processes, life priorities, writing goals, and all the ways that we get in the way of our own writing. How we labor is also bound up in cultural notions of productivity and success that can often kill the creative drive. It can be hard to consistently carve out time in order to cultivate the type of patient, inner stillness required to write, but it is possible. Necessary,…
We'll read books nominated for the Oregon Readers’ Choice Award, Upper Elementary Division. Join us the 2nd Tuesday of the month in the Library's Conference Room. Ages 9-12. October 11, 2022 Winterborne Home for Vengeance and Valor by Ally Carter November 8, 2022 The Total Eclipse of Nestor Lopez by Adrianna Cuevas December 13, 2022 Measuring Up by Lily LaMotte January 10, 2023 Wondrous Rex by Patricia MacLachlan February 14, 2023 Thirteens by Kate Alice Marshall AND The Next President by Kate Messner March 14, 2023 A Wish in the Dark by Christina Soontornvat April 11, 2023 Ways to Make Sunshine by Renée Watson AND VOTING! Vote for your favorite book from this list to help choose the 2023 ORCA winner! To learn more about the Oregon Reader's Choice Award, visit oregonreaderschoiceaward.wordpress.com
This class is for experienced writers who are dedicated to starting the first draft of a story collection over the course of six months. Participants should have experience writing stories and familiarity with the elements of literary short fiction including scene, character, conflict, place, and revision. We will study individual stories by authors, read craft essays, and discuss several published collections and how the stories unite to form a book. Access Program We want our 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 class registrations at a reduced rate. The access program for writing classes covers 60% of the class tuition. Most writing classes have at…
Pushpins & Portals: Experimenting with Short Forms This workshop is virtual, PST Register here Pushpins & Portals: Experimenting with Short Forms In this 6-week class, we will experiment with short form creative writing. Our focus—whether it’s flash fiction, lyric essay, prose poetry, or hybrid—will be on the art of compression. Each week, participants will be given a writing exercise, a short reading, and two workshop submissions from their peers. Class time will include workshop as well as discussion of readings and craft. Our workshop will be guided by observations, questions, and possibilities. We will be thinking less about how to “fix” a piece of writing and more about what we see, our curiosities, and how to recognize hidden opportunities. Each participant will receive feedback from…
A young girl discovers an infinite variety of worlds in Lost in the Moment and Found (Tordotcom), a new standalone tale in Seanan McGuire’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Wayward Children series. Welcome to the Shop Where the Lost Things Go. If you ever lost a sock, you'll find it here. If you ever wondered about your favorite toy from childhood... it's probably sitting on a shelf in the back. And the headphones that you swore this time you'd keep safe? You guessed it… Antoinette has lost her father. Metaphorically. He's not in the shop, and she'll never see him again. But when Antsy finds herself lost (literally, this time), she discovers that however many doors open for her, leaving the Shop for good might not…