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.

Saturday

Apr 4

Saturday

Apr 4

Tuesday

Apr 7

Wednesday

Apr 8

In-person   Writing Classes  

WRITING WITH TAROT

Try a tarot reading for a character or write a poem inspired by tarot images! Tarot is both deeply symbolic and highly narrative, creating a system that can inspire and guide many forms of writing. This multigenre workshop will introduce techniques for using tarot in one’s writing practice.

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Wednesday

Apr 8

Thursday

Apr 9

Thursday

Apr 9

Sunday

Apr 12

Monday

Apr 13

Tuesday

Apr 14

In-person   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.

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Tuesday

Apr 14

Wednesday

Apr 15

Delve Readers Seminars   In-person  

Marilynne Robinson: Home, Lila, and Jack

The three novels in this seminar all overlap in time and space with the mid-twentieth-century world of Gilead, while offering whole other stories and lives that offer perspectives on the great themes of race and racism, faith and family, punishment and reconciliation, love and loss and forgiveness. Set in the American past, Robinson’s novels nevertheless offer challenging insights and hope for today—hope for art, for the nation, for each other and individual selves.

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Wednesday

Apr 15

Thursday

Apr 16

Tuesday

Apr 21

Saturday

Apr 25

Saturday

Apr 25

In-person   Writing Classes  

EPISTOLARY POEMS

Participants in this one day class will read, draft, and collaborate in revising letter poems that balance the public with the private, the close-to-bone with the common. Through generative, constraint-based prompts, participants will explore the tension between forms of direct address and forms of poetic allusion to speak to, or point towards, what’s been left unsaid in their poems.

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Sunday

Apr 26

In-person   Writing Classes  

The Sijo: Poetry Workshop in Korean Traditional Form

The sijo is Korea’s most prominent and enduring traditional poetic form. Characterized by a clarity and accessibility that belies emotional complexity and tonal nuance, it is a form that prioritizes the unsaid and best grapples with the unsayable. Writing in this discipline exercises several poetic skills that we will focus on and hone throughout this six-week workshop.

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Wednesday

Apr 29

Thursday

Apr 30

Wednesday

May 6

In-person   Writing Classes  

Funny Fiction Workshop

In this six-week, workshop-meets-craft class, we'll dissect six 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. Each writer will have the opportunity to have one short story workshopped in this class (ie; written and verbal feedback from both instructor and peers).

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Wednesday

May 6

Delve Readers Seminars   In-person  

Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems

Wallace Stevens is one of the most distinctive and extravagant voices in American poetry, an orator of the imagination and eloquent observer of the world's beauty. Beginning with the appearance of the astonishing Harmonium in 1923, Stevens published seven volumes of poetry while living an 'ordinary' life as an insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut. His Collected Poems is a book of wonders, one of the landmarks of American literary modernism, and his poems are admired and studied for their lustrous language, their philosophical profundity, and their commitment to the importance of poetry in our everyday lives.

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Thursday

May 14

Tuesday

May 26

Tuesday

Jun 2

In-person   Writing Classes  

Write Like You’re Swimming: From Self-Doubt to Compassion and Creative Flow

Through guided meditations, writing exercises, and reading excerpts of big-hearted, emotionally courageous literature, writers of fiction and nonfiction will develop more self-connection, feel compassion for themselves as writers as well as for their characters, and care for their nervous system during the writing process, so they can enjoy more flow, catharsis, and joy.

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Sunday

Jun 14

Delve Readers Seminars   In-person  

Simone Weil: Paying Attention to the World

One of the most compelling figures of modern thought, Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a brilliant, often startling, and visionary thinker. She was a philosopher (one of first two women in France to earn a PhD, along with her classmate Simone de Beauvoir), teacher, writer, factory worker, pacifist, soldier, marxist, anarchist, Jewish, Christian, mystic, exile, playwright, translator, and mathematician.

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Thursday

Jul 9