 |
Monday, July 9th, 2007
2pm THE AGENT GAME
Panel with Sarah Burnes, Betsy Lerner, Maria Massie, Jim Rutman, and Amy Williams
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.
3pm THE ARTFUL EDIT
Panel with Judy Clain, Sarah Burnes, and Abigail Thomas. Moderator: Susan Bell
This panel will discuss the discipline and creativity of editing. We will examine how editing others and being edited by others can help writers learn to better edit themselves. Through the perspectives of a trade book editor, an agent, and a writer, we will explore what editing means and how it is best practiced. Among the questions to be addressed: What are the risks and pleasures of editing an author? What are the risks and pleasures of being edited? Finally, what are the risks and pleasures of editing oneself?
4pm FROM NOT TO HOT: GETTING FIRST BOOKS OFF THE GROUND
Panel with Josh Goldfaden, Mary Otis, and Michele Matheson. Moderator: Lee Montgomery
Tin House New Voice authors talk about the long and anfractuous roads their first books traveled in order to get published. Did they get an MFA? Did they attend summer workshops? Did they go to great and creepy lengths to get in touch with the right agent or editor? Together, their stories will shed light on the difficulties of getting published, the persistence it requires, and the various surprises that pop up along the way.
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
2pm EDITING OURSELVES WITH SUSAN BELL
What a bitch of a thing prose is! --Flaubert
This seminar explores the often misunderstood—or simply over-looked—art of editing. All writers must edit. Understated or lyrical, traditional or avant-garde, fiction or non-fiction, no matter: every writer has to examine his draft, determine its needs, and then try to fulfill them. Editing is usually taught as an intrinsic part of writing. As a result, it can feel elusive and random. This seminar offers no rules or formulas, but practical methods and insights to help students make their way through the tall grass of text with increased ease and authority.
3pm SHOW VS. TELL WITH AIMEE BENDER
Deconstructing the Old Adage
Like telling a lie so many times it becomes a version of the truth, the saying “Show, don’t tell” has similarly insinuated itself into our writing lives. But what does it really mean? Is it absolutely true? Is it a load of fabradeejunk? Using some examples, exercises and discussion, we’ll analyze the implications of this common phrase. When is telling actually the best strategy? What telling is good telling? When is showing a cop-out? We’ll try to find answers to these questions and more
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
2pm WHO GETS TO WRITE ABOUT WHAT? THE QUESTION OF AUTHORITY
Panel with Dorothy Allison, Yiyun Li, and Karen Shepard. Moderator: Michelle Wildgen
Does write what you know mean write only what you know? Hopefully not, or else why write fiction? A fiction writer's job is to make it all up and to do it convincingly, because good readers can sniff out imposters. This panel will discuss the overarching philosophical questions of a writer and her subject, as well as the technical side of making convincing stories and characters when you may be working from an outsider’s perspective or from research rather than from direct, lived experience. Are some boundaries more easily crossed than others—gender over race, class over geography? How do you find the right details and what sort of research should you do? What's scary about this kind of far-outside-the-self creation, and what is simply freeing?
3pm MASTERY OF THE UNSPOKEN WITH JIM SHEPARD
Constructing Subtext through Context
If it is true that literature, as opposed to the essay or the analytic argument, operates by inductive rather than deductive reasoning, it would follow that much of what a reader learns in fiction feels intuited—intuition in this case being defined as the near-immediate knowing or learning of something without the conscious use of reasoning. This may be a significant part of fiction’s fascination for us: the way it encourages us to believe, the way we often do in our lives, that we can intuit the interior from the exterior if we pay the right kind of attention. A close reading of parts of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” will serve as a study of the way in which contextualizing gestures within a scene helps us understand what a story’s protagonists and/or narrators themselves don’t see, or would prefer we overlook.
Thursday, July 12th, 2007
2pm CREATING A WORLD AND LIVING BY ITS RULES
Panel with Charles Baxter, Lee Montgomery, Colson Whitehead. Moderator: Jonathon Raymond
“The world is everything that is the case,” writes philosopher-poet Ludwig Wittgenstein. Fictional worlds adhere to the same law, but “what is the case” is completely up for grabs. Whether mundane or surreal, parables or epics, or epic parables, what we choose to represent becomes our world. How do we breathe life into them, make them unique? And what does it mean to live by their rules when we’re creating them? This panel will explore this fundamental, though slippery and abstract, aspect of creating a world.
3pm CONCISION WITHOUT COMPROMISE WITH WHITNEY OTTO
Small Packages, Big Rewards
This seminar will discuss the special art of delivering a fully realized piece of fiction in no more than a few pages. With Elizabeth Tallent, John Collier, and J.D. Salinger as our guides, we'll discusshow to get the most impact from the fewest words, and how to
understand the important distinction between an anecdote and a shortstory.
3pm A CONVERSATION WITH POET D. A. POWELL, HOSTED BY BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY
Friday, July 13th, 2007
2pm WRITING FROM EXPERIENCE WITH STEPHEN ELLIOTT
The Freedom of Sticking to the Facts
Our experiences, inextricable from how we process them, are the most valuable things we can offer our readers. In both fiction and non-fiction, our lives are jumping off points for stories, our experiences framing devices for the stories we tell about others. We'll talk about the dangers of writing from experience and overcoming the stumbling blocks our fears of exposure can create for us. We'll look at strategies for getting past those fears, as well as dealing with the perspectives of friends and relatives, whose memories might differ from our own. Finally, we'll focus on the joy of integrating the worlds we know with those that we create.
3pm HARD-UP FOR A HARD-ON WITH STEVE ALMOND
The Ins and Outs of Writing Sex
While people can be remarkably creative with physical sex, literary sex often ends up clunky and clichéd. In fact, what the two most commonly share is awkwardness. How can we write about sex without sounding like a romance novel, or worse, a biology textbook? We will examine the works of Mary Gordon, James Salter, David Lodge, and others, in an effort to parse out what makes an erotic scene sizzle, or fizzle. We'll focus on precision and discuss how to make your sex scenes reveal character, and not just fluff the reader. This will be an informal session, one which will, with any luck, get raunchy, so people should leave their inhibitions at the door.
Saturday, July 14th, 2007
2pm GETTING TO THE HEART OF THE MATTER (AND MAKING IT WORSE) WITH CHARLES D'AMBROSIO
The Essential Nature of Conflict
Without conflict even the best prose can seem self-serving and dull. This seminar will give an overview of the history of the idea of conflict, explore some of the misconceptions and fears surrounding it and talk about the mistakes writers often make with respect to it. Finally, we’ll discuss some practical advice about confronting the tensions at the core of a story and allowing the central conflict to erupt.
3pm THE PERIOD WITH MARIE HOWE
Understanding the Elusive Power of the Sentence
What makes a voice so irresistible that we follow it page after page? What makes a voice as flexible and organic as thought itself? How does feeling influence the thinking voice, and thought affect feeling? The sentence is the often hidden musculature within a poem that is already contending with lines (and image, and sound, and meter, etc). We'll look at some starts and stops. And, while we're at it, we'll celebrate how a sentence, if crafted both willfully and organically, can make a reader experience something that is, for the most part, invisible.
All seminars and panels are open to the public for a $15 fee and are held in Vollum Lecture Hall on Reed College Campus.
READINGS
Sunday, July 8th
8pm Reading and signing with T.C. Boyle—interview with Jim Shepard to follow
Monday, July 9th
5pm Tin House Books reading with Josh Goldfaden, Mary Otis, and Michelle Matheson*
8pm Reading and signing with Karen Shepard, Marie Howe, Peter Rock
Tuesday, July 10th
8pm Reading and signing with Stephen Elliott, Charles D’Ambrosio, Yiyun Li
Wednesday, July 11th
8pm Reading and signing Whitney Otto, Steve Almond, Dorothy Allison
Thursday, July 12th
8pm Reading and signing with Annie Proulx—interview with Peter Rock to follow
Friday, July 13th
8pm Reading and signing with Aimee Bender, Colson Whitehead, Jim Shepard
Saturday, July 14th
8pm Reading and signing with Abigail Thomas, D. A. Powell, Charles Baxter
All readings to be held in Cerf Amphitheater on Reed College Campus
Door charge to readings is $5.
*Free event
For more information or to purchase tickets, please call Emily at 503-219-0622 or email cheston@tinhouse.com
|
