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!
The next Vancouver Writers Guild generative workshop will be August 18th at 6:30 PM! Seven-time author and self-publisher Stephen Altschuler will be leading the workshop, giving prompts and encouragement as we all embark on the writing journey together. There will be snacks.
Praise for Writing from Life: "I left the weekend with an agenda and a plan and realistic expectations." ~ Pat Brim-Williams This popular tune-up workshop will be run twice this summer, in July and August. It's the kind of study every writer needs, an opportunity to write from studying your own portrait and then seeing what subjects that leads you to. The supportive approach emphasizes observation as the route to achieve new material, new possibilities, and new pieces, whether you are writing fiction, memoir, or poems. The approach teaches you new skills that you can use for all your future writing, as well as how to transfer your observations into clear notes, jottings, studies, and pieces of new writing. This method of writing is one of the foundational skill sets that all writers should…
Rose City Book Pub is thrilled to host the book release party for Intestinal Fortitude by Earl Llewellyn Goldmann! Join us on the patio for light refreshments and a great time! Part autobiographical and part expose, INTESTINAL FORTITUDE, weaves Earl’s battles with injury, abuse, depression, and recovery even as he succeeds as a basketball standout, teacher, coach, father and friend. In his compassionate and moving memoir, Earl’s stories flow into our hearts and souls. We experience his unflinching optimism. Earl proves that a strong man with resilience and gratitude can find himself and be a beacon of hope for all of us.
Annie Bloom's welcomes Portland author Lara Messersmith-Glavin for an in-store reading from her essay collection, Spirit Things. This in-store reading is first come, first served. Please be mindful of any store health policies that might be in effect on the night of the reading. Signed and personalized copies are available for pre-order! Please, please, please include the name for personalization in the order notes; all orders without a name specified in the order notes will be signed only. About Spirit Things: A collection of essays that evoke an adventurous spirit and the craving for myth, Spirit Things examines the hidden meanings of objects found on a fishing boat, as seen through the eyes of a child. Author Lara Messersmith-Glavin blends memoir, mythology, and science as…
Emily Dickinson has achieved the rarest of distinctions for a nineteenth-century poet (and a female one at that): lasting, evolving fame. Having escaped the confines of academic study and school syllabi, Dickinson has become a popular figure beloved by a wide and varied readership and the subject of films, television programs, and fan clubs. She is acknowledged not only as an important American poet, but as one of the greatest poets of any time and place. Dickinson understands the power and the magic of words and knows how to breathe life into metaphor. Her writing is associative and allusive, frequently enigmatic or ambiguous, and always peculiarly original. Poetry was for her not just a craft or a vocation (though it was certainly both of these),…
Part memoir, part sweeping journalistic saga: as Casey Parks follows the mystery of a stranger's past, she is forced to reckon with her own sexuality, her fraught Southern identity, her tortured yet loving relationship with her mother, and the complicated role of faith in her life. When Parks came out as a lesbian in college back in 2002, she assumed her life in the South was over. Her mother shunned her, and her pastor asked God to kill her. But then Parks's grandmother, a stern conservative who grew up picking cotton, pulled her aside and revealed a startling secret. "I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man," and then implored Casey to find out what happened to him. Diary…
What is the internet doing to us? What is college for? What are the myths and metaphors we live by? These are the questions that William Deresiewicz has been pursuing over the course of his award-winning career. His new book, The End of Solitude (Henry Holt), brings together more than 40 of his finest essays. Ranging widely across the culture, they take up subjects as diverse as Mad Men and Harold Bloom, the significance of the hipster, and the purpose of art. Drawing on the past, they ask how we got where we are. Scrutinizing the present, they seek to understand how we can live more mindfully and freely, and they pose two fundamental questions: What does it mean to be an individual, and how…
HOCUS has opened submissions for an October 21st reading at Rose City Book Pub, with a central theme of "Spirits." HOCUS is looking for prose and poems of up to 2,000 words related to hauntings, liquor, or states of mind! The submission deadline is September 23rd.
This bimonthly reading series is intended to prioritize the safety, creativity, and stories of Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color. Come listen to our featured readers, or sign up to share your work in our open mic. Readings will be followed by a short community discussion. Click here to register for this event. This event is open to everyone, but only people who identify as Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color will be invited to read. If you have any questions, please contact our host Jessica at jessica@literary-arts.org.