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Sunday, July 9th, 2006
8:00 pm Lorrie Moore Reading—interview with Elissa Schappell to follow (8pm, Cerf Amphitheater)
Monday, July 10th, 2006
2:00 p.m. GETTING INTO PRINT: Tin House Editors
When asked about early attempts at publishing, many accomplished writers mention filling desk drawers or papering walls with form rejections before achieving an initial acceptance of their work. Learning how best and where to submit your work often comes after years of careful reading and continued effort. In this panel, the editors of Tin House magazine and Tin House Books offer emerging writers a rare opportunity to learn about the process from the publishing side of things.
3:00 p.m. THE AGENT GAME
Finding an agent to represent your work can be a time-consuming and hair-raising endeavor. Ideally, the relationship between agent and author is both professional and personal, providing a writer with much-needed support and encouragement. In this seminar, New York agents talk about what writers should know before seeking representation and offer unique insight into their profession.
Panel with Sarah Burnes, Liz Farrell, Betsy Lerner, and Ira Silverberg
8:00 p.m. Reading with Karen Karbo, Elissa Schappell, Dorothy Allison (8pm, Cerf Amphitheater)
Tuesday, July 11th, 2006
2:00 pm WHY DID HE DO THAT AGAIN? The Pitfalls of Character Motivation
Seminar with Aimee Bender
After giving birth to a character, a writer needs to take the time to get to know that character and what makes him tick. How does one shape an imagined being into a well-drawn character with thoughts and actions that feel both original and true?
3:00 pm WRITING IN THE LYRIC REGISTER: Raising Your Prose to New Heights
Seminar with Steve Almond
In every narrative, there come moments when the prose must rise into the lyric register. These passages, marked by a compression of sensual and psychological detail, are the closest writers come to singing. Using the work of Frank O’Connor, Denis Johnson, C.K. Williams, and others, we’ll examine how the lyric register operates—and why your work should, in the crucial moments, aspire to song.
5:30 pm Reading with Tin House senior editor, Michelle Wildgen, author of You're Not You. Free event. (Cerf Amphitheater)
8:00 pm Reading with Lee Montgomery, Anthony Swofford, Charles D'Ambrosio (8pm, Cerf Amphitheater)
Wednesday, July 12th, 2006
2:00 pm THE BLURRY BUSINESS OF TRUTH: Rescuing the Memoir
Few writers believe in a neat divide between fiction and nonfiction. Most of us, regardless of what genre we’re working in, dance back and forth through the porous border of lived and contrived experiences. What is a writer’s responsibility to “truth” when writing memoir? Has our understanding of truth become too flexible or are these liberties essential for the craft to excel as art?
Panel with Nick Flynn, Karen Karbo, Lee Montgomery, and Anthony Swofford
3:00 pm FINDING THE STORY
In this famously effective seminar, our special guest Gil Dennis discusses the tools that he uses to discover a story.
Seminar with Gil Dennis
8:00 pm Reading with Michael Ondaatje—interview with Gil Dennis to follow (8pm, Cerf Amphitheater)
Thursday, July 13th, 2006
2:00 pm POET AS LOVER, READER AS THE BELOVED: Building a Unique Relationship
The reader and the writer, the lover and the beloved. These are versions of the same thing: two alien minds trying to share a world. How do poets woo their love-objects (their readers) into an imaginary, often radically unfamiliar, universe, shack, or pup-tent? Is it true, as May Sarton says, that “all poems are love poems”?
Panel with Nick Flynn, Matthea Harvey, and D. A. Powell
3:00 pm THE EXQUISITE TEXT: How to Learn from the Success of Others
Seminar with Antonya Nelson
For this seminar, a very close reading of a contemporary short story masterpiece will illuminate its author’s designs in shaping and revising it. Story will be distributed at time of seminar meeting.
8 p.m. Reading with D. A. Powell, Ann Cummins, Antonya Nelson (8pm,Cerf Amphitheater)
Friday, July 14th, 2006
2:00 pm DEFAMILIARIZATION: Ugly Word, Beautiful Idea.
Seminar with Anthony Doerr
This seminar explores how a writer uses sentences and narrative (and art itself) to make the familiar unfamiliar, to renew our senses of perception. Here we will get to the nitty-gritty of why cliches aren’t doing our work any favors.
3:00 pm MISADVENTURES IN POETRY: When a Poem’s Success Lives in its Mistakes
Seminar with D. A. Powell
So much of the time, we’re looking for le mot juste, the proper turn of phrase, the way to translate our ideas into poems. But often it’s the inexact, the awful, the mistaken linguistic turn that manages to say the right thing because it unmoors us from our perceived
relationship to the subject we’re trying to write. In this talk, we’ll explore some of the ways in which poetry is enriched by saying precisely what we didn’t set out to say.
8 p.m. Reading with Matthea Harvey, Anthony Doerr, Jim Shepard (8pm, Cerf Amphitheater)
Saturday, July 15th, 2006
2 p.m. CREATING A WORLD: The Role of “Place” in Fiction
Setting is too often captured in clichés or hollow glances, but a rich and textured setting can inform the plot, help define characters, and draw a reader into the story. These three writers, each highly skilled at crafting place, discuss their various approaches.
Panel with Dorothy Allison, Ann Cummins, Charles D’Ambrosio
3 p.m. SPINNING FICTION FROM HISTORY AND/OR FACT
Seminar with Jim Shepard
This seminar investigates the particular problems and excitements involved in the use of historical and/or nonfictional material as the part of the basis for fiction. Students are asked to have read, in advance of the seminar, two short stories—Ron Hansen’s “Wickedness”
(from Nebraska) and Nathan Englander’s “The Tumblers” (from For the Relief of Unbearable Urges)—and, if possible, two novels: Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian and Marta Morazzoni’s The Invention of Truth.
4 p.m. A BOOK IN THE WORLD
What happens to your book after the agent sells it? How does yourpublisher work to get it into the hands (and hearts and minds!) of thebooksellers and readers? Follow the odyssey of the novella Girls in Peril, the first book in the Tin House Books New Voice series, and learn about the intricate process behind every book’s introduction to the world. Panelists include Elise Cannon, director of sales, PGW; Lee Montgomery, Editorial Director Tin House Books; Laura Howard, Marketing and Publicity Manager for Tin House Books; Andrea Tetrick, sales rep at PGW; and Gerry Donaghy, buyer at Powell’s.
5:30 pm Tin House Books Reading with Alex Lemon and Karen Lee Boren. Free event. (Cerf Amphitheater
8 p.m. Reading with Nick Flynn, Steve Almond, Aimee Bender (8pm, Cerf Amphitheater)
10 p.m. dance party |
