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!

Nonfiction

  1. Events
  2. Nonfiction

Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

Dr. Jennifer Lincoln in Conversation With Dr. Jen Gunter

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Dr. Jennifer Lincoln has been sharing her expertise as an OB-GYN to her millions of followers on TikTok, and now in her accessible, illustrated guide she answers real questions about vaginal, sexual, and reproductive health for fans and new readers alike. Let's Talk About Down There (Andrews McMeel) is like the health class you wish you had — think evidence-based, myth-busting sex ed where shame gets tossed out the window — in a format that's as approachable as a 15-second video. Addressing topics such as hormones, menstrual cups, and birth control, all with the help of infographics and illustrations, Dr. Lincoln’s succinct, vibrant handbook answers the questions that you may have been too embarrassed to ask, so you'll be empowered to make more informed health…

Continue readingDr. Jennifer Lincoln in Conversation With Dr. Jen Gunter
Free

Writing the Intersection of Our Identities: Tuesday nights

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Through autobiographical writing about our identities—including race, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and class—we’ll explore where we hold power and privilege and where we have experienced marginalization and oppression. In addition to experimenting with craft techniques such as audience, point of view, research, dialogue, and figurative language, we’ll also discuss how to use our writing in service of reflection, healing, truth-telling, and culture change. By the end of the course, I hope you’ll emerge with several drafts, and that we’ll each emerge with a deeper understanding of what it means to have lived in our individual bodies. Access Program We want our Delves and writing classes to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some…

Continue readingWriting the Intersection of Our Identities: Tuesday nights
$240

Attic Institute: FALL Online: Introduction to Flash Nonfiction w Brian Benson

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Flash nonfiction, simply put, is true-to-life writing defined by extreme compression: it's saying what you've got to say using as few words, and as much beauty, as possible. An endlessly accessible, playful, potent form, flash nonfiction is evermore popular; from Brevity to Barren, The Forge to The Sun, legions of journals are eager to publish great flash. In this prompt-driven workshop, we'll read short nonfiction by master writers, including Ross Gay, Natalie Lima, Ira Sukrungruang, Roxane Gay, Jerald Walker, Ruth Ozeki, and many more; we'll talk about what stories are suited for flash, how to tell them well, and where to publish them; and most of all, we'll write, and write, and write, via in-class exercises and take-home prompts. Students will leave the class with reams of new writing and ideas for where to publish. Register for…

Continue readingAttic Institute: FALL Online: Introduction to Flash Nonfiction w Brian Benson
$215 – $242

Premise Course: How do we carry borders with us even as we cross them? Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Luiselli’s Tell Me How it Ends, Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Beautiful question: How do we carry borders with us even as we cross them? (Learn about Premise classes here: https://www.premiseinstitute.com/premisefaq) Texts: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera; Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters, and Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How it Ends Since its conception in 1848, the US-Mexico border has been a site of conflict, contradiction, and beauty. Although the border continues to feature heavily in our news and politics, it is often described through narratives of violence, national security, and human rights abuses.  In this course, we will delve into works that complicate these narratives by embracing the beauty and possibility of the borderlands. We will begin with Gloria Anzaldúa’s landmark work Borderlands/La Frontera, in which she describes the border as “una herida abierta,” an open wound,…

Continue readingPremise Course: How do we carry borders with us even as we cross them? Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Luiselli’s Tell Me How it Ends, Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters
$200

Writing the Intersections of Our Identities: For BIPOC writers

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Through autobiographical writing about our identities—including race, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and class—we’ll explore where we hold power and privilege and where we have experienced marginalization and oppression. In addition to experimenting with craft techniques such as audience, point of view, research, dialogue, and figurative language, we’ll also discuss how to use our writing in service of reflection, healing, truth-telling, and culture change. By the end of the course, I hope you’ll emerge with several drafts, and that we’ll each emerge with a deeper understanding of what it means to have lived in our individual bodies. Please note there is also a section of this class that is open to all. This section is for BIPOC participants only. Access Program We want our Delves and writing…

Continue readingWriting the Intersections of Our Identities: For BIPOC writers
$240

Telltale Presents: What Did You Expect?

Chapel Theatre 4107 SE Harrison St, Milwaukie, OR, United States

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…

Continue readingTelltale Presents: What Did You Expect?
Free – $10

Live Wire: Sarah Marshall, Dino Archie, Omar El Akkad, MAITA

Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St, Portland, OR, United States

SARAH MARSHALL Sarah Marshall is a writer, podcaster, and media critic focused on setting straight our collective memory—or at least getting to the bottom of why we believe and in turn define ourselves by popular narrative and myth. Why is the maligned woman a staple of our news media? Why do we believe that serial killers are brilliant? How do we keep stumbling into all these moral panics? These are some of the questions that propel Sarah forward. She is the co-host of the popular modern history podcast You’re Wrong About, which has been highlighted in the New Yorker, the Guardian and Time Magazine. Website • Twitter DINO ARCHIE Dino Archie is a stand-up comedian who has been featured on Comedy Central’s Adam Devine’s House…

Continue readingLive Wire: Sarah Marshall, Dino Archie, Omar El Akkad, MAITA
$30 – $45

Submission Deadline: 2022 Oregon Literary Fellowships

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Oregon Literary Fellowships are intended to help Oregon writers initiate, develop, or complete literary projects in poetry, fiction, literary nonfiction, drama (including scripts for television and film), and young readers literature. For 2022, Literary Arts will accept applications online only. Deadline to apply: September 17, 2021 Read the guidelines and apply: 2022 Oregon Literary Fellowship Guidelines Apply for Oregon Literary Fellowships (including Oregon Literary Career Fellowships) Apply for Oregon Literary Fellowships for Publishers Questions? Contact Susan Moore at susan@literary-arts.org or attend a Zoom session on August 18 or August 31.

Free

Black Abolitionists and Mercantile Frontiers: A. H. Francis and His Circle, 1835–1864

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Join us for a presentation with Dr. Kenneth Hawkins on the life and achievements of Black abolitionist and merchant Abner Hunt Francis, with remarks from Kimberly Stowers Moreland on the significance of Francis's accomplishments today. Francis operated a prosperous mercantile store on Front Street in Portland until 1861. Throughout the mid-1800s, Francis used his position to fight for Black people on the frontiers from western New York to the Pacific Coast. He wrote letters to his friend Frederick Douglass about the conditions for Black people in Oregon and his successful resistance to the state’s Black exclusion laws, which Douglass published in his abolitionist newspaper. Even with these written accounts, histories of the Oregon Territory and its commercial port often ignored, ridiculed, or misrepresented Francis and…

Continue readingBlack Abolitionists and Mercantile Frontiers: A. H. Francis and His Circle, 1835–1864
Free

Grief and the Lyric Essay

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Throughout history, writers have used lyrical techniques to access states of consciousness we associate with grief. Lyrical writing prioritizes music, rhythm, and emotion over the narrative arc. The goal of this course is to find entry into writing through reading, conversation,and various prompts and exercises to catalyze memory and thinking. We will consider how writers crafting stories and poetry about grief use lyricism, discursiveness, fragmentation, and silence to embody writing content through form. Participant should be prepared to write a lot! Prompts and exercises will allow students to access various parts of memory. In a short period of time, we will get to know one another and provide a sounding board for our stories in a safe space. We will also look at excerpts from…

Continue readingGrief and the Lyric Essay
$145
Click a category label below to view the calendar with only events in that specific category.