In-person Writing Classes
Writing in the Child’s Voice
This course will take a close look how to effectively use the child narrator when writing personal narrative or fiction. Using textual examples, we’ll look at what kinds of situations
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Events, Classes, and Seminars
Our events, classes, and seminars bring the community together to hear, learn, and discuss the most compelling issues and ideas of our day. We hope you will join us in our community space and bookstore at 716 SE Grand Avenue, Portland, OR, online, and at partnering venues across Portland and Oregon.
In-person Writing Classes
Autofiction Weekend Intensive
During this weekend autofiction intensive, we will take a deep dive into the unique art of autofiction. Autofiction combines the disciplines of autobiography and fiction. It can be written like
In-person Writing Classes
Pushing Through: Carrying Your Manuscript Over the Finish Line
This six-week course is designed to help students finish a draft of a fiction or non-fiction manuscript. We'll read craft essays about drafting a book, set aside time each week
In-person Writing Classes
EVERYBODY DOES IT: WRITING ABOUT WORK
In his 1974 book, Working, Studs Terkel begins by saying, “This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body.”
In-person Writing Classes
Where Do I Go From Here: Writing the Novel
This weekend intensive is designed for writers who have written at least the first two chapters of a novel. Limited to 8 students, each participant will have their work discussed,
In-person Poetry Portland Book Festival Writing Class Writing Classes
Revising Poems
Bring one or two of your most promising poems-in-process, and we will work through ways to make them more like what they want to be. This will not be a critique session, but a workshop in generative revision.
In-person Portland Book Festival Writing Class Youth Events
Writing Poetry From Art (Grades 9-12)
In this workshop, we’ll discover parallels between visual and written art, and use pieces in the museum collection to inspire poetry.
In-person Portland Book Festival Writing Class Youth Events
Ekphrastic Worldbuilding (Grades 9-12)
In this workshop, we'll learn how to build a fictional world and add texture to imaginary settings.
In-person Portland Book Festival Writing Class Youth Events
Narrative and Social Justice Storytelling (Grades 9-12)
In this workshop, we’ll learn journalistic storytelling techniques and explore how they can be used to cover social justice stories.
In-person Portland Book Festival Writing Class Writing Classes
The Unique Art of Autofiction
This is a three-hour, one-day intensive discussion on the unique genre of autofiction. This course will provide insight into the many nuances of autofiction, or autobiographical fiction. This “genre” involves writing that is based on real life experiences, but also utilizes fictional literary devices, making it a very unique form.
In-person Writing Classes
Finders, Keepers: Reclaiming Agency through Erasure and Collage
The hybrid genre of erasure and collage often exists between and because of two different mediums: text and image. Through obscuring a pre-existing text using various methods, an original work
In-person Writing Classes
A Wrinkle in Time: How to Manage Chronology
One of the central struggles in storytelling is that human beings are, in essence, time travelers. We live in the past of our memories and the future of our hopes. Thus, when we tell stories, we often shuttle around in time. This can be exciting, but more often it winds up confusing the reader, and
In-person Writing Classes
How to Write Riveting Scenes
The key to any unforgettable work of prose resides in the quality of its scenes. In this class, we’ll look at some of the best scenes ever written and investigate what it takes to write a scene that keeps readers on the edges of their seats. We’ll also discuss how structuring scenes can create a
In-person Writing Classes
Grief Work: Honoring Sorrow as a Generating Motor
Writers can't decide what to do with grief. It has wrongly been called too sentimental or too cold. Too traumatic or too unoriginal. But regardless of the current writerly opinion
In-person Writing Classes
WEIRDING THE EVERY DAY
Being alive is really a very strange endeavor. Bizarre coincidences, déjà vu, the fallibility of our own memory and perceptions, and inexplicable, seemingly magical occurrences are perhaps all more commonplace
In-person Writing Classes
Autofiction Weekend Intensive
During this weekend autofiction intensive, we will take a deep dive into the unique art of autofiction. Autofiction combines the disciplines of autobiography and fiction. It can be written like
In-person Writing Classes
Get Writing: Unblocking Writer’s Block
Sometimes we become so focused on productivity or “doing it right” that we stifle our creativity. In this class we’ll focus on one of the hardest parts of writing: writing.
In-person WINTER 2025 Writing Classes
Get Writing: Unblocking Writer’s Block
Sometimes we become so focused on productivity or “doing it right” that we stifle our creativity. In this class we’ll focus on one of the hardest parts of writing: writing.
Each week we’ll use new prompts and guided activities to inspire new creation. We’ll look at the work of writers we admire and ask: how’d they do that? As they say, writing is a muscle, and no matter what your experience level, you have to continually exercise that muscle and practice new tools to keep your writing nimble and moving.
Through a variety of prompts, we’ll create new work every week and practice tools for expanding existing projects and unblocking writer’s block.
In-person Writing Classes
SEE IT TO BELIEVE IT: VISUAL POETRY
Over the course of this six-week workshop, writers can expect to generate four new poetry experiments, one complete visual poetry project, and leave the workshop with a working knowledge of this exciting genre.
In-person WINTER 2025 Writing Classes
The Long Short Story
Explore a survey of long fiction pieces, and examine the many threads that hold them together. We will discuss the state of longform writing in today’s literary landscape, and use generative prompts and in-class writing time to liberate ourselves from word counts in order to write toward whatever length our stories need to be. Students will finish the course with the beginnings of at least one longer piece of prose.
In-person WINTER 2025 Writing Classes
Write the Self: Weekend Intensive
This weekend course is for all levels of writers and readers.
We will read and discuss excerpts from contemporary authors who write the self (or write from the basis of personal experience) such as Annie Erneaux, Sarah Manguso, Leslie Jamison, Rachel Cusk, Edouard Louis, Garth Greenwell, Claudia Rankine and others, in addition to discussing the craft of writing on self.
In-person WINTER 2025 Writing Classes
THE ART OF FICTION
As John Gardner remarks in The Art of Fiction, “What the beginning writer ordinarily wants is a set of rules on what to do and what not to do in writing fiction.” And while general rules do exist, Gardner observes that such “supposed aesthetic absolutes prove relative under pressure. They’re laws, but they slip,” he
In-person WINTER 2025 Writing Classes
Poem or Picture Book: Writing the Lyrical Children’s Book
Do you write poetry and wonder if you could turn your poems into picture books? Do you write picture books and want to make them more poetic? Explore the wavy grey line between poem and lyrical picture book.
In this collaborative workshop, we’ll study some masters of the lyrical picture book, look at some new picture books coming out by well-known poets, and explore the roles of language, perspective, page turns and “illustratable moments” in separating these two closely related crafts.
Participants will come away with tools to help their picture book texts read more lyrically, as well as tips to help an editor or agent see the visual potential in your poetry.
In-person WINTER 2025 Writing Classes
Nature Writing: Digging Deep
This course invites students to dig deep, observe the world around them, slow down, bask in the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, and discover how their own unique stories can spring from nature.
By reading great writing and engaging with the natural world from a personal standpoint, students will develop their understanding of ecology and our human connection to it as a species.
In-person Writing Classes
Resources for Refining Your Creative Writing Practice
This four-week class offers an in-depth exploration of how to optimize writing habits and routines for productivity and mental health. This class will have two main components. The first component will be a review of the resources available to writers who wish to refine their creative practices. The second component will be in-class writing, reflection, and discussion exercises. These exercises will help us hone our creative practices to feel happy and productive throughout our most arduous creative undertakings. Subjects will include: managing goals and deadlines; when, how, and who to ask for feedback; writing alone vs. working together. After four weeks, students will have composed a clear, concise, personalized work plan, including goals, routines, resources, and assigned reading.
In-person WINTER 2025 Writing Classes
The Art of Brevity: Crafting Short-short Stories
In flash fiction, the whole is a part and the part is a whole. The form forces the writer to question each word, to reckon with Flaubert’s mot juste, and move a story by hints and implications. Flash stories are built through gaps as much as the connective tissue of words, so what’s left out of a story is often more important than what’s included.
In-person WINTER 2025 Writing Classes
Grief Spiral: Writing Elegies Along a Curved Path
In this two-part workshop, we’ll explore elegies, or poems of lament, through the lens of spirals. We can use these curved paths to structure poems, such as through recurring phrases or imagery, and to relax the brain while creating literary responses in conversation with death, loss, and transformation.
In-person Spring 2025 Writing Classes
Get Writing: Unblocking Writer’s Block
Each week we’ll use new prompts and guided activities to inspire new creation. We’ll look at the work of writers we admire and ask: how’d they do that? As they say, writing is a muscle, and no matter what your experience level, you have to continually exercise that muscle and practice new tools to keep your writing nimble and moving.
In-person Spring 2025 Writing Classes
Short Story Generator
Students can work on one or two stories in greater depth, or come away with a handful of starts to many different stories. For beginner and intermediate writers looking to get their work off the ground in a supportive, creative community.
In-person Poetry Writing Classes
The Things Themselves: Poetry
The title of this workshop is a line from a Lucille Clifton poem. We’ll use this poem and a range of others as lenses to consider the ways our cultural and ecological moment is an invitation to widened wonder and love. This workshop is open to everyone. No prior experience with writing or reading poetry is needed or expected. We will talk, read, and write together
Free Events In-person Spring 2025 Writing Classes
How to Start a Story: Three Purposeful Prompts to Serve Your Writing
In this 1-hour workshop, participants will review three different types of writing prompts and explore how each of these types of prompts can serve their writing. Participants will then choose the prompt that speaks to them and complete a short writing exercise, with room to share reflections at the end.
In-person Writing Classes
Mapping Your Nonfiction Book: Outlining Your Idea from Start to Finish
This class series focuses on developing a clear roadmap for memoirs, self-help books, or narrative nonfiction. Through hands-on exercises, participants will outline their projects, identify key themes, and learn techniques for organizing research and storytelling.
In-person Writing Classes
Where Do I Go From Here: Writing the Novel
This weekend intensive is designed for writers who have written at least the first two chapters of a novel. Limited to 8 students, each participant will have their work discussed, with feedback from the class and the instructor. Discussions will be focused on character development and plot and how to chart the next steps with your novel.
In-person Writing Classes
Write with Emily
Join novelist Emily Chenoweth for an afternoon of writing and community. Participants will spend time writing to a variety of prompts, sharing their work with classmates, and learning tips and
In-person Writing Classes
Advanced Fiction Workshop Intensive
In this six-week, workshop-meets-craft class, we'll dissect three different short stories and figure out: How did the writer do that? We’ll then apply some of those same literary tools to your own stories. This class for writers with some experience includes a workshop component.
In-person Summer 2025 Writing Classes
Creative Clarity, Focus and Momentum
Learn creative process skills for sticking with a writing project from initial idea to completion. If you dream of writing that novel or finishing that poem, but you feel scattered, overwhelmed, or stuck with many beginnings but no finished product, this workshop will offer you gentle and effective ways to work through creative blocks so you can finally share your creative expression with your readers.
In-person Summer 2025 Writing Classes
Experiments in Fiction
In this six-week generative course we will read, watch, and listen to a wide range of sources—from traditional short stories to anonymous online forum posts, podcast excerpts, and short videos of people arguing at home or in the street. Each week we’ll discuss what story lives inside our experimental source, and will then come up with a prompt based on that source together.
In-person Summer 2025 Writing Classes
Leading with Suspense: writing the unputdownable story
In this eight-week workshop, we will focus on leading with suspense to evoke curiosity and engagement. In our first class, we’ll discuss the craft of making big and little promises to the reader and fulfilling them in fresh but satisfying ways. Sterling examples of engaging openings from the canon will provide fodder for our discussion of how to captivate a reader. In our subsequent classes, we’ll workshop two student submissions per each class.
In-person Summer 2025 Writing Classes
PUTTING YOUR CREATIVITY FIRST
Putting Your Creativity first will feature a talk, writing prompts and group write-along, followed by a Q&A on the creative process, writing community, and business of art.
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Literary Arts716 SE Grand Ave
Portland, Oregon 97214
- 503.227.2583
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- la@literary-arts.org
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