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!

First Friday Art and Poetry with Scott Poole

Birdhouse Books 1001 Main Street, Vancouver, WA, United States

Join us in launching the third installment of Scott Poole's Paintings and Poetry chapbook series! THE CLOUDS WILL SAVE YOU NOW is the new *limited edition* art book of 20 poems and 20 paintings from Vancouver artist and writer Scott Poole. The event, which will include a launch reception, refreshments, a reading, and original art from Scott, will be held at Birdhouse Books on October 7th at 7pm.

Free

PSU Lit Mic

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

PSU Lit Mic is always lit. Hosted by the delightful and compelling duo Jordan and Grace. You don’t need to be affiliated with PSU to participate. You wrote it, you read it.

Free

Cultivating a Sustainable Writing Practice

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This workshop is offered via Zoom PST Register here Cultivating a Sustainable Writing Practice Our practice—how we labor as writers—is highly personal. When we create a writing habit, it helps to consider our individual creative processes, life priorities, writing goals, and all the ways that we get in the way of our own writing. How we labor is also bound up in cultural notions of productivity and success that can often kill the creative drive. It can be hard to consistently carve out time in order to cultivate the type of patient, inner stillness required to write, but it is possible. Necessary, even. In this supportive workshop, we will talk about how to design a sustainable writing practice that aligns with your creative process, priorities…

$15 – $75

Joe Safdie, Patrick Dunagan, & Charles Alexander (Spare Room Reading)

Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660, Portland, OR, United States

Door opens 7:00 pm, reading at 7:30 pm No late entry Admission free Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660 Covid precautions: Proof of vaccination and masks required =============================================================== Joe Safdie’s last two books from Spuyten Duyvil Press are The Oregon Trail (2021) and, this year, the hybrid chapbook The Secular Divine. Next year a book of his selected essays, Poetry and Heresy, will be published by MadHat Press. He moved to Portland in 2019 and has been studying the language of trees. Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works at Gleeson Library for the University of San Francisco. A graduate of the Poetics program from the now-defunct New College of California, he recently edited David Meltzer's Rock Tao (Lithic Press) and Roots…

Free

Creative Writing & Chill

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

*This event is in-person. Masks and proof of vaccination is required Register here Writing and chill: a high vibe, on the fly, structure free writing space for all-ages (youth centered). Come generate, share and get support! Creative prompts and writing materials provided. Stay tuned for an Open Mic Night later in October!

Free

Charles Goodrich Poetry Reading

Ledding Library of Milwaukie 10660 SE 21st Avenue, Milwaukie, OR, United States

The 16th season of the Milwaukie Poetry Series continues on October 12 at 6pm with a live reading at the library by poet Charles Goodrich. Seating limited to 50. Charles Goodrich’s new book of poems, Watering the Rhubarb, is just out from Flowstone Press. Previous books include the poetry collections  A Scripture of Crows; Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden; and Insects of South Corvallis, along with a collection of essays, The Practice of Home, and two co-edited anthologies, Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest and In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens. Following a long career as a professional gardener and a decade working with the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word at Oregon State University, Charles writes and gardens near the…

Free

Stranged Writing Release Reading

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

The Gravity of the Thing celebrates the release of its first anthology, Stranged Writing: A Literary Taxonomy (bit.ly/3d6z94O) on October 13th. Join us at The Stacks Coffeehouse in Portland, Oregon to hear contributors Joshua James Amberson, Alex Behr, Lucie Bonvalet, Benjamin Kessler, Matt Rebholz, and Eli Ronick read their experimental prose, poetry, and cross-genre works. The event is free to attend, and food, drinks, and Stranged Writing will be available for purchase. About the collection: Stranged Writing is an anthology of defamiliarized creative writing curated according to biological taxonomy (species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, and domain) using word count. Each hardcover edition includes a screen-printed dust jacket that transforms into unique literary organisms or book sculptures, the goal being a dimensional and tactile…

Free

Pushpins & Portals: Experimenting with Short Forms

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This workshop is virtual, PST Register here Pushpins & Portals: Experimenting with Short Forms In this 6-week class, we will experiment with short form creative writing. Our focus—whether it’s flash fiction, lyric essay, prose poetry, or hybrid—will be on the art of compression. Each week, participants will be given a writing exercise, a short reading, and two workshop submissions from their peers. Class time will include workshop as well as discussion of readings and craft. Our workshop will be guided by observations, questions, and possibilities. We will be thinking less about how to “fix” a piece of writing and more about what we see, our curiosities, and how to recognize hidden opportunities. Each participant will receive feedback from the instructor and from the other participants.…

$80 – $200

BIPOC Writing Workshop: October

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Searching for a space to create new work with fellow BIPOC writers? This two-hour workshop meets on Zoom. A variety of prompts will be presented as avenues for generating and sharing new work in an informal setting. Open to BIPOC writers at all levels writing in poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. Access Program We want our writing classes and Delves to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class and Delve tuitions at a reduced rate. The access program for writing classes covers 60% of the class tuition. Most writing classes have at least one access spot available. Please apply here for access rate tuition. Contact Susan Moore at…

$20