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!

Delve Readers Seminar: Etgar Keret: Short Fiction as Social Commentary

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Etgar Keret is one of the most important Israeli authors alive today. He has mastered the genre of short fiction with a witticism that uses humor and farce to make readers step outside of their comfort zone and view things from the perspective of the absurd. In doing that, Keret brings a fresh, comical, and many times unsettling view of our family and social relationships. His view is a keen critique of the human condition in general and of the paradoxes of the everyday reality in Israel. In this 3-session Delve seminar we’ll discuss his book Suddenly a Knock on the Door (2012). Access Program We want our writing classes and Delves to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that…

$125

Delve Readers Seminar: “First – Poets – Then the Sun”: Emily Dickinson’s Craft, Life, and Legacy

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Emily Dickinson has achieved the rarest of distinctions for a nineteenth-century poet (and a female one at that): lasting, evolving fame. Having escaped the confines of academic study and school syllabi, Dickinson has become a popular figure beloved by a wide and varied readership and the subject of films, television programs, and fan clubs. She is acknowledged not only as an important American poet, but as one of the greatest poets of any time and place. Dickinson understands the power and the magic of words and knows how to breathe life into metaphor. Her writing is associative and allusive, frequently enigmatic or ambiguous, and always peculiarly original. Poetry was for her not just a craft or a vocation (though it was certainly both of these),…

$340

FALL :: A (Virtual) Generative Creative Lab :: Exhausting Metaphor— begins September 18th

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Fall :: A Generative Creative Lab :: Exhausting Metaphor Collaboration Leader: Domi Shoemaker, alongside weekly videos featuring Domi and Lidia Yuknavitch in conversation When: Begins September 18th Where: Videos are hosted on our site—you’ll receive a link to one each week on Sundays, and then have access to them always. Domi will host a Zoom meeting every Monday from 5:30-7:30PM PST. Meeting dates: September 19th, September 26th, October 3rd & October 10th Cost: $250—payment plans are available. Please contact Daniel at registration@corporealwriting.com. Scholarships are also available—Apply Here. Seven years ago (!!!) Corporeal Writing hosted its first ever seasonal lab—and we started with Fall. It’s an exciting time for us all as we cozy back into this beautiful season ripe with metaphors. Color. Changes in light,…

$250

Delve Readers Seminar: Henri Bergson and the Revolution in Time

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

In 1889 Henri Bergson’s (1858-1941) bestseller Time and Free Will inaugurated a vast revolution of the understanding of time in world philosophy that was a keystone in the literature, art, and philosophy of the modern world. After an eclipse of his reputation for some decades, Bergson’s ideas have returned as one of the most powerful forces in the renewal of our attitudes toward nature and the cosmos today. We will read his startlingly elegant, clear, and persuasive expositions of these appealing concepts in Time and Free Will, Creative Evolution, and other works. We will also explore the thought of the scientists and philosophers who have continued to develop his seminal insights. In-Person Seminar Note: This seminar meets in-person at Literary Arts, 925 SW Washington. Access…

$245

Delve Readers Seminar: Delve for Writers: Joan Didion and Durga Chew-Bose

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Delve for Writers is a new, occasional Delve series that offers seminars that focus on close readings of narrative, form, and stylistic choices that writers can incorporate into their own writing practice. Creative nonfiction is the perfect place to find voice, ideas and perspective – and nobody does it better Joan Didion and contemporary groundbreaker Durga Chew-Bose, whose collection Too Much and Not the Mood is a wonderful mashup of what Didion has always done so well, mixing cultural criticism and memoir in think-pieces that inspire and challenge us. In this Delve for Writers, we’ll look carefully at the craft of what we’ve read with close readings of style, form, mechanics, and conceptual and narrative choices. This seminar will focus on what we can learn…

$245

PUBLISHING: Literary Agent Rayhané Sanders—Seminar + Consultations—Oct 7th-9th

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

We have the great privilege of hosting Rayhané Sanders, literary agent at Massie and McQuilkin, for a 90-minute webinar on Publishing (with ample opportunity for Q&A) on Saturday October 8th, 2022, from 11:00AM to 12:30PM Pacific. Yes, Rayhané represents our very own Lidia Yuknavitch.) In addition to the seminar, Ms. Sanders is taking on twenty private manuscript consultations. Over the course of a 20-minute meeting, she will give you feedback from an agent’s point of view on the first 25 pages of your manuscript, submitted ahead of time. (Please note, Ms. Sanders comes from New York publishing, and is very encouraging but also very direct!) The deadline for submitting your 25 pages will be September 15th, and you’ll be provided with specific formatting guidelines. Consultations will…

$150 – $375

Delve Readers Seminar: Siri Hustvedt: A Woman’s View

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Winner of the 2019 Princesa de Asturias Award for Literature, Siri Hustvedt has an especially acute way of looking at the world around her. A feminist and an activist for democracy, Hustvedt has a visual and profound way of seeing the world around her, which is reflected in her writing’s subjectivity. This attentive observation allows her to develop complex characters and relations, with a close intimacy between them and with the reader. In this six-week seminar, we will read two of Husvedt novels—one early in her career and another closer to our time: The Blindfold and Memories of the Future. We may also add one or two of her essays to connect her theoretical ideas with her fictional work. As stated by the jury in…

$245

Delve Readers Seminar: Orhan Pamuk’s Nights of Plague: Fairy-tale, History, Allegory

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Explore Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, Nights of Plague, an epic narrative which depicts the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the late Ottoman era during the reign of the despotic Sultan Abdülhamid II. Presented as an historical novel, Nights of Plague’s diseased universe resonates with our current world, hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Pamuk’s signature style manifests itself through multiple narrative mediations, leading to an open-ended representation of history. Published in the original in 2021, the English translation of Nights of Plague is scheduled to appear in early October 2022. Texts Nights of Plague, Orhan Pamuk. translated by Ekin Oklap. Penguin-Randomhouse. October 4, 2022. The book can be preordered. It will be also available in Ebook and Audiobook formats. Access Program We want our writing…

$245

Delve Readers Seminar: An Intensive Study of Totality: Jorge Luis Borges

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

The Argentine genius Jorge Luis Borges explored every facet of the word during his lifetime of writing. From sonnets about dream tigers to stories about detectives in Buenos Aires to essays on the collapse of time, Borges oeuvre reads as if limitless, always imbuing the reader with a sense of total expansion. This seminar will draw from his Collected Fictions, Selected Poems, Selected Non-fiction in an attempt to construct (& deconstruct) the scope of one of the most boundless authors of the 20th century. Texts: Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges Selected Non-fictions by Jorge Luis Borges Access Program We want our classes to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure…

$245

Delve Readers Seminar: The Art of Memory: Autofiction

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

“Fiction isn’t memory,” writes Jane Gardam, “but memory is fiction.” Autofiction embodies this view, blending truth and fiction to produce stories rooted in the writer’s life, but filtered through the imagination. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and Saša Stanišić’s Where You Come From are compelling examples of the genre. To the Lighthouse is the story of the Ramsay family’s holiday on the Isle of Skye. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is composed as a letter from a young man to his mother, immigrants to the US from Vietnam. Through the story of their relationship, Vuong asks questions about race, violence, masculinity, addiction, and love. Bosnian-German writer Saša Stanišić is little known in the US but deserves a wider…

$245