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.
Yallah! Muslims Write is a three month workshop by and for self-identifying Muslim artists to join together in a joyful, supportive, and courageous space to share writing and foster community. It runs July-September.
Write, mingle, and be merry - The Literary Arts Bookstore and Cafe are excited to welcome local authors from the LGBTQ+ community for an evening of co-writing and and delicious
Join us for a night of readings from this year's Stafford Challenge Anthology! About The Stafford Challenge The Stafford Challenge is a yearlong international poetry project inspired by the daily
Questions about applying to this year's Oregon Literary Fellowships? Join us at this information session! Drop in any time between 12:30 and 2:00 p.m.
Hosted by Kyle Yoshioka and Jessica Meza-Torres, this monthly reading series is intended to prioritize the safety, creativity, and stories of Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color. The featured readers for
This class is designed for nonfiction writers. Essayists, memoirists, and writers of literary reportage are all welcome. Please come with a complete early draft of a project — maybe it’s something fresh, or maybe it’s simply a piece on which you feel a bit stalled. By the end of the month, writers will emerge with a new set of revision strategies, and a clear path forward for revising their work-in-progress.
Here is an opportunity to share or listen to one page of work in progress from talented writers from everywhere. Come with a single page of work and sign up to read—or come to listen and prepare to be inspired.
Deadline to apply for 2026 Oregon Literary Fellowships is Friday, August 8, 2025.
Join two accomplished storytellers, Mark Roberts, whose work spans the stage to screen with credits including Mike and Molly, Two and a Half Men, as well as his acclaimed plays, and Jon Raymond, known for his novels, teleplays and screenplays including Mildred Pierce, Meek’s Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy, for an in-depth conversation on the art of crafting stories for both screen and stage.
This is a class to take if you’re new to writing picture books, if you’re curious about writing them, but don’t know quite where to start, or even if you’ve been writing for a while, but feel like you still have some unanswered questions.
Ideal for writers of short fiction and all levels, this fast-paced class will work on two drafts of the same short story to refine and review all the elements of craft, including character, tone, voice, and subtext from several different perspectives.
In this workshop, we will talk about all the ways a dummy can help your picture book writing craft, and then we’ll spend timing making them. You can use your own manuscript or an example text.
Over the four weeks of this course, we’ll work to demystify the submission process. We’ll discuss how to find publications you’re excited to send your work to, set up personalized submission goals and to-do lists, and organize our own systems for keeping track of our submissions.
Slamlandia is a poetry open mic and slam that meets every month at Literary Arts, on the third Thursday. This mic provides a creative, fun, and welcoming space for all literary
Literary Arts welcomes Mariah Rigg to celebrate her debut collection of short stories, Extinction Capital of the World. About the book Magnetic, haunting, and tender, Extinction Capital of the World
Join us for a very special interactive event with local author Holly Capelle for her new cook book, Preserving the Seasons. About the book: Clear instructions for preserving the seasons’
This monthly reading series is intended to prioritize the safety, creativity, and stories of Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color. Come listen to our featured readers, or sign
While better known for her extraordinarily imaginative paintings, the British-born Mexican artist Leonora Carrington was also a dazzling writer, conjuring stories that alchemically transform the banal and infuse the imagination
Join us for a special evening as local theatre collective Theatre Diaspora presents a staged reading of Isabel, a play by reid tang. Isabel It's the staircase in the woods
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.
While this course will predominantly take the form of a fiction workshop, it will also feature discussions of published works to interrogate the “absolutes” that govern the art of fiction, as well as to equip students to appreciate how they might bend if not break these rules in service of the stories that they hope to tell.
In this workshop we will read braided essays by contemporaries such as Terese Marie Mailhot, Kyo Maclear, Rebecca Solnit and Melissa Matthewson who show that the landscapes we traverse are the exact right starting point to explore our own stories and when we braid our important places with our own experience, the result can be an extraordinary juxtaposition, leaving behind an unimaginable deer trail for others to follow. We will spend time discussing the writing of others, exploring our own personal landscapes, and working toward a complete braided personal essay by the end.
Calling all graphic novel readers! Join us in welcoming Johanna Taylor to discuss her latest, The Ghostkeeper. About the book: Dorian Leith can see ghosts. Not only that, he listens
You have a great idea—but is it ready to become a book? In this interactive workshop, you’ll refine your nonfiction concept and clarify what your book is really about, who it's for, and how it stands out.
In this generative and craft-focused class, we’ll explore how close reading can unlock our own voice. We’ll study excerpts from your favorite authors, examine sentence structure, tone, rhythm, and emotional pacing, and organize our findings into a living document you can return to again and again.
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.
The Bostonians is Henry James’s most explicitly American novel—and not only because the characters spend their time arguing about politics and gender. Set in the wake of the U.S. Civil War, the book explores loyalty and love, fanaticism and friendship, family feuds and Boston marriages.
In Western literature, scholars often reduce supernatural fiction to pulp, pop, or entertaining"fluff," which is somehow less noteworthy than other works of literature. Yet horror fiction often uses supernatural tropes of haunting and monstrosity to depict oppression, marginalized identities, gender, and "madness."
Through conversation and writing, we can consider how these modern and postmodern feminist authors expand Western literature and the gothic tradition through provocative first-person narratives.
This course for dedicated writers is designed to guide you through the writing and/or revising of your novel. It runs from September through May.
Incite: Queer Writers Read is a curated, bimonthly reading series for Queer writers. Incite’s hope is to create conversation, connection, and greater understanding both within the Queer community and with
This six-month class is designed for memoirists in the early to mid stages of their memoir writing journey looking for consistent, in-depth feedback on their work. We will study four different memoirs in this class, along with several excerpts and essays.
This course for dedicated writers is designed to guide you through the writing and/or revising of your novel. It runs from September through May.
The Golden Ass is an outsider’s portrait of life in the Roman Empire, which is both shockingly familiar and alsi truly strange. It is the only complete surviving novel from Greco-Roman antiquity,
A rich young Roman named Lucius goes to the annual Festival of Laughter in a town in Thessaly and meets a witch. She mistakenly turns him into a donkey. On his travels to find the plant with the magic antidote that will restore his humanity, he experiences his society from the animal's point of view.
This course is a guide to the spirit and ethos of Oulipo and their collaborative experimental writing approach, designed to free the mind through constraint.
Each session will offer generative prompts and experimental forms for writers to respond to. No prior knowledge or skills required other than a sense of curiosity and a desire to test, try, and experiment with writing.
This 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. There will be an opportunity to submit either one or two short excerpts of your writing (can be from a short story or novel-in-progress) to be workshopped during the class.
During this eight-week course we’ll read and discuss genres and craft elements like fabulism, magical realism, absurdity, unreliable narrators, trick mirror logic, and more. Through generative prompts and constructive feedback, we’ll begin to craft our own acutely surreal realities. Expect to leave with several fresh starts to weird and wonderful works.
This weekend course is for all levels of writers and readers. We will read and discuss excerpts from contemporary authors who write the self. Students will spend about an hour in each class working on writing the self, based on prompts.
This eight-week memoir workshop teaches writers how to transform personal experiences into compelling scenes that captivate readers. Students will learn to craft authentic moments from memory, weave reflection seamlessly into narrative, and build scenes that invite readers into their lived experiences while revealing deeper emotional truths.
A generative writing workshop to create material from a variety of prompts, models, and methods. We will build community with each other, learn some revision hacks, share feedback, and come away from the weekend intensive with plenty more to think about and develop in our writing practice.
This eight-week class is focused on helping each writer push one story, essay, or poem through the drafting and revision stages and over the finish line. We’ll meet weekly to share accountability updates, read some work-in-progress with the group, set or revise goals for your weekly writing practice, and share successes and challenges with fellow writers. You’ll also learn strategies for keeping focused and staying on track. All genres welcome.
Visual poetry is as expansive as it is playful which can complement any writer’s practice. 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 this focused workshop, you’ll learn the key components of a compelling book proposal—from crafting a powerful overview and defining your audience to identifying comps and writing a sample chapter that shines. Ideal for nonfiction writers with a solid book concept who are pursuing traditional publishing and want to create a professional, pitch-ready proposal.
In this six-week class, using 2024’s Best American Short Stories as our guide, we’ll explore a selection of contemporary fiction—deemed this year’s best—with an eye to steal from them. This year’s guest editor, Lauren Groff, writes that these stories “buzz with their own strange logic.” We’ll examine the inner workings of these stories to decipher some of that strange logic, but more pointedly, we’ll focus each week on one technique, discuss how the author is achieving a desired effect, and practice employing it in our own writing.
Throughout this eight week course, students will look at the many ways in which humans are connected to our natural surroundings, both urban and remote. Weather, soil, plants, wildlife, changing systems, and more will all be explored. By delving into the inherent close relationship humans have with the natural world, each student’s path to writing their own stories using the natural world as scaffolding will emerge.
Join us in celebrating Jade Chang's latest novel, What a Time to Be Alive! About the book: A deeply moving and often hilarious novel following a woman who becomes an internet folk hero in the
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