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!
Come hear 5 wonderful writers read their grief words. This zoom event lasts about an hour and is guaranteed to be the best heart medicine. Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84596161664?pwd=UktVamJyNlpKVGNUbjcxay9EY1Y4QT09 Meeting ID: 845 9616 1664 Passcode: 395080
We have the great privilege of hosting Rayhané Sanders, literary agent at Massie and McQuilkin, for a 90-minute webinar on Publishing (with ample opportunity for Q&A) on Saturday October 8th, 2022, from 11:00AM to 12:30PM Pacific. Yes, Rayhané represents our very own Lidia Yuknavitch.) In addition to the seminar, Ms. Sanders is taking on twenty private manuscript consultations. Over the course of a 20-minute meeting, she will give you feedback from an agent’s point of view on the first 25 pages of your manuscript, submitted ahead of time. (Please note, Ms. Sanders comes from New York publishing, and is very encouraging but also very direct!) The deadline for submitting your 25 pages will be September 15th, and you’ll be provided with specific formatting guidelines. Consultations will…
PSU Lit Mic is always lit. Hosted by the delightful and compelling duo Jordan and Grace. You don’t need to be affiliated with PSU to participate. You wrote it, you read it.
This workshop is offered via Zoom PST Register here Cultivating a Sustainable Writing Practice 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, even. In this supportive workshop, we will talk about how to design a sustainable writing practice that aligns with your creative process, priorities…
*This event is in-person. Masks and proof of vaccination is required Register here Writing and chill: a high vibe, on the fly, structure free writing space for all-ages (youth centered). Come generate, share and get support! Creative prompts and writing materials provided. Stay tuned for an Open Mic Night later in October!
Before being dubbed the inventor of the essay form, Michel de Montaigne was a grief-stricken man who locked himself away in a tower on his family’s manor on the French countryside where, for years, he labored over what would become his famous essays. In his solitude, he wrote a series of meditations titled “Of _____” — “Of Smells," “Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes,” “Of Posting,” (letters, that is), “Of Sleep,” and "Of Thumbs" — that attempted the impossible task of defining and then exhausting his interest in individual objects or desires. Modern life does not mirror Montaigne’s privilege of time, space, and quietude, but part of his beloved legacy still rings true: the necessity of attention to detail—to singularity—and how dedication to understanding the specific can crack open…
Isaac Fitzgerald has lived many lives. He's been an altar boy, a bartender, a fat kid, a smuggler, a biker, a prince of New England. But before all that, he was a bomb that exploded his parents’ lives — or so he was told. In Dirtbag, Massachusetts (Bloomsbury), Fitzgerald, with warmth and humor, recounts his ongoing search for forgiveness, a more far-reaching vision of masculinity, and a more expansive definition of family and self. Fitzgerald’s memoir-in-essays begins with a childhood that moves at breakneck speed from safety to violence, recounting an extraordinary pilgrimage through trauma to self-understanding and, ultimately, acceptance. From growing up in a Boston homeless shelter to bartending in San Francisco, from smuggling medical supplies into Burma to his lifelong struggle to make…
It’s been another strange year. Let’s make it even stranger with Telltale’s first special production, The Ghost Show, a night of celebration, mourning, community building, and creepiness. For us, ghosts can represent all the grief and loss of these bizarre and heavy years, the way the things and people we love are never really gone, and a way to get your heart racing in the middle of the night. Ghosts help us tell important stories and hold onto things we can’t let go of yet. Telltale promises to bring you a makers market selling odd things, an opportunity to make your own ghost, live music, storytelling, opportunities to participate in the show if you like, ghost shaped snacks, and perhaps a few ghosts in attendance…
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 the instructor and from the other participants.…
Annie Bloom's welcomes Los Angeles author David Ambroz for a reading from his new memoir, A Place Called Home. This in-store reading is first come, first served. Seating is limited. Please be mindful of any store health policies that might be in effect on the night of the reading. About A Place Called Home: There are millions of homeless children in America today and in A Place Called Home, award-winning child welfare advocate David Ambroz writes about growing up homeless in New York for eleven years and his subsequent years in foster care, offering a window into what so many kids living in poverty experience every day. Told with lyricism and sparkling with warmth, A Place Called Home depicts childhood poverty and homelessness as it…