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!

Terese Marie Mailhot – Writing Trauma, Making Art: August 3

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

When: August 3rd, 2019:: 10:00 - 4:00 Where: The Corporeal Center; 510 SW 3rd Ave, Portland, OR 97210 Cost: $300 Creating art from lived experience is difficult. There are pitfalls, but there's a windfall to be had, where a person can look back and within to see the right narrative, and the right art worth making, or worth sacrificing for. I'd like to help people avoid the pitfalls, and encourage writers to find the narrative structure within their own lives. Finding the story is half the work. Someone told me it's like trying to make the music we hear in our heads, and I like that. I'd like to help people find the right song, and learn practical tips on how to execute a story. We'll discuss shame,…

$300

A reading with NYT Bestselling author, Terese Mailhot

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

Join us in downtown Portland for a reading by beloved NYT Bestselling author, Terese Mailhot. This reading is free and open to the public. TERESE MARIE MAILHOT is from Seabird Island Band. Her work has been featured in Granta, Guernica, Mother Jones, and elsewhere. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Heart Berries: A Memoir. She is a winner of the 2019 Whiting Award, a SWAIA Fellowship, and the inaugural Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature. She teaches writing at Purdue University.

Free

Longreads Club: Viktor Orbán’s War on Intellect

Rose City Book Pub 1329 NE Fremont, Portland, OR, United States

READ THE ARTICLE: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/george-soros-viktor-orban-ceu/588070/ As the Hungarian prime minister systematically undermined his own country’s education system, one institution stood defiant: a university in the heart of Budapest, founded by George Soros. Join the Longreads Club where we explore a long-form article focused on global topics. No membership or registration required. Just read the article, show up, and join the discussion!

Free

Caveat Magister in Conversation With Shawn Levy

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Over 30 years, Burning Man has gone from two families on a San Francisco beach to a global movement in which hundreds of thousands of people around the world create events on every continent. It has been the subject of fawning media profiles, an exhibit in the Smithsonian, and is beloved by tech billionaires and boho counterculturalists alike. But why does it matter? What does it actually have to offer us? The answer, Caveat Magister writes, is simple: Burning Man’s philosophy can help us build better communities in which individuals’ freedom to follow their own authentic passions also brings them together in common purpose. Burning Man is a prototype, and its philosophy is a how-to manual for better communities that offers principles instead of rules.…

Free

The Trauma Cleaner

Books Around the Corner 40 NW 2nd Street, Gresham, OR, United States

Hello all of you lovely True Crime junkies! Pick up your copy of The Trauma Cleaner and start reading! Then come join us on Sunday, August 11th from 3-5, to discuss the book, snack on yummy treats, drink some wine, and talk True Crime shop! If you want to support the gracious host of our little book club that could, please purchase your copy of The Trauma Cleaner from Books Around the Corner. You can even have it shipped to you for just $5.

Free

Emperors of the Deep

Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton, OR, United States

From the Jaws blockbusters to Shark Week, we are conditioned to see sharks as terrifying, cold-blooded underwater predators. But as Safeguard the Seas founder William McKeever reveals, sharks are evolutionary marvels essential to maintaining a balanced ecosystem. We can learn much from sharks, he argues, and our knowledge about them continues to grow. In his groundbreaking new book, Emperors of the Deep (HarperOne), the documentarian and conservationist dispels misplaced fears and corrects common misconceptions, exploring in depth the secret lives of sharks – magnificent creatures who play an integral part in maintaining the health of the world’s oceans and ultimately the planet. McKeever goes back through time to probe the shark’s prehistoric secrets and how it has become the world’s most feared and misunderstood predator,…

Free

Erik Davis

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, Erik Davis’s High Weirdness (MIT) charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality – but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness, Davis – America's leading scholar of high strangeness – examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time…

Free

Passing Our Stories Down: A Mandarin/English Bilingual Workshop

APANO Office 2788 SE 82nd Ave, Ste 203, Portland, OR, United States

Passing Our Stories Down: A Mandarin/English Bilingual Creative Writing Workshop with Write Around Portland When: Tuesday, August 13th, 6-8pm Where: APANO Office, 2788 SE 82nd Ave "Do you have stories to pass on to the next generation? Have you ever wanted to write these stories down?" Based on the acclaimed Write Around Portland model, this workshop provides 2-hours of guided writing time for English and/or Mandarin speaking individuals, with opportunities for sharing and feedback. Open to all levels of writers. For more information about Write Around Portland, visit writearound.org.

Free

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America

Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton, OR, United States

In her masterful work, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America (Back Bay), Beth Macy takes us into the epicenter of America's 20-plus-year struggle with opioid addiction. From distressed small communities in Central Appalachia to wealthy suburbs, from disparate cities to once-idyllic farm towns, it's a heartbreaking trajectory that illustrates how this national crisis has persisted for so long and become so firmly entrenched. From the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, Macy parses how America embraced a medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm. Through unsparing, yet deeply human portraits of the families and first responders struggling to ameliorate this epidemic, each facet of the crisis comes into focus. In these politically fragmented times, Macy shows, astonishingly, that the only…

Free

Ten Years a Nomad: A Traveler’s Journey Home

Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton, OR, United States

Ten Years a Nomad: A Traveler's Journey Home (St. Martin’s) is part travel memoir and part philosophical travel manifesto, an exploration of wanderlust and what it truly means to be a nomad, filled with stories of Matt Kepnes's adventures abroad. Kepnes, author of How to Travel the World on $50 a Day, knows what it feels like to get the travel bug. Wanderlust is a powerful thing. After quitting his 9-5 job more than 10 years ago, he realized that living life meant more for him than simply meeting traditional milestones like buying a car, paying a mortgage, and moving up the career ladder. With almost nothing tangible to show for it after traveling over 500,000 miles and staying in 1,000 different hostels in 90…

Free