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 on November 1st to celebrate the release of Instrument by Dao Strom. Dao will be joined by Coleman Stevenson, reading from her new book Light Sleeper, and Emily Kendal Frey, reading from her forthcoming book with Fonograf Ed. *Zoom RSVP required.*
"Every man must have one secret, even if only one, from his wife,' he said. "...All is yours, everywhere is open to you--except the lock that this single key fits." --Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber Join us as we unlock Bluebeard's forbidden chamber with: * Artist, writer, and educator Coleman Stevenson * Psychiatrist Dr. Chinenye Onyemaechi, * Melissa Mullins, professor and folktale scholar * Katharina Raven, photographer and filmmaker * Michelle Ruiz Keil, author To experience this gruesome tale of deception, discovery, and escape, here to the fullest, before the reading, follow the links: https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm040.html https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault03.html https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm046.html https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0311.html#devil and the first story in: https://uniteyouthdublin.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/1-the-bloody-chamber-and-other-stories-1979.pdf BIOS AND TALK DESCRIPTIONS: Chinenye Onyemaechi, M.D. ("Dr. Chi") is a board-certified physician specializing in general and forensic psychiatry. She merges…
Forge a deeper connection with your intuition in this 5-week course exploring intuitive processes and symbolism in creative practice. Students will work with The Personal Oracle deck, designed by instructor Coleman Stevenson, to stretch their symbolic awareness and sharpen their creative instincts. The cards and other divinatory methods will be used as prompts for storytelling and other creative writing exercises as well. This is a great class for card readers who want to expand their reading methods to include visual and intuitive reading AND for writers who want to explore alternative composition methods. No prior experience with cartomancy is required. Tuition for the course includes a copy of The Personal Oracle (Second Edition) and an accompanying journal for exploring the cards. Access Program We want…
IPRC is honored to be selected by Creative Laureate Emeritus Subashini Ganesan and the City of Portland to create a healing through art collective project. Poetry Is A Prompt is a collaborative poetry project that we invite you to participate in. It’s an opportunity to reflect on grief and healing from the past year of heightened racist violence and the evolving COVID pandemic, as well as the many personal losses each of us experience. Intisar Abioto (@intisarabioto), Stephanie Adams-Santos (@tarot_obscuro), jayy dodd (@jxzz_hndz), Catie Hannigan (@glinnt), and Coleman Stevenson (@darkexact) have created first lines of poetry to inspire your writing. Crystal Thomas (@darkrystalight) has created a sculptural structure to hold your lines of poetry written on paper chain garlands. Come visit the IPRC’s new Martha…
IPRC is honored to be selected by Creative Laureate Emeritus Subashini Ganesan and the City of Portland to create a healing through art collective project. Poetry Is A Prompt is a collaborative poetry project that we invite you to participate in. It’s an opportunity to reflect on grief and healing from the past year of heightened racist violence and the evolving COVID pandemic, as well as the many personal losses each of us experience. Intisar Abioto (@intisarabioto), Stephanie Adams-Santos (@tarot_obscuro), jayy dodd (@jxzz_hndz), Catie Hannigan (@glinnt), and Coleman Stevenson (@darkexact) have created first lines of poetry to inspire your writing. Crystal Thomas (@darkrystalight) has created a sculptural structure to hold your lines of poetry written on paper chain garlands. Come visit the IPRC’s new Martha…
In this follow-up to Oracles, Intuition, and Creativity, we will go deeper into our exploration of sets of symbols and how they function as tools for self-study and guides for artistic creation. The class will begin with a brief survey of the history of divination and an analysis of various types of oracles (their art, symbolism, and structures), including a conversation with contemporary oracle designers about their practices. Each participant will then design their own oracle system and write a guide for its use. No artistic ability is needed for this class, but there will be an opportunity at the end of the five weeks to attend a special session with a hands-on creative component; details will be given in class. While it is not…
Author Emily St. John Mandel told The LA Times in March 2020, “I would not recommend reading Station Eleven in the middle of a pandemic.” Now as we are firmly planted in 2022, what can a book such as this provide as we reflect on our own pandemic experiences and try to make sense of the future? This text will engage us with concepts such as the importance of art and literature, surviving vs. thriving, community building, and leadership and morality. We will also explore classic folktales and Shakespearean themes that are interconnected with this story of post-apocalyptic endurance. Texts: Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven Access Program We want our writing classes and Delves to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background.…
In this online three-part workshop, participants will explore various methods of using the Tarot and other simple forms of divination as prompts for poems. We will allow ourselves to be guided intuitively in our creations, suppressing the urge to control the process intellectually. Session One will be purely generative, focusing on starting and progressing new poems. In Session Two participants will work with the poems they started from prompts, developing them into cohesive pieces. Partly this will be through introducing a rational/intellectual component to raw materials that were derived from intuitive processes, but further divinatory and chance methods will also be part of our revision practices. In Session Three, students will share and discuss their polished work. Materials: any Tarot deck, your favorite book, pen…
If you allow them to, ideas for art and writing can come from absolutely anywhere. This creative generation class will put that theory to the test, through a series of experiments in creative problem-solving, spontaneous and chance-based play, and other exploratory prompts that challenge you to work outside your normal modes and investigate how the creative brain works. Prior to the start of this series of classes, each participant will receive a unique packet of random materials in the mail. In-class exercises and weekly assignments will ask you to work with these materials in various ways, including an opportunity to create collaboratively at a distance. You’ll also keep a weekly journal detailing your personal process and ideas about creativity. As support for this process, we…
“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…