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.
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 reader for
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
In this 3-hour course, we’ll learn how, where, and with what to begin our memoirs. We’ll discover that our first chapter is more than just the sturdy foundation to a life recorded, it’s a guide for you, the writer—both a map and its key.
Escape from the cold with a book and a beverage at Literary Arts! Join us for a special happy hour. Spend $20 or more at the bookstore and take a
The Literary Arts Bookstore and Cafe is thrilled to partner with SCRAP PDX for a winter-themed crafting event. Hand-sew decorative winter plush ornaments to adorn your tree, home, bag, or
Join us at the Literary Arts Bookstore and Cafe for a write-in celebrating 250 years of Jane Austen! We’re channeling our inner Jane and writing the night away. Whether you’re
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
Join us for an afternoon of festive winter fun for kids at The Literary Arts Bookstore & Cafe! We’ll have oodles of sugar cookies to decorate, a coloring/craft corner, and
This four week Delve will focus on two early novels from Barbara Kingsolver. Both of these books take place in a southwest dealing with environmental impacts, poverty, and the choices people make within those contexts.
Come learn the power of making short movies with your own short narrative. Digital storytelling joins the arts of writing and filmmaking to create 3-4 minute films.
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.
In this class, we will look anew at our manuscripts or rough drafts. We’ll locate the symmetries that already exist and expand them, push them to their fullest potentials. We’ll find themes and ideas that are intuitively central to our stories and ask whether they’ve been examined enough.
In this Delve seminar we will explore three extraordinary literary lightning bolts that Woolf produced during the later years of her life, from the 1930’s through to the first years of World War II and the Battle of Britian.
What makes a funny story more than just an elbow jabbing good time? In this class, we’ll read several humorous short stories and figure out what makes them impactful, lasting and literature.
In this six-week, workshop-meets-craft class, we'll dissect five 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, with written and verbal feedback from both instructor and peers.
In this 8-week, in-person class, we’ll focus on one of the hardest parts of writing: writing. If you’ve taken Get Writing before, in January 2026 we’ll use all new writing prompts and exercises. If you’ve never taken it, we encourage you to get writing! This class is open to all writers wanting to generate new work and learn more about the craft of writing.
In this workshop, we’ll read the first pages of novels by writers like Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Celeste Ng, Julia Armfield and more. We’ll consider the craft of a novel’s beginning and ways this can fit into the process of writing the full manuscript. Students will workshop their own first pages with each other and receive instructor feedback on up to 25 pages that begin their novels.
Who writes our shared histories? Who gets deemed "unreliable?" Through generative writing exercises and discussion of examples from Brody Parrish Craig's The Patient is an Unreliable Historian, we'll write poems together that challenge truth, combat erasure, and reclaim space for lived experience
Every story emerges from a prompt: a memory, an image, an historical incident, a song, a family tale. Experimenting with a wide array of such prompts can be a great way of discovering and developing stories, especially the ones that you didn’t know you wanted to tell.
Scenes are the heartbeat of storytelling. This class explores how to craft vivid, purposeful scenes that immerse readers and move your story forward. Through examples, exercises, and feedback, you’ll learn to build tension, reveal character, and balance showing and telling across fiction and nonfiction.
In this seminar, you will acquaint yourselves with major writings of W. G. Sebald (1944-2001).
While this course will predominantly take the form of a workshop, it will also feature discussions of published works to explore the “absolutes” that govern the art of fiction and creative nonfiction, 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 course, we’ll respond to writing prompts that engage the memory and summon the events of our past. By the end of week 8, all students will have a clear and succinct vision for their memoir, a revised outline, and the knowledge of both stories it is telling.
The Literary Arts Bookstore is pleased to welcome Karian LeBlanc to celebrate the release of A Kids Book About Purpose. She wrote this book to inspire kids, especially those who feel different, unseen, or unsure of their path, to believe in their greatness and take small steps toward a bigger purpose.
Thomas Pynchon’s novels are chaotic combinations of ideas, puns, characters, subplots, facts, fictions, and words. Set in the eighteenth century, Mason & Dixon includes all of the above plus a talking dog.
This six-week course is designed to help students finish a draft of a manuscript. We'll read craft essays about drafting a book, set aside time each week to discuss problems we're having with manuscripts, and design a schedule for each student to ensure everyone addresses the issues specific to their draft.
Fernanda Melchor has quickly become one of the most heralded young writers emerging into international attention. Winner of the Anna Seghers Prize, the Ryszard Kapuscinski Award, and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, she has garnered an incredible amount of celebration by the age of 41. Her work explores violence, self-loathing, class disparity, and the stories we tell ourselves in justification of horrific acts.
In this four part class, we will consider the what, why, who, and how of form: what form is, why we might choose to write in an inherited form, alter an inherited form, or write in a made-up form, and how we might go about doing so.
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