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!

Front Porch Sessions: “Snow Days”

Alberta Street Pub 1036 NE Alberta St, Portland, OR, United States

Story tellers: Hannah Kim Hannah Kim is a Gemini, writer, improviser, storyteller and stone cold witch. She is currently interested in exploring how capitalism intersects with race and gender, reclaiming access to the divine feminine as a part of the feminist movement and increasing representation and visibility in media and arts spaces. She's also interested in yoga, tarot and comedy as a tool of resistance. Paige Hendrix Buckner Paige Hendrix Buckner is the Program Director of Founders Gym, an online training center that helps underrepresented founders build successful tech startups. In the first eighteen months of operation, FG has trained 357 founders across 18 countries, who've gone on to raise over $40MM. Throughout her career, Paige has operated at the intersection of education, entrepreneurship, and…

$10

Delve Readers Seminar: Delve Online: Memory and Ancestors: Paula by Isabel Allende

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This class meets via Zoom teleconferencing, Participants who register will receive information on how to log onto the Zoom meeting. “What actually happened isn’t what matters, only the resulting scars and distinguishing marks. My past has little meaning; I can see no order to it, no clarity, purpose, or path, only a blind journey guided by instinct and detours caused by events beyond my control. There was no deliberation on my part, only good intentions and the faint sense of a greater design determining my steps.” – Isabel Allende, Paula   Allende wrote this memoir for her daughter Paula when she became gravely ill and fell into a coma. In typical Allende fashion, it is a work that accepts the magical and spiritual worlds, and…

$75

Delve Readers Seminar Online: Memory and Ancestors: Paula by Isabel Allende

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This two week Delve meets via Zoom teleconferencing, Participants who register will receive information on how to log onto the Zoom meeting. “So it is with my life, a multilayered and ever-changing fresco that only I can decipher, whose secret is mine alone. The mind selects, enhances, and betrays; happenings fade from memory; people forget one another and, in the end, all that remains is the journey of the soul, those rare moments of spiritual revelation. What actually happened isn’t what matters, only the resulting scars and distinguishing marks. My past has little meaning; I can see no order to it, no clarity, purpose, or path, only a blind journey guided by instinct and detours caused by events beyond my control. There was no deliberation…

$75

Delve Readers Seminars Online: Best Friends Forever: Female Friendship in Literature

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.” This Delve will explore female friendship, as written by women writers, through both a fiction and nonfiction lens. These friendships are complex and nuanced, sometimes ugly, sometimes enduring, and sometimes one of the most significant relationships of a lifetime. Through Toni Morrison’s beautiful and stirring Sula and Nel, Hungarian writer Szabo’s unlikely relationship between a woman and her housekeeper in The Door, and Ann Patchett’s exploration of her 20-year long friendship with writer Lucy Grealy, we will explore different paradigms of these relationships across time and culture. Texts: Truth and Beauty, Ann Patchett Sula, Toni Morrison The Door, Magda Szabo First assignment: Participants should read Truth…

$150

Delve Readers Seminar Online: Milan Kundera

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Explore Czech writer Kundera alongside some of his inspirations. We will begin with his most famous work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, reading both the original text and exploring major influences on this work, through excerpts from Kafka and Nietzsche. We will also read his novel Immortality and short story collection Laughable Loves. We will discuss what is distinctive about Kundera’s style, such as his lyrical writing and preoccupation with philosophical themes. Of course, no discussion on Kundera would be complete without a discussion surrounding the thematic elements of totalitarianism and revolution. Reading List: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Immortality Laughable Loves Excerpts from Nietzsche and Kafka (guide will provide PDFs to…

$230

Delve Readers Seminar Online: Contemporary Korean Fiction

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

A look at 3 contemporary Korean writers. From a haunting meditation on grief to a powerful examination on capitalism, participants will discuss the themes that bind and distinguish these texts. Discussions will also focus on how translation affects our understanding of these novels as well as elements of Korean culture and current affairs that are uniquely reflected in these works. This seminar is offered exclusively for people of color Reading List: The White Book, Han Kang The Impossible Fairy, Han Yujoo Familiar Things, Hwang Sok-Yong Participants should read The Impossible Fairy before first class meeting. Hannah Kim is a writer, storyteller, and improv comedian. She is interested in radical intersectional feminism and how it relates to anti-capitalism and reclamation of the divine feminine. She is…

$150

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

Delve Readers Seminar: Feminist Horror and Millennial Anxiety in South Korean Literature

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung  and Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park have just been translated into English from the original Korean by Anton Hur and have recently been shortlisted and longlisted (respectively) for the Booker Prize. Though very different from one another, by reading both we can get a taste of the exciting landscape that is modern Korean literature. Cursed Bunny is a short story collection that combines magic realism, horror and science fiction to address the real-life horrors of capitalism and patriarchy. Love in the Big City is a novel that captures the millennial loneliness and love affairs of a queer Seoulite. In addition to discussing the themes present in both texts, we will discuss translation and how it affects our understanding and interaction with the work.…

$130

Delve Readers Seminar: “Real Women Have Bodies”: the grotesque in women writers’ short stories

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Genre-defying writers Carmen Maria Machado, Sayaka Murata and Bora Chung incorporate elements from fairy tales, horror and science fiction to give us lopsided but chillingly familiar scenes from our society. Whether in Machado’s rewriting of folklore in “The Husband Stitch”, Murata’s imaginings of a world where we eat dead people in “Life Ceremony”, or Chung’s nightmarish rendering of a body made of a woman’s excrement in “The Head”, these stories don’t shy away from body horror, rather choosing to dive right into the messy as well as the sometimes disgusting realities of being a human, and woman, in our world. Texts (selected stories) Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung Access Program We…

$160

Delve Readers Seminar: Language as resistance, words as collage: Don Mee Choi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Though published many decades apart, these two texts share similarities both in their subject matter and their experimental qualities. Just as Dictee cannot be merely labeled as a memoir and DMZ Colony cannot be labeled purely as a poetry collection, both texts expand our understanding of genre by weaving together prose, poetry and photographs. Moreover, they “hold history accountable” by integrating historical events into the deeply personal, ranging from Japanese colonization of Korea to the Korean War. In doing so, these Korean American writers give voice to feelings and understandings that have often been silenced. By looking at these two texts in tandem, we will examine their use of language to resist power and silencing as well as how their experimental methods seek to give…

$160