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!

July BIPOC writer workshop

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

For BIPOC writers Searching for a space to create new work with fellow BIPOC writers? This two-hour workshop meets on Zoom. A variety of prompts will be presented as avenues for generating and sharing new work in an informal setting. Open to BIPOC writers at all levels writing in poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. Scholarships are available. Contact Susan Moore at susan@literary-arts.org for more information. Jacqueline Fitzgerald is an educator, coach, writer, and musician who believes that creation is a catalyst for transformation. Working at the cross-section of art, healing, and change work, Jacqueline has a passion for stories and their ability to cultivate belonging. Her writing has been published in the Oregonian, The Learning Network of the New York Times, and Beacon Magazine. Currently, she…

$15

The Dandelions Are Prophesizing: A Writing Workshop Through Plant & Mycelial Encounters w/ Janice Lee

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The Dandelions Are Prophesizing: A Writing Workshop Through Plant & Mycelial Encounters A 4-Week Online Workshop starting July 19, 2021 “The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. It is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing. And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature.” – Thich Nhat Hanh “If we are interested in livability, impermanence, and emergence, we should be watching the action of landscape assemblages. Assemblages coalesce, change, and dissolve: this is the story.”…

$350

Carrot Quinn in Conversation With Torrey Peters

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

After a childhood marked by neglect, poverty, and periods of homelessness, and raised by a mother who believed herself to be the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, Carrot Quinn moved out on her own. She found a sense of belonging among straight-edge anarchists who taught her how to traverse the country by freight trains, sleep in fields under the stars, and feed herself by foraging in dumpsters. Her new life was one of thrilling adventure and freedom, but still, she was haunted by the ghosts of her lonely and traumatic childhood. The Sunset Route (Dial Press) is a powerful and brazenly honest adventure memoir set in the unseen corners of the United States — in the Alaskan cold, on trains rattling through forests and deserts,…

Free

Patrick Wyman in Conversation With Mike Duncan

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Patrick Wyman, creator of the hit podcast series Tides of History and Fall of Rome, explores the four explosive decades between 1490 and 1530, bringing to life the dramatic and deeply human story of how the West was reborn. In the bestselling tradition of The Swerve and A Distant Mirror, The Verge (Twelve) tells the story of a period that marked a decisive turning point for both European and world history. Here, Wyman examines two complementary and contradictory sides of the same historical coin: the world-altering implications of the developments of printed mass media, extreme taxation, exploitative globalization, humanistic learning, gunpowder warfare, and mass religious conflict in the long term, and their intensely disruptive consequences in the short term. As told through the lives of…

Free

Write Around Portland: Bi-Monthly BIPOC Online Writing Workshop

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

For people who identify as Black, Indigenous or People of Color (BIPOC). 2nd & 4th Friday of every month from 4 to 5:30 pm (Pacific Time), Free. (No workshop 12/25.) Workshops are held via Zoom. Pre-registration is required. Registration opens the 1st of the month every month. Pre-register for our 2nd Friday workshop here. Pre-register for our 4th Friday workshop here. Click here for more workshop details.

Free

Love Notes: Flash Prose

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In this prompt-driven 2-day intensive participants will create a series of connected flash love stories. With the aid of experimental exercises exploring prose and poetry (epistolary, lists, photo captions, etc.) we will celebrate and write about love in all its forms, including the flip side of love and more! Special attention will be paid to voice and technique. Fiction, non-fiction, all genres welcome. 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.…

$145

Beyond the What: Swapping Art for Plot in Memoir, with Lidia Yuknavitch

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

WHAT: A three-hour online webgasm with Lidia Yuknavitch and at least one special guest. (With a 15-minute intermission.) WHEN: Saturday, July 24th 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. (Note: This offering is available as part of a three-webinar bundle along with Unlikeable on Purpose and Revivify: Breathing Life into Dead Matter. Each webinar is $150, but you can sign up for all 3 for $395. Just…

$150

the IPRC hosts a zine reading

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The Independent Publishing Resource Center hosts as cool zinesters read their new work. The Independent Publishing Resource Center will host a live zine reading during #virtualpzs2021. The line-up is yet to be announced but the IPRC is very cool, and we are very excited for this event.

Free

Lisa Wells in Conversation With Lydia Millet

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Like many of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by news of apocalyptic-scale climate change and a coming sixth extinction. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes. But what can be done? Wells embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking answers in dedicated communities — outcasts and visionaries — on the margins of society. Wells meets Finisia Medrano, an itinerant planter and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists to rewild the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing "watershed discipleship" in New Mexico; another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming — guns into plowshares. She watches the world’s greatest tracker teach how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land…

Free

Submission Deadline: The Gravity of the Thing: Summer 2021

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Our Summer 2021 reading period is open until July 31st. We accept defamiliarized works in the following general categories: Short: tell us a story in 3,000 words or less; we are interested in fiction, creative nonfiction, self-contained excerpts, and genre-bending forms. Flash: a fiction, creative nonfiction, or genre-bending story under 500 words. Poetry: share one or more poems, prose poems, or multimedia works for a combined count of 500 words or less. Six Words: a story in six words; you may share up to five stories per submission, but only one will be chosen. Baring the Device: essays about defamiliarization—or defamiliarized essays about storytelling, literary craft, or publishing—for our Baring the Device column and resources; click here to learn more. The Gravity of the Thing publishes work on a rolling basis throughout its quarterly reading periods. A majority of submissions…

Free