A little more about Horses of God:

On May 16, 2003, fourteen suicide bombers launched a series of attacks throughout Casablanca. It was the deadliest attack in Morocco’s history. The bombers came from the shantytowns of Sidi Moumen, a poor suburb on the edge of a dump whose impoverished residents rarely if ever set foot in the cosmopolitan city at their doorstep. Mahi Binebine’s novel Horses of God follows four childhood friends growing up in Sidi Moumen as they make the life-changing decisions that will lead them to become Islamist martyrs.

The seeds of fundamentalist martyrdom are sown in the dirt-poor lives of Yachine, Nabil, Fuad, and Ali, all raised in Sidi Moumen. The boys’ soccer team, The Stars of Sidi Moumen, is their main escape from the poverty, violence, and absence of hope that pervade their lives. When Yachine’s older brother Hamid falls under the spell of fundamentalist leader Abu Zoubeir, the attraction of a religion that offers discipline, purpose, and guidance to young men who have none of these things becomes too seductive to ignore.

Narrated by Yachine from the afterlife, Horses of God portrays the sweet innocence of childhood and friendship as well as the challenges facing those with few opportunities for a better life. Binebine navigates the controversial situation with compassion, creating empathy for the boys, who believe they have no choice but to follow the path offered them.

Greta Wrolstad (1981-2005) was a poet and vital presence in the M.F.A. program at The University of Montana, where she held a teaching assistantship in English and served as poetry co-editor of CutBank.  Greta was my student.  She was not only tremendously talented but at-home in herself, in ways that are utterly elusive to me.  I will be lucky if, in my lifetime, I can approach some of the peace that seemed to radiate from Greta at 24.

Like Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, two poets she read exhaustively, Greta was exceptionally good at describing the natural world—in part, I suspect, because she had the patience to look at seawater and trees for a long time, without asking what she saw to be anything other than itself.  Greta was a traveler.  Her poems open out like vast geographies, always with a strain of quiet and sense of witness. She did not shy away from representing ugliness, or horror, as in this poem from the sequence “Notes on Sea and Shore”:

To be sailing the Sargasso Sea, where life

is caught and held indefinitely…no wind nor

currents to carry matter away.  Day-after-day

afloat on a shoreless sea,

a sea clogged with kelp, felled kelp,

fallen upwards to air collected there

by a hurricane’s pull.  Our warm bodies bobbing

bloodless on the brown ocean, strong and steady,

oblivious to this ebb tide—shielded by the Sargasso

Sea caught and held by our own

two hands, caught and held.  Still clinging

to Floridian rocks, West Indian rocks,

dross smeared across the mid-Atlantic.

Everything suspends in a final suspension; every-

thing linked and floating, as a

left hand takes the right to keep it warm.

The swerve from a wash of bloodlessness to a sudden, specific warmth is a signature turn in Greta’s work; she jolts you just when you feel a landscape has become eerily inhospitable or inhuman.

“Notes on Sea and Shore” opens Night is Simply a Shadow, a full-length collection just released from Tavern Books (and superbly edited by poets Carl Adamshick, Michael McGriff and Britta Ameel). They shepherded this collection into existence with immense care and persistence; Brandon Shimoda and Christine Bown also contributed to the selection of poems. Night is Simply a Shadow gathers up Greta’s voice and the presence of her most ardent supporters.  It captures an intensely lyric impulse in Greta’s work: to gesture constantly toward care for the world and for each other.  “O my floating life,” writes Lorine Niedecker, “Do not save love / for things / Throw things to the flood.”

There is a book launch—free and open to the public—at 7 pm on Saturday, June 8^th at Division Leap Bookstore & Gallery in Portland.

Joanna Klink is the 2013 Tin House Writer-in-Residence, a collaboration with our good friends at Portland State University’s graduate program in Creative Writing.

We hope you have enjoyed the Tin House Seminar: Maggie Nelson thus far. For those of you new to class, read a full description of the project.

Last week, the seminar read  The Red Parts: A Memoir and completed the second writing assignment.  If you didn’t get a chance to read The Red Parts this week, these supplements will get you up to speed (and really make you want to carve out the time to sit down and read Nelson’s haunting memoir about the murder of her aunt, Jane Mixer, in 1969:

Eve Conant, “A Death in the Family,” The New York Times Book Review

This week, the class has focused on The Latest Winter and Shiner. Read the reviews here:  Jordan Davis, The Latest Winter in The Constant Critic and David Gunton, Shiner in Jacket #19.

Exercise #3: Poem(s)

Pick two poems from Shiner, The Latest Winter, and/or Something Bright, Then Holes.  Identify an element in each poem that you’d like to play with in your own work.  The element can be macro (a particular approach to subject matter, a certain kind of voice, a pattern of repetition, a strategy of ligature, etc) or it can be at the level of the sentence (syntax, orthography, lineation, acoustics, diction, etc).  Drawing upon both of the elements you’ve selected, write 2-3 pages of poetry (a single poem, or two, or several—up to you).

Zak Smith was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1976. In addition to the Gravity’s Rainbow illustrations, which were shown in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and are now in the collection of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Smith’s recent projects include the multipanel painting 100 Girls and 100 Octopuses and an ongoing series of portraits of friends and acquaintances in the sex industry entitled Girls in the Naked Girl Business as well as a number of stand-alone paintings and drawings, abstract and otherwise. His work has appeared in numerous publications worldwide and is held in many public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. He lives and works in Brooklyn.

We hope you’ve enjoyed the Tin House Seminar: Maggie Nelson thus far. For those of you just discovering this, please follow the link for a full description of the project.

Last week, the seminar delved into Bluets. There was an amazing amount of user generated supplementary material added to the forum, well worth a look for those of you who have read the book or are just catching up. This week, we get our first writing assignment!

Exercise #1: Ghost Book Narrative

Many of my books have a kind of “ghost book,” a book that secretly—or not so secretly, as the case may be—stands behind my book, not just as its muse, but often as its literal stylistic and/or structural model.  … In the case of Philosophical Investigations and Bluets, the leaning against not only entailed working from Wittgenstein’s ideas qua ideas but also involved lifting concrete sentence constructions, locutions, and so on.  But there are insurmountable differences between us, which made the lifting productive.  —Maggie Nelson, “A Sort of Leaning Against,” Writer’s Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House, p. 94

Using as your ghost book a text selected from The Public Domain Review—or, if you like, another text entirely—write a 2-3 page piece that “leans against” the ghost book in whatever way(s) you choose. Make sure to check out the Maggie Nelson Seminar Blog for updates and discussions regarding exercise #1 (and all things Maggie Nelson!).

Spring delivers many a splendid thing (flowers, baseball, Don Draper), but for those us working on Thurman street, the change in season brings with it a new neighbor.

Collaborating with our good friends at Portland State University’s graduate program in Creative Writing, we are pleased to welcome Joanna Klink as the 2013 Tin House Writer-in-Residence at PSU. Joanna is the author of three books of poetry, They Are Sleeping, Circadian, and Raptus. She has been on the faculty of the University of Montana’s MFA Program since 2001, and recently served as the Briggs-Copeland Poet at Harvard.

The aim of this ongoing partnership is to bring national caliber writers to Portland for in-depth teaching opportunities in PSU’s Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing, as well as providing them an opportunity to generate new work in a creatively stimulating environment.

One of the perks (or some would argue, hazards) of receiving the Writer-In Residence is you get to live in a lovely apartment situated between the Tin House Books and Magazine offices.

During her stay, Joanna will be providing the occasional dispatch about poetry, her time here in Portland, and what it’s like to live near such a drunken wonderful editorial staff.

For those lucky enough to call Portland home, Joanna will be reading at 6:30pm next Friday (April 19th) at The Little Church.

The Tin House Seminar is the product of a partnership between Tin House and the MFA Program at Portland State University. It offers a term-long intensive study of an author’s body of work, culminating in a public reading and staged interview with the author. The 2012 seminar, taught by Charles D’Ambrosio, focused on the work of the award-winning fiction writer Anthony Doerr.

The 2013 Tin House seminar, taught by Leni Zumas, will focus on the work of Maggie Nelson, a writer whose intellectual ferocity and wildly divergent work is tailor made for sustained study and discussion.

This year, for the first time, we are excited to offer readers of The Open Bar the ability to participate in the 10-week graduate seminar being taught at PSU. We encourage our readers to follow the syllabus, read the texts, and post your thoughts/comments/questions to the Maggie Nelson Seminar Blog, where Leni and students taking the course will engage with the community on the work. Towards the end of the term, Maggie, who will give a reading and interview at The Little Church in Portland on May 31, 2013, will be answering some of the questions posted to the site.

Most supplementary materials—reviews, interviews, essays, audio clips, etc.—will be accessible via the seminar website. Course members will help fill out the body of the website, adding content to the site in the form of links, images, PDFs, and/or posts related to that week’s texts.

Class begins on April 4th (today!) with an examination of Maggie Nelson’s “A Sort of Leaning Against,” an essay taken from The Writer’s Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House.

This is a fabulous opportunity to read (or reread) Maggie Nelson’s work—Bluets, Jane: A Murder, Shiner, Something Bright, Then Holes, The Art of Cruelty, The Latest Winter, The Red Parts: A Memoir, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions—and engage with the material in a unique and exciting way.

 “I want to ask if you will join me in a small, inexpensive, but possibly life-altering experiment. Over the next thirty days, let’s all buy a favorite book of poems and send it to someone who doesn’t usually read poems. This could be a family member, friend, your local representative, whomever! I believe poetry enriches our lives and our hearts. I believe that by sharing poetry with others we are taking part in humanizing our culture.”

Inspired by this challenge and in honor of National Poetry Month, Tin House Books and Coffee House Press  have collaborated with Archipelago Books, BOA Editions, Copper Canyon Press, Milkweed Editions, Red Hen Press, Sarabande Books, and YesYes Books to give readers the opportunity to share their love of poetry through a Buy One, Give One program.

It’s this simple: Participating publishers will give you a free book of poetry for every book of poetry purchased via their Web sites.

How it works for us: When you buy a copy of Alex Lemon’s Mosquito or Brandon Shimoda’s Portuguese, Tin House Books will send you a free copy of Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House to give to someone who doesn’t usually read poems—a family member, a friend, your local representative, whomever.

Spread the love and share a gift that never stops giving.

If you’ll be in Boston for AWP, come help Tin House and Octopus Books celebrate a new collaborative poetry series as well as the release of several outstanding new titles. Have a drink with editors and authors from Tin House and Octopus, and listen to readings from:

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a book of criticism. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Black Clock and Salon, among other periodicals. He is a senior editor and founding member of The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Patricia Lockwood‘s poems have appeared widely, including in The New Yorker, Slate, Boston Review, Tin House, and Poetry. She lives in Savannah, Ga. Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (Octopus Books, 2012) is her first book.

Brandon Shimoda is the author of four books of poetry—most recently Portuguese (Tin House & Octopus Books) and O Bon (Litmus Press)—as well as several limited editions of collaborations, drawings, writings and songs. He is currently working on his first book of nonfiction, and co-editing, with poet-critic Thom Donovan, the selected writings of Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan. Born in California, he has lived most recently in Maine, Taiwan, and Arizona.

Michael Helm was born in Saskatchewan. His most recent novel, Cities of Refuge, is a national bestseller in Canada and was a Rogers Writers’ Trust Ficiton Award finalist, a Giller Prize nominee, and a Globe and Mail and Now magazine Best Book of the Year. His earlier novels are The Projectionist, a finalist for the Giller Prize and the Trillium Award; and In the Place of Last Things, a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. His writings on fiction, poetry, and the visual arts have appeared in North American newspapers and magazines, including Brick, where he serves as an editor. He teaches at York University in Toronto.

And your hosts for the evening are…

Elissa Schappell is a co-founder and editor at large of Tin House, as well as the author of  Blueprints for Building Better Girl and Use Me, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and co-editor with Jenny Offill of the anthologies The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. She is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review. Her essays, articles, and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies such as The Bitch in the House, The KGB Bar Reader, and The Mrs. Dalloway Reader. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Queens in Charlotte, North Carolina, and at Brooklyn College.

Matthew Dickman is the poetry editor of Tin House and the author of All-American Poem (American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008) and Mayakovsky’s Revolver (Norton, 2012). He is the recipient of the Honickman First Book Prize, the May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the 2009 Oregon Book Award, and two fellowships from Literary Arts of Oregon. His poems have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and the New Yorker, among others. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Zachary Schomburg is the author of Fjords vol 1, Scary No Scary, and The Man Suit. He co-founded Octopus Magazine in 2003 and Octopus Books in 2006. He lives in Portland, OR, where he co-curates the Bad Blood Reading Series.

Directions after the jump…

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Although we don’t start accepting applications until January 1st, we just couldn’t sit on our workshop lineup any longer. We are very excited to unveil your 2013 Tin House Writer’s Workshop Faculty All-Stars.

Along with a few other surprises, you can find this talented, generous, and madcap group of writers July 14-21 at Reed College, Portland, Oregon, USA.

Steve Almond

Lan Samantha Chang

Anthony Doerr

Major Jackson

Dorianne Laux

Maggie Nelson

Benjamin Percy

Karen Russell

Jim Shepard

Karen Shepard

David Shields

Dana Spiotta

Cheryl Strayed

Luis Alberto Urrea

Jess Walter