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!
Brandon Taylor, author of Booker Prize finalist Real Life and senior editor of Recommended Reading, talks to Ross Feeler about “Parisian Honeymoon,” a story about a man who discovers that his new wife is a bigot. They will discuss their editing process, and how to write anti-racist stories with racist characters without being morally didactic. Q&A to follow.
John Darnielle (Wolf in White Van, Universal Harvester, the Mountain Goats), Leah Johnson (You Should See Me in a Crown), Daniel Lavery (Something That May Shock and Discredit You, The Merry Spinster, Slate’s Dear Prudence, The Toast), Amber Sparks (And I Do Not Forgive You, The Unfinished World), and R. Eric Thomas (Here for It, Elle magazine) join Dungeon Master Matt Lubchansky to play a classic tabletop role-playing game with a literary twist. If you’ve never played D&D before, don’t worry—most of our players haven’t either.
Electric Literature executive director Halimah Marcus talks to Marie-Helene Bertino (Parakeet, 2 a.m. at the Cat’s Pajamas, Safe as Houses) and Elissa Washuta (White Magic, My Body Is a Book of Rules, Shapes of Native Nonfiction) about coping with trauma and subverting expectations at the intersection of magic and reality. They will discuss how magic works in practice and as a rhetorical device in fiction. Q&A to follow.
Eavesdrop on your dream writing group meeting with a classic drinking (or not drinking) game. Memoirists and essayists are masters at spinning everyday lives into literary gold, but can they make stuff up? Electric Lit contributors and writing group pals Angela Chen (Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex), Lilly Dancyger (Burn it Down: Women Writing About Anger), Deena ElGenaidi, Jeanna Kadlec, and Nina St. Pierre bring their talents to bear on this game of truth and fiction. Hosted by Jess Zimmerman.
About a third of the stories published in Recommended Reading are unsolicited submissions, which share space in the magazine with work by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners. Unlike some legacy lit mags, we really are reading all the work you send in, and we really do publish it. So how can you make your stories stand out among the thousands of submissions we receive every year? Recommended Reading’s editorial team—Halimah Marcus, Brandon Taylor, Erin Bartnett, and Alyssa Sondsiridej—pull back the curtain on their decision-making process and offer invaluable advice to short story writers. A must-watch for anyone who is planning to submit. Q&A to follow. This event is part of Electric Lit's Winter Salon Series, presented by Reedsy.
For freelancers, writing an essay, feature, or opinion piece doesn’t start when you type the first line. It starts with the pitch. Having a topic and a talent isn’t enough; you also have to be able to package your idea in a way that catches an editor’s eye. But how do you get started writing a pitch? How long is too long—and how short is too short? What does a good pitch look like—and a bad one? And why does Electric Lit ask people to write a pitch, anyway? Electric Literature editor-in-chief Jess Zimmerman and contributing editor Jennifer Baker fill you in on everything you need to know when proposing nonfiction work to Electric Lit and other publications. Q&A to follow. This event is part…
Unlike most literary magazines, The Commuter chooses its weekly piece of poetry, flash, graphic, or experimental narrative almost exclusively from unsolicited submissions—9 out of 10 issues are drawn from the so-called “slush.” (We don’t think it’s slush!) Work published in The Commuter has been recognized by Best American Poetry and Comics, the Wigleaf Top 50, and Best Small Fictions. But we get thousands of submissions every year, and only publish 52 issues. So how can you help your work get recognized? Commuter editors Halimah Marcus, Kelly Luce, and Ed Skoog invite you behind the scenes for a frank editorial discussion that is a must-watch for anyone planning to submit. Q&A to follow. This event is part of Electric Lit's Winter Salon Series, presented by Reedsy.
Do you dream of having in-depth discussions with your favorite authors about their latest books? Join a panel of Electric Literature’s veteran interviewers—Tyrese Coleman, J.R. Ramakrishnan, and Arriel Vinson—to learn how the professionals do it. How do you pitch an interview to a publication and get the author to agree to talk to you? What are the secrets of crafting great interview questions—and how do you avoid the ones that thud? How do you get your conversation with the author to really flow—and if it does flow freely, is there any way to make transcribing less arduous? Our panel will dig into all of these questions and more. Moderated by Preety Sidhu. Q&A to follow.
You know you want to publish a book—but you're not sure how to take the first step, or even what the first step is. (“Write the manuscript,” obviously, right? Well, no, not always!) Agent DongWon Song (Howard Morhaim), nonfiction editor Rakia Clark (HMH), fiction editor Angeline Rodriguez (Orbit), and marketing director Meghan Deans (Ecco) open up the black box of publishing and walk you through the steps between “good idea” and “physical book you can sign.” Learn what to expect, what will be expected of you, what to watch out for, and how to prepare yourself to navigate the publishing world. Moderated by Jess Zimmerman. Q&A to follow.
First impressions count—and they never count more than when you’re trying to impress an editor who has 1,500 submissions to read. Editors often say that they can tell within the first page whether a story will be worth accepting, so how do you make your first page really shine? Eavesdrop on our evaluation process—and vie to get your story noticed—with Recommended Reading editors Halimah Marcus and Brandon Taylor. They’ll be reading opening pages submitted just for the occasion, sharing their reactions and thought processes as they go. Submit your own first page anonymously to see if your story has what it takes to catch our editors’ eyes, or simply tune in to see how other writers fare. Submission instructions: You can find the link to…