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!
Join us for an offsite reading in downtown Portland. We'll be hosting an unforgettable lineup of readers, including Garth Greenwell, Carmen Maria Machado, Terese Mailhort, Alexander Chee, and Lidia Yuknavitch. Contact: Corporeal Writing
In the Dream House (Graywolf) is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope, through which Machado examines the past from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado…
For February we will be discussing In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. https://www.tworiversbooks.com/book/9781644450383 A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties. In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope—the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—through which Machado holds the events up to…