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.
Come on down to the Literary Arts Bookstore & Cafe for our monthly write-in. This month’s theme is Ancestors! This month's specialty drink is called Grandma’s Favorite. This drink has all the comfort of a London fog with none of the caffeine. Notes of bergamot, lavender, and vanilla create comfort in a cup! Stay up to date with the Literary Bookstore
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 communities in Portland. We encourage poets new and old to come share their work. We strive towards a safe space for poets to read their
The Literary Arts Bookstore is pleased to welcome author Rebecca Handler to celebrate her new novel, In the Round. Handler will be joined in conversation by Selina Fillinger. About the book: Have you ever been dead certain that you’re being observed, that maybe your very existence is predicated on how others see you? A few
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 up to share your work in our open mic. Readings will be followed by a short community discussion. Hosted by Kyle Yoshioka and Jessica Meza-Torres. The featured reader
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. Our host is the one and only, Emme Lund. The featured reader for December will
This December, The Moth’s anticipated Mainstage season comes to Portland in partnership with Literary Arts. One foot in front of another… Join The Moth this fall for TIGHTROPE, an evening
Come on down to the Literary Arts Bookstore & Cafe for our monthly write-in. This month’s theme is Little Women! This month's specialty drink is called March’s Mulled Wine. Sit back and enjoy a mulled wine or cranberry juice, and imagine you’re by the fireplace with the March family, while Beth plays piano and Jo tells you a story. Stay up
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 communities in Portland. We encourage poets new and old to come share their work. We strive towards a safe space for poets to read their
Dickens turns his pen onto a satiric look London’s pursuit of Money and Society, and a bitter one at the state of the poor and those whose living are derived from the great and polluted River Thames, the powerful controlling symbol that unites many of the characters and plots in the novel.
This class is for experienced writers who are dedicated to starting the first draft of a story collection over the course of 6 months. We will have 22 class meetings between January and June, with a two-week break in March/April to focus on generating and revising our work. Participants should have experience writing stories and familiarity with the elements of literary short fiction including scene, character, conflict, place and some revision. We will study individual stories by authors, read craft essays, and discuss several published collections and how the stories unite to form a book.
Does what you write or how you write it change with the seasons? In these quarterly gatherings we’ll meet to be inspired by the turn of the world, consider nature’s shifts and how we can incorporate them into our writing practice.
Through journaling and discussion, we’ll work our way toward a greater understanding of the novel Tokyo Ueno Station’s view on contemporary Japan, and the fractured structure Yu employs to explore one man’s memories. Over the course of our time together, we’ll gain insights into our own places, decisions, losses, and joys, reading and journaling toward a finer understanding of life’s fragility and resilience.
Writing Authentic Characters is a four-week course for writers who want to understand their characters more deeply and make them feel believable and relatable to readers. Each week will include examples from fiction or film, discussion, and guided writing exercises. In the final week, you’ll spend more time developing a short extract, either from your own work or from one of the prompts provided, using the techniques from the course to strengthen the character’s motivation and subtext.
In this four week Delve, we’ll revisit four iconic works of middle grade fiction—Island of the Blue Dolphins, Hatchet, Julie of the Wolves, and Jacob Have I Loved. We will come to these books as adults with new questions. Throughout the course, we will weave between how the books existed in their time and what they have to offer us now.
In Beautiful Is the World, David Biespiel spans three decades of lyric intensity, tracing the intimate cartography of memory, place, and inheritance. David will be joined in conversation with Director of Programs for Writers Susan Moore.
Over the course of eight weeks, you’ll work to complete a rough draft of a short story, with weekly check-ins to keep you on track. There will be some in-class discussion and feedback for your writing, but there will not be a traditional, dedicated workshop component to the class.
This six-week intensive is for the writer who has lived their subject matter. The expert, the advocate, the practitioner, the person who has earned their perspective and is ready to shape it into something that lasts. Each session combines direct instruction with hands-on writing practice, guided research, breakout group work, and mastermind-style coaching — so students leave every class with something made, not just something learned. A craft thread runs through every session: every workshop produces actual writing, not just planning documents.
In this workshop, we will ask: what can writing teach us about the ways we move through the world? How can we use our words to dismantle our own biases and the systems that live within us? Through exploration of gender and sexuality in creative texts across genres by TLGBQ+ and gender non-conforming writers, we will cultivate our own texts of interrogation and self-discovery.
This eight-week opportunity to read Middlemarch, Eliot’s masterpiece of 19th-century provincial English lives, will encourage engagement across whatever distinctions we use to label or group us as readers.
Literary Arts is pleased to present Isabel Wilkerson as part of the 2026-27 Portland Arts & Lectures series. Please note: a subscription to the entire 2026-27 Portland Arts & Lectures
Every poem is in conversation with the writing that came before it. This conversation crosses generations and cultures, erasing distances of time, space, and mortality. In this four-part class, we'll make that conversation intentional. We'll consider the what, why, and how of writing in dialogue with other writers: what it means to write "after" someone, why we might quote, echo, erase, or respond to another text, and how we might do so with care, integrity, and proper credit.
Join us for a Delve seminar in which we will explore a wide range of visual art alongside short essays and books by artists, novelists, philosophers, filmmakers, and poets. Together we will read a series of classic unconventional short texts, both old and new, that examine the complex roles color (culminating with a deep dive into the color blue) plays in literature, the fine arts, philosophy, music, and daily life.
The purpose of this course is two-fold: to discuss the novel-writing process and to create a community of writers working alongside one another. Students will leave the course well on their way to a first draft of a novel and a clear understanding of what comes next. Though this class is craft/discussion based, there will be a couple moments to share work and receive feedback from the class.
In this course, we’ll study writing that engages with folklore in a wide variety of ways: speculative memoir that tangles with witch tales, poems that draw on botanical lore, short story fairy tale retellings, mythic poetry and fiction, and more.
In this generative online writing class, each class will be devoted to exploring a different form of the lyric essay. We will glean our invitations for writing from sample essays and end the course with a reading of short lyric essays written during our time together.
Ideal for writers in the early stages of developing their novels, this ten-week class will explore plot, voice, character and narrative structure in the novel form.
The workshop will begin with an interactive seminar on narrative structure. Participants will then analyze and present the dramatic beats of one of their favorite pieces of fiction to better understand what makes the story “work.” We’ll then apply those principles to your own work of fiction, devising character-driven scenes for maximum emotional effect.
Over three sessions, we’ll break down what a memoir book proposal needs, how to prove there’s an audience for your story, and how to make your personal material feel urgent. We’ll study real-life successful proposals and revise student material live in class. Best for writers with at least a partial manuscript or proposal-in-progress.
While Greek Mythology has never truly left the cultural zeitgeist, it’s clear that lately these old stories are at the forefront of the contemporary imagination. Over the past several years, no less than hundreds of retellings of Greek myths have been released in cinematic, best-selling novels, inventive scholarly works, and piles of poetry. What is compelling us to fervently consume these symbolically rich but often fraught tales of gods and goddesses, monsters and oracles, full of brutality, rebirth and transcendence?
This class is for fiction writers who have already made significant progress on novels, novellas, or short stories. This six-week workshop will offer in-depth guidance to students on their fiction writing projects.
Literary Arts is pleased to present Ben Rhodes as part of the 2026-27 Portland Arts & Lectures series. Please note: a subscription to the entire 2026-27 Portland Arts & Lectures
This course encourages prose writers to turn their gaze outward through research, be it trips to the library, time spent online, interviewing, and more. Over six weeks, we will read and discuss works that incorporate research in unique ways, and follow our questions and passions to enrich our writing.
Each week, we will read and discuss short pieces and excerpts from contemporary authors who are known to weave their pasts into the present including Annie Erneaux, Joan Didion, Ayad Aktar, Sonya Walger, Aysegul Savas, Rachel Cusk, Emmanuel Carrere, and others. There were also be to weekly craft essays on various genres (memoir, personal essay, autofiction and hybrid).
This course is designed to help poets overcome the fear of fixed form through in-class practice, specialized writing prompts, and instruction on letting the form work for them rather than against them. Students will be guided through writing practices and prompts to generate specific words, ideas, symbols, or metaphors that will serve as catalysts for discovering fresh syntax, diction, and imagery.
Writing prompts will encourage students to experiment with structure and voice and hopefully deepen into their own hybrid memoir drafts. This class will provide time, space, and inspiration for writers in early and middle stages of a nontraditional memoir.
Through 5-part story structure, guided prompts, playful exercises, and real-time exploration, you’ll practice noticing what’s already there and shaping it into a story.
Literary Arts is pleased to present New York Times bestselling author Louise Erdrich at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on March 18, 2027. Her appearance will conclude months of engaging programs and events through Multnomah
Literary Arts is pleased to present Kiran Desai as the final speaker of the 2026-27 Portland Arts & Lectures series. Please note: a subscription to the entire 2026-27 Portland Arts
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