LitPDX seeks to amplify marginalized voices, and welcomes all, their ideas, their events, and their words.

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Risograph Basics @ Outlet!

Outlet 2500 Northeast Sandy Boulevard, Portland, OR, United States

About the Workshop Welcome to our Risograph Basics course: a printing, collage, experimentation, and mark making extravaganza! Get to know Outlet and our RISO sisters (Barbara, Janet, Corita, and Tina) and learn the basics of this fun and unique print method! This workshop is a great place to start if you’re new to riso, or if you’d like a refresher! We’ll take a deep dive into risograph history, an overview of how these machines work, the stencil-duplicator process, and the quirks and fun (sometimes unpredictable) outcomes of riso printing. The main focus of this class is EXPERIMENTATION. We’ll share print and zine inspiration, favorite mark making tools and how to use them for riso, and we’ll walk through a print demo on two of our…

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$100 – $125

Poetry Workshop: An Afternoon of Deep Music w John Morrison | Apr 8 | In-person

Attic Institute 4232 SE Hawthorne, Portland, OR, United States

“Poetry is speech with song in it, the song made by words made to dance." ~ Robert Nye Prosody in the poems of Terrance Hayes, Mary Szybist, Diane Seuss, and others In this afternoon gathering, we will step into several poems by highly-accomplished poets and see what techniques they use to achieve their superior poems. More exploration than lecture, together we’ll discover the formal strategies and deep music in the work of Terrance Hayes, Mary Szybist, and Diane Seuss, among others. While this exploration can be seen as a follow up to January’s Deep Music of Poetry session on prosody, all are welcome for this fresh adventure. Be ready to read and collaborate in a full afternoon of discovery, and plan to carry home inspiration for…

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$99 – $119

Abel, Ashby, Ready, & Safdie

Soliloquy Fine Arts 2232 SE Clinton Street, Suite B, Portland, OR, United States

Soliloquy Fine Arts is hosting poetry readings on Saturdays in April, in connection with the exhibition Expanse, which features abstract atmospheric paintings and a large-scale mobile by Julie Rall and Ruth Meijer. Soliloquy Fine Arts 2232 SE Clinton Street, Suite B (back of bldg) Gallery hours on Saturdays: 1:00-4:00 pm Readings take place at intervals from 1:30 to 3:00 pm each day. See below for the schedule of readers. April 8: David Abel, Chris Ashby, Meg Ready, Joe Safdie April 15: Marina Lazzara, Jennifer Pons, Michelle Ruiz Keil April 22: Stephanie Baker, David Booth, Monica Regan April 29: Sarah Ellen Sims, Chanel Wiggan, James Yeary The April readings at Soliloquy have been curated by Elizabeth Costello.

Free

Archie Bongiovanni in Conversation With Sarah Shay Mirk

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Archie Bongiovanni, the comics artist behind the hit A Quick and Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns, explores queerness in their shockingly frank and funny graphic novel, Mimosa (Abrams ComicArts – Surely). Best friends and chosen family Chris, Elise, Jo, and Alex work hard to keep themselves afloat. Their regular brunches hold them together even as the rest of their lives threaten to fall apart. In an effort to avoid being the oldest gays at the party, the crew decides to put on a new queer event called Grind — specifically for homos in their dirty thirties. Grind is a welcome distraction from their real problems: after a messy divorce, Chris adjusts to being a single parent while struggling to reconnect to their queer community. Elise…

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Free

Taylor Koekkoek

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

An amusement park employee overdoses after eating the gel of a fentanyl patch. Two homeless men discover the body of a drowned woman. A sister encounters a dangerous stranger while driving her brother to rehab. Ex-lovers seek to rekindle their relationship with the aid of an earthquake. In the nine masterful stories that comprise Thrillville, USA (Simon & Schuster), debut author Taylor Koekkoek depicts Americans living on the margins of society, seeking escape from isolation and underemployment in drugs, booze, and self-destructive relationships. While the action is set largely in the rural Pacific Northwest, the characters’ malaise and disaffectedness is endemic of the country as a whole. The title takes its name from the aforementioned amusement park, but Thrillville is as much a state of…

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Free

Delve Readers Seminar: Little Things: A Study of Literary Compression

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“It’s the little things that count”; “Good things come in small packages”; “Brevity is the soul of wit”; “The Devil’s in the details”… We’ll put these aphorisms to the test in this Delve Seminar exploring short poems, prose poetry, and short/micro fiction. These compressed forms aren’t lacking for content in their brevity, and we will explore ways of extracting their compressed contents like we would with zip files, expanding them like dry sponges in water, receiving the full communications of their code like expert cryptographers. We’ll also try writing a few small pieces of our own to learn through direct experience just what makes them tick. Authors we’ll read include Emily Dickinson, Russell Edson, Lucille Clifton, William Carlos Williams, Matsuo Bashō, and many more. Access…

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$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Haunted Chambers: Piranesi and The Little Stranger

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Setting is an important aspect of every story, but sometimes it is so integral as to be almost a character in itself. Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi and Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger explore the unsettling power of place and its influence on the human mind. Piranesi lives in the House, a fantastical, dreamlike structure where ocean waves surge through infinite vestibules, clouds float and birds fly through halls decorated with statuary, and human remains lie secreted in niches. Alone except for occasional visits from a man he calls the Other, Piranesi records his daily routines and discoveries in his journal, muses on the Other’s quest for “a Great Secret and Knowledge,” and gradually unravels mysteries that threaten to upend his fragile contentment. In The Little Stranger,…

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$240

Chelsea Bieker: Book Launch for Paperback of Heartbroke

Broadway Books 1714 NE Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

Please join us to celebrate the launch of the paperback edition of Heartbroke, with the author Chelsea Bieker in conversation with fellow author Genevieve Hudson. Heartbroke is a defining book of Californian stories where everyone is seeking or sabotaging love. United by the stark and sprawling landscapes of California's Central Valley, the characters in these stories boil with reckless desire. A woman steals a baby from a shelter in an attempt to recoup her own lost motherhood. A phone-sex operator sees divine opportunity when a lavender-eyed cowboy walks into her life. A mother and a son selling dream catchers along a highway that leads to a toxic beach manifest two young documentary filmmakers into their realm. And two teenage girls play a dangerous online game…

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Free

Katie Holten in Conversation With David Naimon

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Inspired by forests, trees, leaves, roots, and seeds, The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape (Tin House) invites readers to discover an unexpected and imaginative language to better read and write the natural world around us and reclaim our relationship with it. In her gorgeously illustrated and deeply thoughtful collection, Katie Holten gifts readers her tree alphabet and uses it to masterfully translate and illuminate beloved writing in praise of the natural world. With an introduction from Ross Gay, and featuring writings from over 50 contributors, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Ada Limón, Robert Macfarlane, Zadie Smith, Radiohead, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, James Gleick, Elizabeth Kolbert, Plato, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, Holten illustrates each selection with an abiding love and reverence for the magic…

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Free
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