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!

Delve Readers Seminar: Tove Jansson: The Summer Book

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

If you already know Tove Jansson as the author and illustrator of the Moominfamily stories and comic strips, you will meet her in this Delve seminar as the author of her superb The Summer Book. This is a novel that is so deep and yet so apparently casual that it will repay the close reading we will give it in this four-week seminar. We will also observe her imagination for fiction in her short stories, letters, and other works. But we won’t forget the Moomins, for life on the island in The Summer Book echoes life in the Moominvalley. These books and a look at Jansson’s artwork will help us understand the fascinating account of the passages of life that The Summer Book gives us.…

$160

Delve Readers Seminar: Shuggie Bain

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Douglas Stuart won the 2020 Booker Prize with this debut novel about young Hugh (Shuggie) Bain, growing up in 1980s Glasgow and struggling to care for his wayward, alcoholic mother. Drawing on his own experience, Stuart portrays the difficulties of a working-class, queer childhood with heartbreaking tenderness, bringing Shuggie and his world vividly to life. This seminar will introduce readers to one of the most exciting new voices in literature. Access Program We want our writing classes to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class registrations at a reduced rate. The access program for writing classes covers 60% of the class tuition. Most writing classses…

$120

Delve Readers Seminar: The Book of Embraces

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The vignetted format of this text sometimes expands into short stories and sometimes shrinks into prose-poems, but regardless of any section’s length, this book is always intimate, charming, and transportive. Galeano uses journalistic research, autobiographical anecdotes, and interviews to emphasize how there really is no distinction between the personal and the political. He writes of the military dictatorship in Uruguay that forced him into exile, an Italian pantomime performance that reminded him the importance of loving your craft, a pet guinea pig that’s too afraid to leave its cage, the Chilean government’s despoiling of Pablo Neruda’s home, the fantastic dreams of his wife, and a few hundred other vignettes that advocate for love, friendship, and determination. A powerful text that uplifts humanity in the face…

$110

Delve Readers Seminar: James Baldwin

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Explore James Baldwin’s first two novels – Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room – and some of his early essays in order to deepen your understanding of the intersection of identity, morality, and power. What do these early works teach about Baldwin’s response to his own question: what does it mean to be an honest person and a good writer? September 1 - October 6, 2021 Wednesdays, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. (six sessions) online via Zoom Guide: Nicholas Buccola Nicholas Buccola is the author of The Fire Is Upon Us,The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass and the editor of The Essential Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and Liberal Democracy. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, and many other publications. He is the Elizabeth and Morris Glicksman…

$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Hilary Mantel: Beyond the Booker

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Hilary Mantel is best known for her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, the first two volumes of which (Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies) won the Booker Prize (in 2009 and 2012). The third and final volume, The Mirror and the Light, was published to acclaim in 2020. These books are modern masterpieces, yet Mantel’s earlier novels are equally worthy of attention and admiration. Mantel’s books are so original, and so different from one another, that it’s often difficult to believe they were written by the same novelist. In this seminar, we will read two of Mantel’s novels and her memoir. Beyond Black is the tragi-comic story of Alison, a modern-day medium scraping out a living among an assortment of cranks, true believers, and charlatans. Haunted…

$240

Delve Readers Seminar: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is one of the most celebrated & impactful books ever written. Since its publication over 50 million copies of the novel have been sold. The story follows the Buendía family & the other residents of Macondo through seven generations, depicting everything from civil war to flying carpets. The lush prose creates a transportive narrative that ever expands in all directions, exploring & complexifying the themes of colonialism & imperialism, the malleability of time, familial elitism, & humanity’s struggle to justify life. “Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to…

$240

Delve Readers Seminar: 9/11 Literatures and the Global War on Terror: 20th Anniversary

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

2021 marks the 20th Anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack and a period classified as the “global war on terror.” In this Delve seminar we will read, reflect, and discuss the literary responses to the immediate and the long-term impacts of the war on terror and the rise of xenophobia, Islamophobia, and the changing socio-political landscape of American life post 9/11. The literary texts that we will read will provide some broad understanding about public anxiety and trauma, particularly for those who experienced 9/11 closely and those that belonged to the Muslim-American communities. We will also unpack various representations and debates surrounding the ways in which the figure of the terrorist, terrorism, torture, racism and Islamophobia have informed the study of the 9/11 genre. Please…

$180

Delve Readers Seminar: Herman Melville: Great Shorter Works

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Although Herman Melville is best known for Moby-Dick, he also demonstrated mastery of the novella, and this Delve will explore Melville’s best-known shorter works: Bartleby the Scrivener, famous for the Wall Street denizen who “would prefer not to,” no matter what his employer might want; Benito Cereno, where a captain answering a ship’s call of distress ends up in a situation far more perplexing—and dangerous—than what he had bargained for; and the posthumously-published masterpiece, Billy Budd, a story of the “handsome sailor” whose beauty and simplicity result in tragedy and a crisis of conscience for his captain. In each of the three weeks of this Delve, we will examine one of these shorter works and discuss their position in Melville’s unusual literary career and the…

$110

Delve Readers Seminar: Homer, The Odyssey

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The Odyssey is one of the world’s oldest and most enduring works of literature. Homer’s ancient Greek epic has inspired many modern artists and has introduced generations of readers to the the world of Greek myth, poetry, and storytelling.  In this seminar, we will explore the intricacies of Homer’s epic and its central story— Odysseus’s effort to return home from the Trojan War and reunite with his wife and son.  We will use the much heralded new translation by Emily Wilson. The Odyssey was also the principal inspiration for James Joyce’s Ulysses, the modernist epic of everyday life, that will be the focus of a Delve seminar next Spring, the 100th anniversary of its publication on February 2, 1922.   Participants in the Ulysses seminar are encouraged, though not required…

$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Signs. Spoken. Memory. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This seminar is for BIPOC participants only Celebrating the 40th anniversary of this seminal publication, we will study Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee along with some of its academic critique. This work in many ways defies categorization–with its mixture of French and English, text and images, and the poetic and political. Though it has been described variously as an autobiography, a postcolonial text and an avant-garde, experimental work, it still remains largely inscrutable. Through academic critique and discussion, we will seek to unearth some of its many layers and better understand its contribution to the Asian American literary canon. Text: Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Access Program We want our writing classes and Delves to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand…

$80