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 this workshop we will read poets like Claire Wahmanholm, Tommy Pico, Emma Bolden, Sarah Marcus, and Richard Siken among others, and write our own poems against decay and toward joy. This is a generative workshop.
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.
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, on the third Thursday. This mic provides a creative, fun, and welcoming space for all literary communities in
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
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.
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.
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.
uring 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 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.
Psychology wouldn’t be what it is today if it weren’t for Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung. Ever curious about the depths and machinations of the psyche, he developed an intellectual life and therapeutic practice based in a profound abiding with the human soul. In his singular memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections, written in his later years, we’re treated to a panoply of reminisces, revelations, and personal myths.
Readers generally considered The Plague, published in 1947 (and a large factor in Camus receiving the Nobel Prize for literature a decade later), to be a superior metaphorical novel about
Literary Arts is pleased to present Elizabeth Gilbert as the first speaker of the 2025-26 Portland Arts & Lectures series. Click here to view the full lineup. Please note: a subscription to the entire 2025-26 Portland Arts & Lectures series is required to attend this event.
Learn the craft of narrative writing. Participants will learn to write perceptively – deploying their five senses and delving into feelings as they write. They will learn how to leverage narrative distance, writing between their ideas and the immediacy of their experiences to see how distance can affect the emotional weight of the work. They will learn how to use metaphors as a means of discovery, to harness verbs, and to modify sentences for focus and impact.
This six-week seminar is designed for writers interested in doing deep reads of contemporary literature from a craft perspective. We will dissect the structure and language from five very different short stories so that we can apply some of the same tools these writers use in their work to our own. Delve for Writers is an occasional series of seminars designed to help writers improve their craft through close readings of contemporary poetry and prose.
Since moving into our new permanent headquarters, a historic building turned bookstore and community space in Portland’s Central Eastside, we’ve been thinking a lot about the spaces we create and
Literary Arts is thrilled to present Timothy Snyder, bestselling author of On Tyranny. Literary Arts’ Executive Director Andrew Proctor will be in conversation with Snyder about his latest work, On Freedom at the Arlene Schnitzer
This foundational series is for personal nonfiction writers ready to shape real-life experiences into engaging stories with intention and clarity. Over four sessions, you’ll learn how to identify your memoir’s deeper message, build a strong narrative arc, and make structural choices that serve both your story and your reader.
In this class we’ll study and practice specific techniques used by established speculative fiction authors such as N.K. Jemisin and Nalo Hopkinson. We’ll examine examples of “worldbuilding in small doses” and try our hands at it. We’ll discuss the merits of creating worlds from the inside out versus going from the outside in. We’ll cover viewpoint, voice, neologisms, “found” texts, and other elements of this aspect of writing with exploratory and generative exercises.
In this six-week class we will explore prompt and nurture creative ideas to create a dossier of possibilities for further development. Participants can expect to take home 5-10 new ideas for creative works-in-progress and strategies for infusing more joy and authenticity in their writing practice.
In this four-week class, we’ll read and discuss ekphrastic poems by a wide selection of writers, creating our own definition of ekphrasis, pushing the boundaries of what an ekphrastic poem can be. We’ll engage with several essays by poets to get us asking questions and diving deeper into our craft.
In this workshop, students will learn the fundamentals of what makes an effective pitch and receive guidance, insight and support about how to navigate the pitching process.
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