Events
Join us for live events, reading seminars, and writing classes.
Featured Events
April 2020
Youth Events Writing Classes
Online Teen Creative Writing Workshop: Free
Wed, April 8 from 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
This 90-minute creative writing workshop is a laid-back session taught via Zoom that is open to high school students at all skills levels interested in writing. Students will be guided through fun, imaginative writing exercises and flex their creative muscles with plenty of time to chat with fellow writers. Limited to 20 students. All genres. Zoom meeting instructions to be emailed to students by instructor prior to class start. Sold out but still interested in joining a waitlist and/or…
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Writing Classes
Spring 2020 Online: Starting The Story: Short Fiction workshop
Wed, April 15 from 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm
This 4 -week short fiction workshop will focus on generating new work. Participants will read excerpts, share just-written work aloud, and discuss assigned weekly readings together. We will investigate ways to unearth material together and share strategies for maintaining a regular writing practice. Participants will leave will many fragments and several starts for new work.
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Delve Readers Seminars
Delve Online: Still and Unstill: Objects and Landscapes as Human Metaphors
Thu, April 16 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Six-week Seminar: This Delve will explore museum galleries, pages of books, and the realm of memory, discovering commonalities in ways writers and visual artists recreate human experience through their hyper-realistic descriptions of material objects and natural places.
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Delve Readers Seminars
Delve Online: Free 90 minute Discussion on Severance
Fri, April 17 from 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
A free 90-minute Delve discussion on Severance by Ling Ma. Hosted by Hannah Kim. The discussion is limited to 16 people and pre-registration is required. Registered participants will receive information on how to sign on to the Zoom meeting. “ Memories beget memories. Shen fever being a disease of remembering, the fevered are trapped indefinitely in their memories. But what is the difference between the fevered and us? Because I remember too, I remember perfectly. My memories replay, unprompted, on…
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Writing Classes
Spring 2020 Online: April Writer of Color Sunday Morning Workshop
Sun, April 19 from 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
One-day Workshop: Open to writers of color at all levels writing in poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. A variety of prompts will be presented as avenues for generating and sharing new work in an informal setting. You can also bring your own prompts and questions about the writing process, and explore them with the group.
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Delve Readers Seminars Free Events
Delve Online: Free 90 minute Discussion on The Falls by George Saunders
Fri, April 24 from 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
A free 90-minute Delve discussion on The Falls by George Saunders. Hosted by Christopher Zinn. The discussion is limited to 16 people and pre-registration is required. Registered participants will receive information on how to sign on to the Zoom meeting. "Boy, oh boy, could life be a torture. Could life ever force a fellow into a strange, dark place from which he found himself doing graceless, unforgivable things like casting aspersions on his beloved firstborn. If only he could escape…
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Writing Classes
Spring 2020 Online: Strange Stories: Putting the Uncanny in Your Fiction
Mon, April 27
A 4-week online workshop. Looking at stories from writers such as Kelly Link and A.S. Byatt, we will consider how the strange can get us closer to the truth. Plan to draft two stories and discuss one of those stories with the class.
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Delve Readers Seminars
Delve Online: Memory and Ancestors: Paula by Isabel Allende
Tue, April 28 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Two week online Delve seminar. Paula by Isabel Allende is a memoir that accepts the magical and spiritual worlds, and is vibrant with strange lands, bizarre ancestors and rich memories.
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Delve Readers Seminars
Delve Online: A Universal History: Selected Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges
Thu, April 30 from 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
This Delve takes place online with Zoom teleconferencing. Participants will receive instructions for how to log on to the Zoom meeting. Born in 1899, Jorge Luis Borges devoted his life to literature, exploring far beyond the previously-held boundaries of fiction, and this devotion shifted not just our understanding of language, but of our consciousness. As he once said, “This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen." One never knows what they might find within his…
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Youth Events Ticketed Events
2020 Verselandia! City-wide Youth Poetry Slam (Postponed)
Thu, April 30 from 7:00 pm
POSTPONED This event has been postponed until a future date, yet to be determined. If you have already purchased tickets, please hold on to them, as they will be honored on the rescheduled date. We are immensely grateful for your support of Literary Arts, our writers, our youth, and the literary community during this extremely difficult time. Join Literary Arts for the ninth annual Verselandia! city-wide youth poetry slam. Students from local public high schools compete in individual school…
Find out moreMay 2020
Writing Classes
Spring 2020 Online: Short Story Crash Course
Mon, May 4
Draft a short story in four weeks. Each week’s session in this asynchronous online class combines generative writing to help cultivate ideas for plot and character with workshop feedback to assist in developing story arc, structure, and sensory details.
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Writing Classes
Spring 2020 Online: Advanced Memoir
Sun, May 10 from 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Six-week Class: This workshop is for participants deep into writing their memoir. We will spend our time discussing one another's work, looking at tools and practices of the form, reading some sample memoir sections, and helping to boost writing stamina as you strive toward a finished draft.
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Writing Classes
Online: Writing a Novel in 8 Weeks
Mon, May 11 from 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Eight-week Class: This is a boot-camp-style class designed for aspiring novelists who have a clear fictional project in mind and who can commit to a rigorous eight-week schedule of reading and writing.
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Delve Readers Seminars
Delve Online: To the Wedding by John Berger
Tue, May 12
This Delve takes place online with Zoom teleconferencing. Participants will receive instructions for how to log on to the Zoom meeting. "I like quoting ancient verses when the occasion is apt. I remember most of what I hear, and I listen all day but sometimes I do not know how to fit everything together. When this happens I cling to words or phrases which seem to ring true." So begins John Berger's To the Wedding (1995), a modern fable, at…
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Writing Classes
Spring 2020 ONLINE: The Lyric Essay: Braiding the World
Sat, May 16 from 10:00 am - 4:00 pm
The lyric essay is a form which allows many small fragments to be drawn together to create a whole. A lyric essay might hold memories, research, a bit of poetry; it celebrates mixing genres. In this workshop, we will write a series of fragments, and then stitch them together into short essays. Call it a collage, a mosaic or a quilt; you will leave the workshop with a sense of how small pieces of writing can grow into essays.
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Delve Readers Seminars
The Essays of James Baldwin
Wed, May 20 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Six-week Seminar: This Delve will examine the essays of James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the black freedom struggle.
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Writing Classes
Spring Storytelling Intensive
Thu, May 28 from 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
The workshop covers crafting stories using the five-part story arc, delivering your best performance onstage, and a treasure trove of secrets to this satisfying artform. This class culminates in a show at the downtown Literary Arts center, where you’ll tell your story before a live audience.
Find out moreJune 2020
Writing Classes
Creating Better Characters
Sun, June 7 from 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Four-week Class: This workshop will focus on the skills involved in creating and sustaining vibrant and complex characters for both short-and long-form works of fiction. Through a series of in-workshop prompt-based generative exercises and take-home assignments, you will create and flesh out a series of vivid characters.
Find out moreWriting Classes
Summer 2020: Collage Your Writing Project: A New Way Into Your Work
Sat, June 20 from 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
Two-week Class: These are just a tiny sample of how we're going to dig deep and investigate our projects through a visual art form. Come with a big project, come with a story, come with an idea about something you want to begin.
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Ticketed Events
2020 Oregon Book Awards Ceremony (Rescheduled)
Mon, June 22 from 7:30 pm
This event was previously scheduled to take place on April 27. If you had previously purchased tickets for that date, please hang on to them! They will transfer directly to be used for entry on June 22. Join Literary Arts' annual celebration of the state's most accomplished writers in the genres of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, young readers, and graphic literature. Winners will be named at the Oregon Book Awards Ceremony at Portland Center Stage at the Armory. This year’s…
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Writing Classes
Fear and Writing
Sat, June 27 from 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
One-day Workshop: Fear is a natural part of the creative process. Instead of fighting it, work with it. Through stories, mindfulness, and free-writing, you will discover simple, realistic ways to face your fear, get to know it, and use it to propel your writing, rather than hinder it.
Find out moreJuly 2020
Writing Classes
Spring 2020: Mastering Revision
Sun, July 19 from 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
In this four-week class, we will take an editor’s perspective on polishing our work.
The class will be structured as a mini-workshop and we will devote most of our time to peer reading and critique with an emphasis on elements of developmental editing as well as line editing
September 2020
Delve Readers Seminars
William James: Inventing an American Philosophy
Sun, September 6 from 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Six-week Seminar: The philosophy of William James (1842–1910) has had world-wide influence, and yet it is in many ways an essentially American view of the nature and humanity. James was a psychologist by training. This study led him to develop his unique view of human experience, out of which grew his profound concept of the nature of knowledge and reality as the way in which we act in the world and experience life.
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Delve Readers Seminars
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Thu, September 10 from 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Six-week Seminar: Composed in the era of the Second World War, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has become, through various incarnations, one of the best known stories in the world and also part of a larger system of myth and lore--thee so-called "Tolkien universe"--that also includes the Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and countless additional tales in prose and verse.
Find out moreMay 2021
Ticketed Events
2019/2020 Portland Arts & Lectures: Colson Whitehead
Wed, May 5, 2021 from 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
The 2019/2020 Portland Arts & Lectures series will close on May 7 with Colson Whitehead, author of The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, a New York Times best seller which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award.
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