Events, Classes, and Seminars

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

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

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”?

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.

Explore the complicated messages about gender, trust, and romantic compatibility in Shakespeare's beloved comedies: Much Ado about Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night.

This Delve will examine stories from different literary genres and periods that all uniquely address the topic of personal freedom in conflict with societal pressures and control over the individual. Our texts will include Margaret Atwood’s much anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream

This seminar is offered exclusively for people of color. Seminar participants will receive one complimentary admission to Literary Arts’ Portland Arts & Lectures event with Min Jin Lee on January 15. “We cannot help but be interested in the stories of people that history pushes aside so thoughtlessly.” ― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko Whether it’s

This Delve explores two pivotal examples of historical fiction in contemporary Turkish literature, Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi (2009) and Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red (2001). Shafak’s novel transports the reader to the golden age of the Anatolian city Konja, the capital of the Seljuk Sultanate in the

With the growing interest in speculative fiction, several writers have worked to deconstruct popular tropes to examine contemporary social issues. Octavia Butler’s modern classic, Kindred, is a science fiction novel that uses time travel to reposition the slave narrative as a speculative work.  The story begins when the main character, Dana, is transported to the

In this six-week seminar, we will explore the works of award-winning contemporary writers Leslie Marmon Silko, Annie Proulx, and Claire Vaye Watkins and how they confront, disrupt, challenge, and complicate the dominant narrative of the West. Leslie Marmon Silko’s now classic novel Ceremony weaves desert landscape and tribal origin stories into a tale of a

Six-week Seminar: This Delve seminar will explore the recent trilogy—Outline, Transit, and Kudos—by Rachel Cusk and contextualize it within the developing literary form of autofiction.

Four-week Seminar This class will focus on Forster’s use of symbolism and allusion, lyrical figurative language, and his keen observations of British life in this early 20th century literary masterpiece.

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.