LitPDX seeks to amplify marginalized voices, and welcomes all, their ideas, their events, and their words.

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Kristen Arnett in Conversation With Karen Russell

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into the family taxidermy shop to find that her father has committed suicide, right there on one of the metal tables. Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the failing business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the shop to make aggressively lewd art with the taxidermied animals. Her brother Milo withdraws, struggling to function. And Brynn, Milo’s wife — and the only person Jessa’s ever been in love with — walks out without a word. As Jessa seeks out less-than-legal ways of generating income, her mother’s art escalates — picture a figure of her dead husband and a stuffed buffalo in an uncomfortably sexual pose — and the Mortons reach a…

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Morgan Thomas in Conversation With Kristen Arnett

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The nine stories in Morgan Thomas’s shimmering debut collection, Manywhere (MCD), witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, at whatever cost. As each character traces deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery. A trans woman finds her independence through the purchase of a pregnancy bump. A young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themselves in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A young writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag. And in the uncanny title story, a…

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