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

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Portland Correspondence Co-op

IPRC (Independent Publishing Resource Center) 318 SE Main Street #175, Portland, OR, United States

PDXCC is a monthly gathering where participants make and share analog correspondence in the great mail art tradition of Ray Johnson and Anna Banana: art and conversation through the mail. This uniquely democratic, DIY art form incorporates writing, drawing, collage, rubber stamps, faux postage, decorative tape, typewriters – anything goes, as long as it goes through the mail. Hang out, skill share and send the glorious results through the mail. Monthly events hosted by the Portland chapter of the Correspondence Co-op and Niko Courtelis. Basic materials will be on hand (scissors, glue sticks, envelopes\’85), but you’re encouraged to bring whatever materials fuel your creative spirit. Free and open to the public, every third Tuesday of the month

Free

Reading with Lesley-Ann Brown, Intisar Abioto, and Jayy Dodd

The Stacks Coffeehouse 1831 N. Killingsworth St, Portland, OR, United States

The Stacks Coffeehouse will be hosting a reading on the evening of Wednesday, January 23rd, 2019. This reading will feature Lesley-Ann Brown and her book, Decolonial Daughter: Letters from a Black Woman to her European Son (Repeater Books 2018). Lesley-Ann Brown is a Brooklyn-born writer, educator and activist who currently lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her parents hail from Trinidad and Tobago. She studied writing and literature at the New School for Social Research and has worked as a freelance journalist for Vibe and The Source. She also created the critically-acclaimed blackgirlonmars blog and is the founder of Bandit Queen Press. Intisar Abioto is an adventurer, dancer, writer, and photographer.  With a research focus on the global African Diaspora, her unique form of story inquiry as…

Continue readingReading with Lesley-Ann Brown, Intisar Abioto, and Jayy Dodd
Free

Tour the William Stafford Archives

Lewis & Clark College 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, Portland, OR, United States

Kim Stafford, Poet Laureate of Oregon, invites interested writers and teachers to a tour of the William Stafford Archives at Lewis & Clark College, hosted by Zach Selley, Archivist. We will see how a writer's papers can be expertly preserved, with finding aids leading to every draft of every poem in Stafford's first two books, the 20,000 pages of daily writing, manuscripts, letters, photographs, films and other resources for learning from the practice of a beloved poet. Contact: Kim Stafford

Free

Portland Correspondence Co-op

IPRC (Independent Publishing Resource Center) 318 SE Main Street #175, Portland, OR, United States

PDXCC is a monthly gathering where participants make and share analog correspondence in the great mail art tradition of Ray Johnson and Anna Banana: art and conversation through the mail. This uniquely democratic, DIY art form incorporates writing, drawing, collage, rubber stamps, faux postage, decorative tape, typewriters – anything goes, as long as it goes through the mail. Hang out, skill share and send the glorious results through the mail. Monthly events hosted by the Portland chapter of the Correspondence Co-op and Niko Courtelis. Basic materials will be on hand (scissors, glue sticks, envelopes’85), but you’re encouraged to bring whatever materials fuel your creative spirit. Free and open to the public, every third Tuesday of the month.

Free

Marilyn Stablein

Broadway Books 1714 NE Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

Marilyn Stablein joins us at 7 pm on Wednesday, September 25th, to read from her recently published travelogue on her journeys through India, Nepal, and Tibet, Houseboat on the Ganges: Letters from India & Nepal: 1966-1972, published by Chin Music. Stablein left her studies in Berkeley in 1966 as a teenager to live in the Far East, before the heft of the counter-culture's spiritual land rush to India and at a time when -- with few exceptions -- most such accounts were written by the occasional male pilgrim. Through letters Stablein wrote to her family in California, which her mother lovingly saved, we also encounter the astonishing independence of a courageous young woman at the forefront of the spiritual revolution of the '60s. The book…

Continue readingMarilyn Stablein
Free

Books to Prisoners Fundraiser

Rose City Book Pub 1329 NE Fremont, Portland, OR, United States

Books to Prisoners will read letters that they have received at our local chapter, as well as letters than have been published in a book the Seattle Chapter recently put together. Copies of the books that Seattle published are already available at Rose City Book Pub and will be available at this event as well. Purchasing them will support the Seattle chapter (our parent chapter), Rose City Book Pub, and our local Portland chapter. This event will also be the last day of the book drive hosted by Rose City Book Pub. Hey there! We have some awesome fundraisers coming up before the year wraps up and we hope you can make it to one or all of them. Our first fundraiser of the Fall/Winter…

Continue readingBooks to Prisoners Fundraiser
Free

Portland Correspondence Co-op

IPRC (Independent Publishing Resource Center) 318 SE Main Street #175, Portland, OR, United States

PDXCC is a monthly gathering where participants make and share analog correspondence in the great mail art tradition of Ray Johnson and Anna Banana: art and conversation through the mail. This uniquely democratic, DIY art form incorporates writing, drawing, collage, rubber stamps, faux postage, decorative tape, typewriters – anything goes, as long as it goes through the mail. Hang out, skill share and send the glorious results through the mail. Monthly events hosted by the Portland chapter of the Correspondence Co-op and Niko Courtelis. Basic materials will be on hand (scissors, glue sticks, envelopes’85), but you’re encouraged to bring whatever materials fuel your creative spirit. Free and open to the public, every third Tuesday of the month

Free

Reading: Shawn Aveningo Sanders: What She Was Wearing

Annie Bloom's Books 7834 SW Capitol Hwy, Portland, OR, United States

Annie Bloom's welcomes Portland poet Shawn Aveningo Sanders to read from What She Was Wearing. How long can you keep a dark secret before you become completely unraveled? In What She Was Wearing, Sanders uses poetry, prose, and letters to tell her #MeToo story—one that has taken over 30 years to reveal. In this collection, Shawn shares her nightmare of being raped at a fraternity toga party, and examines the event from a variety of perspectives, including poems written from the viewpoint of her attackers; the toga she was wearing; homecoming years later; and even the moment she told her college-aged children. As Shawn’s story unfolds, the reader will come to understand how significant the aftermath of rape can be. For decades, she was "triggered"…

Continue readingReading: Shawn Aveningo Sanders: What She Was Wearing
Free

Attic Institute: WINTER Online: The Letter as a Literary Form w Wendy Willis | Feb 1 – Feb 22

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

We will explore the role of the letter in literature--letters from writers; letters between writers; letters as poems and novels and essays. We will investigate how a letter can  clarify and distill both voice and audience and how writing a letter might break open a project at just the right point or kickstart writing that has stalled. This is a generative workshop across genres. Register for this workshop NOTE: To protect everyone during the COVID-19 pandemic, we're offering our workshops via Zoom. All students must first sign up for a free Zoom account. Setting it up is easy. And we can help you with questions, if needed. For each class, you'll receive a Zoom "invitation," from the instructor. Click the link...follow the simple directions about the settings for your microphone and…

Continue readingAttic Institute: WINTER Online: The Letter as a Literary Form w Wendy Willis | Feb 1 – Feb 22
$215 – $242

A conversation with Faris Cassell

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Her award-winning book The Unanswered Letter was the 2020 winner of the Holocaust Award of the National Jewish Book award. In 1939, as the Nazis closed in, Alfred Berger mailed a desperate letter to an American stranger who happened to share his last name. He and his wife, Viennese Jews, had found escape routes for their daughters. But now their money, connections, and emotional energy were nearly exhausted. Alfred begged the American recipient of the letter, “You are surely informed about the situation of all Jews in Central Europe. . . . By pure chance I got your address. . . . My daughter and her husband will go . . . to America. . . . Help us to follow our children. . .…

Continue readingA conversation with Faris Cassell
Free
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