Bookstore Free Events
Kavi Yaga in conversation with Amy Marcott
The Literary Arts Bookstore & Cafe is pleased to welcome author Kavi Yaga to celebrate her debut short story collection, The Vanishings. Yaga will be joined in conversation by Amy

ON THE TENTH SEASON OF THE ARCHIVE PROJECT, ENJOY DISCUSSIONS FROM PORTLAND ARTS & LECTURES, PORTLAND BOOK FESTIVAL, AND OTHER COMMUNITY EVENTS FROM OUR HOME IN PORTLAND, OREGON AND BEYOND.
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.
The Literary Arts Bookstore & Cafe is pleased to welcome author Kavi Yaga to celebrate her debut short story collection, The Vanishings. Yaga will be joined in conversation by Amy
Join us at The Literary Arts Bookstore & Cafe to hand-sew decorative plush to celebrate summer fruit! Sew felt cherries, strawberries, citrus slices, bananas, avocados, and more! ✨ Bring a
Although this course will predominantly take the form of a workshop, it will also provide insights into the craft of writing by drawing upon principles from The Art of Fiction, essays on literary craft, and published short stories. Designed for beginner and advanced writers, this course meets for ten sessions total. Students will have the opportunity to share two pieces (up to 25 pages each) and receive constructive feedback in a thoughtfully facilitated, supportive atmosphere.
The Literary Arts Bookstore & Cafe is excited to welcome author Jamie Fisher to celebrate her latest book, Nobody Broke Your Heart: An Intimate Biography of Elliott Smith. Fisher will
This class is designed to demystify the editing process with applicable tools for editing at each stage of your draft. From fiction to creative nonfiction, this five-week workshop offers in-depth looks at different editorial tools to use to help you refine your story and your language.
The Literary Arts Bookstore & Cafe is pleased to welcome poets James Ciano, Bobby Elliott, and Nick Martino for an evening of celebrations and conversation.
Come out for an evening of live comics! The authors of the new romance anthology comic book Do You Like Me? come together to read their sweaty love stories alongside
If you dream of writing that novel or finishing that poem, but you feel scattered, overwhelmed, or stuck with many beginnings but no finished product, this workshop will offer you gentle and effective ways to work through creative blocks so you can finally share your creative expression with your readers.
This five-day intensive teaches writers the essential elements of compelling scene construction. Over five class meetings, students will learn to create authentic characters, ground readers in vivid and purposeful setting, weave exposition seamlessly into narrative, and build scenes that draw readers in and hold them page after page.
Come on down to the Literary Arts Bookstore & Cafe for our monthly write-in. This month’s theme is Labor Day! This month's specialty drink is called The Means of Production.
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
Memoir-writing challenges us to interrogate ourselves. Transcribing those memories can be difficult, but even more difficult is ensuring we are honest about how our important relationships have shaped us. This course will ask you who or what you have left out, and why it’s important to evaluate bringing them into the fold. We will look at how to treat that “character” with respect and look at examples from authors who use compassion and authenticity when looking at hard relationships.
This craft-focused workshop is built around personalized feedback on work in progress. Each session, the group reads and discusses four writers’ submissions, and for every piece, the instructor prepares an individual craft lesson—the one element she believes will most help that piece take its next step forward.
Every writer has moments that seem larger than themselves: a night sky, a death, a first encounter with art, a dream, a sentence in a book, a city seen from above, a strange conversation, a childhood image that never stopped working. This one-day workshop helps writers return to one such moment and begin shaping it into literary material.
If Tolstoy’s War and Peace, written a decade earlier, was an attempt to capture the totality of political and interpersonal life, then The Brothers Karamazov is an attempt to capture the totality of internal life. We will be reading the Peaver and Volokhonsky translation, itself a major turning point in the novel’s popularity in English, shedding some of the stuffy, plodding, confusing language of earlier translations in favor a readable and populist style. The Brothers Karamazov is a big novel full of big ideas, and there is no better way to experience it than in a group.
Give your writing the space it needs to grow. This six-week lab helps you make meaningful progress while receiving immediate, actionable feedback. Through dedicated writing time and structured critique, you’ll generate and refine new work each week leaving with stronger pages, clearer direction, and writing momentum.
The spiral holds great meaning for cultures all over the world and has captivated our attention throughout ancient and modern time. In this 3-part generative writing workshop, we’ll expand our writing across multiple genres including poetry, essay, and narrative with prompts inspired by multicultural authors.
This Delve seminar will focus on Hawthorne’s short stories—among the most thrilling, strange, and memorable in the American canon. We will explore his first collection of stories, Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1851) as well as a small selection of extraordinary later stories.
Throughout this six week course, students will look at the many ways in which humans are connected to our natural surroundings, both urban and remote. 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.
In this Delve we will study Adorno's Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life---the amazing book he wrote between 1944 and 1949 to explore his feelings about the calamitous situation of a world facing despotism.
This is an important novella in the vein of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, but with an ending that packs a different punch. At its center is a man torn between family, community, church, and one young woman in a terrible predicament. He must make a choice, and Keegan’s exquisite, concise writing reveals that agonizing choice. It’s a perfect story to ponder and discuss: What would you choose in his situation?
Second section added for Tuesday nights. This is an important novella in the vein of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, but with an ending that packs a different punch. At its center is a man torn between family, community, church, and one young woman in a terrible predicament. He must make a choice, and Keegan’s exquisite, concise writing reveals that agonizing choice. It’s a perfect story to ponder and discuss: What would you choose in his situation?
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
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
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