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!

Telltale at the Tower Presents: We Are Infinite.

The Tower 3307 SE 7th Avenue, Portland, 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…

Free

Refuse the Given World: Breaking Blocks Through Play

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“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…

$290

Historians and the News: Kathleen Belew

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

A Historical Perspective on the White Power Movement, the January 6 Insurrection, and the Domestic Legacies of Overseas Wars OHS is excited to re-launch the popular “Historians and the News” series with a conversation between Dr. Kathleen Belew and Dr. Christopher McKnight Nichols. This free virtual event promises to offer valuable insights, informed by years of scholarly analysis of the past, into the news stories that fill our screens and newspaper pages. As the House select committee investigating the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 has begun to hold hearings and new reporting reveals the seriousness of the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, militaristic white-supremacist organizations such as the Proud Boys continue to hold rallies in cities including Portland, Salem, and…

Free

Incite: Queer Writers Read – September

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

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,…

Free

Thom Hartmann

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In his new book, The Hidden History of American Healthcare (Berrett-Koehler), popular progressive radio host Thom Hartmann reveals how and why attempts to implement affordable universal healthcare in the United States have been thwarted and what we can do to finally make it a reality. For-profit health insurance is the largest con job ever perpetrated on the American people — one that has cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives since the 1940s. Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan's single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This…

Free

Writing with our Ancestors, with Chelsea Hicks

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

WHAT: A four-week generative online writing lab. WHEN: Begins Friday, September 10th, 2021. This class is hosted on our rich interactive online platform, WetInk. The class is broken into four weeks, and within those weeks you go at your own pace. In addition, Chelsea will host five weekly Zoom session on Fridays from 4-5pm PST. The final Zoom session will be a group reading/celebration. (Zoom dates: 9/10, 9/17, 9/24, 10/1, 10/8) ACCESS: While able to be purchased directly from this site at our standard rate of $350, this offering is available at a sliding scale rate to anyone who inquires. Please reach out to Daniel Elder at registration@corporealwriting.com. Payment plans are also available. In Chiapas and Oaxaca, writers center Indigenous literature with translation across languages,…

$350

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 workshops 11/26 & 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

Attic Institute: FALL Online: The Music of Language for Prose Writers w Joanna Rose

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Your sentences have music that can evoke emotion in ways that support and inform your story or essay. Meter, rhythm, word length, sentence length, consonants and vowels, juxtaposition -  they’re not just for poets!  Grammar has its own music as well. In this class we’ll explore the emotional possibilities of sound & meaning using published texts as well as the work of participants, who will be asked to submit 2 pages per week.. Come prepared to be surprised at what your writing can do. | Maximum: 10 writers Register for this workshop NOTE: To protect everyone during the COVID-19 pandemic, we're offering our workshops via Zoom. All students must first sign up for a free Zoom account. Setting it up is easy. And we can help you with questions,…

$215 – $242

Attic Institute: FALL Online: Prose Poetry or Creative Nonfiction? A Generative Writing Workshop w Ruben Quesada

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

A first-person perspective. A description. A moment. A feeling. A monologue. Maximum | 10 writers "Thank you Ruben Quesada for an incredible class. It was full of fascinating information and the prompts Ruben gave us inspired my generative work (and from the other poets, you could tell it was the same for them)! Ruben also cultivated a space of openness and sharing that was truly remarkable for such a short class. He is a fantastic addition to the Attic, and I sincerely hope to take classes with him in the future. I most definitely would be interested to continue learning from and writing with Ruben." ~ Emma Nelson, student Register for this workshop NOTE: To protect everyone during the COVID-19 pandemic, we're offering our workshops via Zoom. All…

$65 – $83

I Am My Story Live

Alex L. Parks Performing Arts Center Jesuit High School 9000 SW Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy, Portland, OR, United States

September 11 is an historic day, and as that date approaches, we at The Immigrant Story invite you to join us at an historic event. To commemorate this important occasion, we will present powerful voices of survival and soothing musical accompaniment in a live storytelling event called “I Am My Story: Voices of Hope.” With storytellers from Burundi, Rwanda, Cambodia and Syria, the program focuses on remarkable, first-person tales of courage and fortitude. These brave sagas and resilience in the face of unimaginable atrocities of war and genocide offer hope and inspiration at a time when those qualities are sometimes in short supply. “I Am My Story Live” will also feature performances from world-class musicians. The event, produced in collaboration with the City of Beaverton,…

Free