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!

Refuse the Given World: Breaking Blocks Through Play

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“When I sit down and start writing, I feel the given world recede, and I can just play.” —Sam Lipsyte Remember when you were a little kid, playing on the floor for hours and hours? Our best writing days are often imbued with that same sense of timelessness, freedom, wonder, and escape—in other words, our work often works best when it feels like play. In this generative writing course, we will tap into a playful mindset—by using silly rules, obstructions, oblique strategies, games, dreams, ephemera, constraints, and more—to unlock problematic works and/or generate new material. You will leave this class with more than a dozen techniques for starting a new project, breaking a block, or working through something sticky in a piece of writing. This…

$290

September Poetry Practice Space

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Join us monthly on zoom, on the third Thursday of the month for prompts and sharing. Register here, and we’ll send the zoom link on the day of the event. Poetry Practice Space is a monthly gathering for poets and writers. Writing materials, readings and prompts for generative writing will be provided. Come share a space to talk about your writing practice, and current writing projects, bemoan rejections, celebrate acceptances, share writing resources— and write together! Consider Poetry Practice Space the calisthenics for your poetics. Suggested donation, no one turned away for lack of funds Free for members

Free

Writing with Herbs w/ Amanda Andrei

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

WHAT: A four-week generative online collaboration WHEN: Begins Saturday, September 18th, 2021—just in time for the autumnal equinox. This class is hosted on our rich interactive online platform, WetInk. The class is broken into four weeks, and within those weeks you go at your own pace. In addition, there will be two zoom meetings—one at the start of class on 9/18 and one at the close of class on 10/15. These meetings will occur from 12-130pm Pacific. ACCESS: You can buy a seat in this workshop at our standard rate of $350, but this offering is also available at a sliding scale to anyone who inquires. Please reach out to Daniel Elder at registration@corporealwriting.com. Payment plans are also available. Writing With Herbs Leaves, flowers, buds,…

$350

The Stacks Coffeehouse: October 2021 Writing Class

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Generative, Drop-in Writing Class @ The Stacks Coffeehouse $20 for 4 weeks Buy now This class will be focused exclusively on creating new work, with prompts sent out every Friday morning via email (starting October 1st) and live student readings via Zoom every Thursday at 7pm PST, where everyone will be encouraged to share their works-in-progress in answer to the prompt (The last class reading will be October 28th). All levels are welcome. Prompts are geared toward flash fiction, but we love nonfiction and poetry too. Generative: This class is generative, which means we’ll be focused on generating new work rather than polishing existing work. Prompts will be emailed on Fridays, and the class with meet live every Thursday at 7pm to share work. Unlike…

$20

Writing Beyond Stereotypes of Disability

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Characters with disabilities have been around as long as there have been stories, but often those characters are based on stereotypes that serve as plot shortcuts and end up being harmful to real people with disabilities. Disability is one of humanity’s most shared traits. It is inevitable that to write characters you will write disability. This class will use model texts and generative writing exercises to explore how to go beyond stereotypes such as the one-handed villain, the pitiable cripple, and the inspirational athlete, to write nuanced characters that honor human diversity on the page. Because we live in an able world, discussions and exercises will also touch on writing disabled worlds and how to reveal the often invisible expectations of ablism in our current…

$95

Multiplicity — A 4-Week Generative Writing Lab w/ Daniel Elder

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

WHAT: A 4-week generative online writing lab WHEN: The online class space—hosted on our rich interactive platform WetInk—opens Friday, October 8th. Weekly Zoom sessions will be held every Saturday morning at 10AM PST. (Zoom dates: 10/9, 10/16, 10/23, 10/30, 11/6.) ACCESS: $350. Sliding scale and/or payment plans available to all and sundry—contact Daniel at registration@corporealwriting.com Do you want to write beyond a main character into multiple voices, bodies, and stories? Do you wanna fuck around with time? Do you wanna write into the multiverse? Do you wanna interrupt monomythologies and hero archetypes? If so, it sounds like you wanna fuck shit up and you've come to the right place. For four weeks in this generative online writing lab, we're going to plunge into these worlds…

$350

Archiving Ancestors, Collective Grief, and the Illusion of Time

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The quiet and stillness of quarantine transported many of us beyond the bounds of time and space. Through our unexpected journeys, we may have traced new threads from ancestral roots to our present moments and felt them stretch towards an unknown somewhere on a vast continuum of time. Loss of place, people, and ways of being from the past, present, and anticipatory future left grief to linger and blur the edges of things. This generative writing series will invite us to craft multi-genre pieces that archive the transcendent, dizzying, perplexing, and new. We will honor our ancestors, known, unknown, and chosen. We will write from the dark blue of sorrow to expand our capacity for joy. We will dissolve the illusion of time to embody…

$145

October Poetry Practice Space

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Join us monthly on zoom, on the third Thursday of the month for prompts and sharing. Register here, and we’ll send the zoom link on the day of the event. Poetry Practice Space is a monthly gathering for poets and writers. Writing materials, readings and prompts for generative writing will be provided. Come share a space to talk about your writing practice, and current writing projects, bemoan rejections, celebrate acceptances, share writing resources— and write together! Consider Poetry Practice Space the calisthenics for your poetics. Suggested donation, no one turned away for lack of funds Free for members

Free

FALL | Zoom | Digging Deep w Wendy Willis | Nov 8 – June 20 TWO SPOTS REMAINING

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Meeting every other week for sixteen sessions, this ongoing and supportive writing community both studies aspects of craft and shares work for feedback in a multi-genre, generative approach. | Maximum: 12 writers Required to join: email letter of interest describing your experience writing and what you're working on. Email with required letter of interest  Schedule Nov 8 + 22 Dec 6 Jan 3 + 17 + 31 Feb 7 + 21 Mar 7 + 21 Apr 4 + 18 May 2 + 16 June 6 + 20 NOTE: Click to sign up for a free Zoom account. Teacher: Wendy Willis Time: Mondays, Nov 8 - June 20, 2022, 5:30 - 8pm Pacific Time, every other week, 16 sessions Location: Zoomoom | Online Workshop Total Fee: Discounted Early Registration is due seven (7) days…

$860 – $907

November Poetry Practice Space

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Join us monthly on zoom, on the third Thursday of the month for prompts and sharing. Register here, and we’ll send the zoom link on the day of the event. Poetry Practice Space is a monthly gathering for poets and writers. Writing materials, readings and prompts for generative writing will be provided. Come share a space to talk about your writing practice, and current writing projects, bemoan rejections, celebrate acceptances, share writing resources— and write together! Consider Poetry Practice Space the calisthenics for your poetics. Suggested donation, no one turned away for lack of funds Free for members

Free