Wed, Jan 7, 2015 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Written over a century apart, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Mario Vargas Llosa’s Dream of the Celt both craft literary worlds that approach the brutalities of colonialism, the extension of personal responsibility and the limits of reason. Partly in the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Kafka and His Precursors,” we’ll consider how Vargas Llosa reframes Conrad through his tale of Roger Casement’s life in the Congo, Amazonia and Ireland. Guide: Kelly Austin has graduate degrees in literature from Claremont,…

Thu, Jan 22, 2015 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Feminism takes on many forms, especially as it filters through the literary canon. Poets in particular use witness, disruption and innovation of form to tell the story of the strength of women’s voices and their lives. This three-night seminar will explore six contemporary poets who intrinsically expand our understanding of feminine landscapes and concerns. We’ll make close readings of Maya Angelou, Adrienne Rich, Maxine Kumin, Lyn Hejinian, Wong May and Patricia Lockwood. Guide: Sara Guest is an editor and poet.…

Tue, Feb 17, 2015 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that readers in pursuit of enjoyment, must be in want of a Jane Austen Delve…. Jane Austen, acclaimed in literary criticism, films, prequels and sequels, spin-offs and mash-ups, has so much to offer that not even a whole year could do her justice, but for the sake of six weeks, the class will investigate the major novels of the writer with a dip into Austen’s Juvenilia and zombies and monsters, and the depiction of…

Mon, Feb 23, 2015 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

T.S. Eliot claimed that “all great poetry dramatic …” and “the greatest drama would always be poetic.” No two modern poet-dramatists exemplify this in their work more than Yeats and Lorca. Arguably the greatest twentieth century poets of the English and Spanish canons, respectively, both were inspired by the local imagination of folklore. Yeats turned to the Irish mythical figures Cuchulain and Emer; Lorca to “the women who live in the villages of Spain.” And each was embroiled in a…

Wed, Feb 25, 2015 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

In four weeks we will enjoy an overview of two decades of Brecht’s provocative work. We’ll begin with Man Equals Man, which takes aim at right-wing nationalists and the very idea of individual personality. Next we’ll read The Threepenny Opera, a musical everyone likes, particularly the very bourgeoisie whom Brecht attacks. We will move on to Mother Courage and Her Children, his anti-war masterpiece, and finish with The Caucasian Chalk Circle, a parable about social injustice. We may even accept Brecht’s challenge to interrupt our…

Thu, Feb 26, 2015 from 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Multnomah County Library's selection for Everybody Reads 2015 is a desperate cry of last-chance hope from the heart of our city’s long-ignored African-American community. In first-person prose critics have called both gut-wrenching and beautiful, Portland native Mitchell Jackson voices the pain, illusion and promise of a mother and son fighting to free themselves from a life of drugs and limited opportunities without losing the love that sustains them. In this two-night seminar, we’ll look at Jackson’s autobiographical debut novel from…

Tue, Mar 31, 2015 from 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

First published in 1854, Walden; or, Life in the Woods became one of the most notable works of the American Transcendentalists and one of the founding documents of American natural history.  What began as a social experiment—Thoreau’s resolve to live simply and reflectively on a plot of land owned by his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson—became a literary project, nothing less than an epic prose poem on the sublimity of nature and the place of humans in that nature.  In this…

Wed, Apr 1, 2015 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Though largely ignored in his lifetime, William Blake has become many things to many people: a prophet, a poet, a pre-feminist, a painter, a Christian (or an anti-Christian), an iconoclast, an abolitionist, a monomaniac, a cosmologist, a writer of children’s songs, a destroyer of poetic form, an entrepreneur, a social critic, a shut-in, a revolutionary, the architect of an elaborate personal mythology, the father of book arts, an aphorist, someone who just didn’t get the Enlightenment, and on and on.…

Sat, Apr 4, 2015 from 10:30 am - 12:30 pm

From her Pulitzer winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, to The Namesake and Unaccustomed Earth, and her most recent novel The Lowland (short listed for the Man Booker Prize), Jhumpa Lahiri examines the complex state of belonging to both India and America for both the first and the second-generation immigrants.  In this seminar we will explore how Lahiri’s literary representation connects the two worlds of the East and the West as her subjects navigate their various states of…

Sun, Aug 16, 2015 from 10:30 am - 12:30 pm

One of the biggest literary mysteries of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has been why (Nelle) Harper Lee never published a follow-up to her first, only, loosely-autobiographical, wildly popular, and beloved novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Earlier this year we learned that not only had a manuscript emerged for a novel written before her classic (and originally rejected by her publisher in the 1950s), but it was going to be published in July of 2015. This announcement was…

Thu, Sep 10, 2015 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

“My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you.” The story contained in Carl Jung’s Red Book is the story of his inner journey from crisis and terror back to his own soul. It is not fiction, but the carefully transcribed chronicles of visions and dreams that he’d…

Mon, Sep 14, 2015 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Participants will embark on a literary tour of travel writing beginning with Herodotus’s tour of Ancient Egypt, moving to Arab travelers in the 10th century, and concluding with the Edo period Japanese poet (and inveterate traveler) Basho. This Delve explores the changing shape of early travel writing, all the while asking how and why cultures imagine, visit, and write about each other. Guide: Bruce Suttmeier is Associate Dean of Faculty at Lewis & Clark College, as well as an Associate…

Wed, Sep 16, 2015 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

When Gabriel García Márquez wrote one of his early novels, Leaf Storm, he was inspired by William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In this Delve, we’ll look at questions of influence and creative transformation. What happens when one master apprentices to another? How do writers learn from each other? And what do the South and South America have in common? We’ll trace just what Macondo owes to Yoknapatawpha County. Guide: Kelly Austin has graduate degrees in literature from Claremont, Cambridge,…

Wed, Oct 14, 2015 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

 Now widely regarded as one of world literature’s greatest poems, Dante’s Divine Comedy has traveled a rough road through literary history. Though popular among Dante’s contemporaries, the work fell out of favor during the Renaissance, and Enlightenment critics found the poem so grotesque and horrifying that Voltaire suggested Dante’s reputation was safe—nobody would bother reading him. However, the Romantics enthusiastically embraced the Divine Comedy, and Victor Hugo went so far as to write that Dante “has constructed within his own…

Mon, Oct 19, 2015 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

With Wordstock just around the corner, we’re excited to take a close look at two of this year’s featured writers — one local and one coming to town for the festival. Both published career-defining novels this summer with strong, eclectic female protagonists. In this two-night seminar, we’ll read Vendela Vida’s The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty for our first session and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children for our second, giving us a chance to compare and contrast two of…

Mon, Nov 2, 2015 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

From Thoreau in his cabin at Walden Pond to Sondheim’s fairytale characters, when one goes “into the woods” he or she is often in search of the ineffable: cures for the ills of modern society or answers to deep existential questions. And in centuries worth of literature what’s found there is nothing more or less profound than our deepest selves. In this seminar we will explore both 19th century and modern authors who go into nature asking big questions—about how…

Tue, Nov 3, 2015 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Virginia Woolf’s playful and passionate novel Orlando is inspired by and dedicated to her lover Vita Sackville-West. We’ll explore her treatment of fiction, biography, literature, and history, and how she plays with time, age, gender, social norms, and language. After seeing Profile Theatre’s production of Sara Ruhl’s Orlando, we’ll discuss the stage adaptation and its relationship to the novel. Note: Tuition includes a ticket to see Profile Theatre’s production of Orlando in mid-November. Guide: Gemma Whelan is the founding Artistic…

Tue, Nov 10, 2015 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

To read the work of the Polish poet and 1996 Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska is to enter a miraculous world, a world where anything can happen, where “the unthinkable can be thought.” Szymborska lived through the horrors of WWII, the Nazi occupation, and the Soviet oppression of Poland, and in poems that are witty, subversive, and brilliantly inventive, she asserts the power of the individual in the face of a dehumanizing modernity. Our goal will be to appreciate and enjoy…

Tue, Jan 5, 2016 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Argentine author Julio Cortázar is considered the master of short narrative within the Latin American 20th century canon, as well as an experimental writer who explored multiple literary genres and their intersections. Hopscotch—Cortázar’s masterpiece—is fundamental to understanding the complex scope of his narrative concerns. Cortázar approaches storytelling and other writings through different forms of experimentation that involve the use of language, the reader’s attention and active participation, wordplay and rhythm, and the architecture of texts. His concept of “snapshot” in short…

Wed, Jan 13, 2016 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

In 1919, the international project of high modernist literature received a singular contribution by an unknown writer from New Orleans, a Midwestern transplant, whose short story cycle set in a fictional small town in rural Ohio provided a model, based upon utilizing the combined advantages of novels and short stories, that later American writers like William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor would follow. Though a portrait of a single community, the stories in Winesburg, Ohio explore distinct sets of characters and…

Mon, Jan 25, 2016 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Mondays, January 25 – February 29, 2016 6:30 – 8:30pm “…one meaning of here is ‘in this world, in this life, on earth. In this place or position, indicating the presence of,’ or in other words, I am here. It also means to hand something to somebody—Here you are. Here, he said to her.”— Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric “The brightest memory,” writes Rankine in Citizen: An American Lyric, “fades faster than the dullest ink.”…

Wed, Feb 24, 2016 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

  Please note that this Delve Readers Seminar is separate from Cristina Henríquez's Everybody Reads presentation on March 8, 2016.   Join us for an in-depth exploration of this year’s Everybody Reads title, The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez. This beautifully written and heartbreaking work of fiction presents readers with a timely and provocative portrait of the struggles and dreams of American immigrants. Henríquez focuses on the intersecting lives of two families in Delaware, one from Mexico and…

Tue, Mar 1, 2016 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is a modern masterpiece. In the wake of the unprecedented destruction of World War I, Mann constructs an extraordinary reflection on modernity, on self, and on literature. Its elusiveness has intrigued generations of audiences since its publication in 1924. Let’s unveil the layers together in a concentrated meditation on what makes this novel a great work of art. Guide: Kelly Austin has graduate degrees in literature from Claremont, Cambridge, and UCLA. Most recently she taught…

Wed, Mar 2, 2016 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

In 2013, Canadian short story writer Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She was raised in rural Ontario, where many of her stories are set, and she is primarily occupied with the injuries that people—often women and girls—suffer and inflict upon others over the course of long, obscure, confusing lives. So what is all the fuss about? How is it that in Munro’s hands the humble short story becomes an agent of illumination, both capacious and intimate, brutal and…

Sat, Mar 5, 2016 from 10:30 am - 12:30 pm

In the late ‘60s, Joan Didion introduced readers to her masterful interweaving of personal narrative and cultural critique in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of nonfiction essays that transformed the genre. More recently, she altered the structure and poetics of memoir through her description of sudden loss and all-consuming grief—and the life that follows—in The Year of Magical Thinking, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In this seminar we will explore how…

Wed, Apr 6, 2016 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the publication of Infinite Jest, Delvers will tackle David Foster Wallace’s inventive, challenging, sobering, funny, and fundamentally human novel about the myriad forms of living a mediated life in the 21st century. For many, Infinite Jest is that pesky, vexing book sitting dusty and untouched for years upon a bookshelf, waiting on an elusive-ethereal “right time” for its reader to clear her schedule. Part of the argument here then, is that even though Infinite…

Sat, Apr 9, 2016 from 10:30 am - 12:30 pm

Mohsin Hamid is the quintessential contemporary migrant writer—born in Pakistan, educated in the U.S., living in the United Kingdom, and dividing his time between these spaces—capturing the reality of living “in-between” language, politics, and multiple global affiliations. Hamid, in short, captures what it means to be a migrant, a foreigner, an outsider, and how these conditions are becoming more common within the globalized literary landscape. In this seminar, we will explore Hamid’s much-acclaimed post-9/11 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (shortlisted for…

Wed, Aug 31, 2016 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Wednesdays, August 31–October 5, 2016 6:30–8:30 p.m. “Since it is universally believed that man is merely what his consciousness knows of itself, he regards himself as harmless and so adds stupidity to iniquity. He does not deny that terrible things have happened and still go on happening, but it is always ‘the others’ who do them…we prefer to localize evil in individual criminals or groups or criminals, while washing our hands in innocence and ignoring the general proclivity to evil.…

Mon, Nov 7, 2016 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Mondays, November 7–December 12, 2016 6:30–8:30 p.m. (6 meetings) A fall evening, when the light fails early and the Portland skies are gray, is the perfect time to pull up a chair with literary friends and dive into the depths of Shakespeare’s most compelling psychological dramas. In Macbeth, Othello, and Titus Andronicus, the most upstanding and heroic men are undone by ambition, jealousy and—in the case of the tragic Titus—misplaced loyalty to those in power. Placed into crucibles of conflict,…

Thu, Jan 12, 2017 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Thursdays, January 12–February 23, 2016 6–8 p.m. (no meeting February 9) Death comes for all of us, and for those we love—often after long bouts of debilitating disease. What role can art and literature play in understanding and enduring these losses? In this seminar, we’ll consider how illness and the end of life are represented across genres, with explorations of Atul Gawande’s nonfiction study Being Mortal; Paul Kalanithi’s memoir When Breath Becomes Air; Scott McPherson’s award-winning play Marvin’s Room; Reviewing the…

Tue, Feb 21, 2017 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Tuesdays, February 21 – April 4 (No Meeting March 28th) 6:30-8:30 p.m. “What I try to capture as a writer is the feeling of being alive, of being awake. Because of this, I’m more apt to follow the wisp of a thought or a half-glimpsed image than chart a sequential series of events. But I absolutely believe in momentum. Momentum is not plot, but it has that same quality of urgency and forward motion.” — Jenny Offill In Jenny Offill’s…

Mon, Feb 27, 2017 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Mondays, February 27–April 3, 2017 6:30–8:30 p.m. James Salter and John Cheever are widely considered to be masters of the short story. Though wildly different in their approaches, both writers are concerned with the forces—external and internal, seen and unseen—that shape our lives. Whether it’s the catty neighbor at a dinner party or some dark force that calls to us in the night, Cheever and Salter recognized that none of us escape the trials of life, no matter how hard…

Sun, Mar 5, 2017 from 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Sundays, March 5–April 9, 2017 4:00–6:00 p.m. Flannery O’Connor died at age 39 with one of the most thoughtful, intriguing, and complex bodies of work in all of American literature. Her obsessions with religion, morality, and the South Gothic are evident in all 32 of her short stories and come into full expression in her posthumously published final collection Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). She said of her work: “The stories are hard, but they are hard because there…

Thu, Apr 6, 2017 from 6:30 pm

Thursdays, April 6–April 20, 2017 6:30–8:30 p.m. (three meetings) What if we lived in a republic of poetry where “the guard at the airport/ will not allow you to leave the country/ until you declaim a poem for her”? What if “this is the year that police revolvers,/ stove-hot, blister the fingers of raging cops”? What if our grief of 9/11 remembered “the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen could squint and almost see their world”? What if your…

Mon, Jan 22, 2018 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

In the years following the success of Claudia Rankine's Citizen, what work is answering the call toward more dynamic, vulnerable, and demanding literary activism? During this Delve seminar, we work towards creating the new 'American lyric': Thief of the Interior by Phillip B. Williams and Of Being Dispersed by Simone White.