Program

The Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop is a weeklong intensive (July 8-15) of workshops, seminars, panels, and readings led by the editors of Tin House magazine and Tin House Books. and their guests – prominent contemporary American writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The program combines morning workshops with afternoon craft seminars and career panels. Evenings are reserved for author readings and revelry.

Workshops meet for six sessions, Monday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. Each workshop will have no more than twelve students and will treat two to three manuscripts per session. You may only enroll in one workshop. If you have questions about which faculty member would best suit your work, call our office at 503-219-0622 and we will make every effort to steer you to the most appropriate workshop. Please continue to check the Web site for updates on new faculty or call our office for details.

Tin House editors and guest agents are available to meet individually with students throughout the week. For students who have completed a collection of stories or poems, a memoir, or a novel, one-on-one mentorships are available with select faculty and staff for an additional fee (for further details see MENTORSHIP.)

Full Program TUITION:
$40 application fee
$1100 for registrations postmarked on or before July 2, 2012

Apply

• 7:30 am – 9:00 am
  Breakfast
• 9:00 am – 9:50ish am
  Morning Lecture
• 10:00 am – 12:30 pm
  Workshops
• 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm
  Lunch
• 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
  Panel or Seminar

• 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
  Panel or Seminar
• 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
  Cocktails, Agent Meetings,
  and Student Readings
• 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm
  Dinner
• 8:00 pm
  Author Readings
• 9:00 pm
  Reception

The Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop is held at Reed College, located on 100 acres of rolling lawns, winding lanes, and magnificent old trees in the southeast area of Portland, Oregon, just minutes from downtown and twelve miles from the airport. Praised as one of the best big cities in the United States by Money Magazine and most livable city by Travel and Leisure, Portland offers a vibrant art scene, unique dining, and excellent public transportation. More importantly for writers, Portland is home to Powell’s, the largest independent bookstore in the world.

Summer Writer’s Workshop participants will be housed in the dormitories of Reed College near the center of campus. Most rooms are doubles, but not shared unless requested.  The confines are clean, but quite sparse (remember your college days?) and students are encouraged to bring extra blankets, lamps, and fans to help make their stay more comfortable. All classrooms, readings, panel presentations, dining and reception areas are within walking distance from the dormitories.

During the summer, Reed College offers access to its bookstore, library, mail service, art gallery, print shop, and athletic facilities. Computers with modems may be used through the telephone connection in dorm rooms for no charge. Wireless internet is also provided to those participants with airport cards in their laptops. Tin House will also host a cybercafé where students can access the Internet. A limited number of printers are available and students are highly encouraged to print all needed materials before arriving at the conference

Meals are served in the dining area of the college and are catered by Bon Appetit. We work closely with these folks in the hopes that all dietary requirements and restrictions are accounted for and that our participants’ needs are met. Students not staying with us on campus need to pay for meals individually.

Portland is easy to get to by air, train, bus, and car. The Portland International Airport (PDX) is accessible to major cities throughout the country, and is about twenty to thirty minutes from Reed College via public transportation, shuttle services, and cabs. The bus and train stations, located in downtown Portland, are about fifteen minutes from the college campus. Participants can also rent cars at the airport and throughout the city. Click here for directions.

2012 Schedule Forthcoming (May)
2011 Schedule Below.

Monday, July 11th

2:00 pm
The Agent Game,
A Panel with Sarah Burnes, PJ Mark, and Denise Shannon, moderated by Rob Spillman
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.

3:00 pm
The Future of Publishing,
With Richard Nash

Tuesday, July 12th

2:00 pm
Facts in Fiction: The Sweet Lure and Dark Danger of Outside Information,
With Peter Rock
Is doing research an admission of weakness, for a fiction writer? Isn’t imagination enough? In this talk, we’ll explore these questions with an eye to how the world outside of us might resonate with the world within, and how this interaction might lead us to write work we couldn’t have anticipated. We’ll seek clues to how we might inhabit those things we wish to explore, as well as guessing at how we might trick ourselves into going places we’ve been avoiding. Promised: digressions into just what it is that makes facts so interesting; examples of embarrassing mistakes made by one author; tactics and strategies; reflections on productivity vs. abject procrastination; assorted mystical assertions.

3:00 pm           
Going the Distance: Creating Characters You Can Live With, a panel with Jonathan Dee, Karen Shepard, and Scott Sparling, moderated by Tony Perez
A novel’s success rests largely on whether its characters compel us, whether we find them believable. Well-crafted characters take on lives of their own and guide a plot toward its end. They account for that quality of all good stories: inevitability. Where do these characters come from? How does a writer instill his characters their own unique voices and identities? How do you know when it is time to let a character go?

3:00 pm-Capehart
Poetic Structures: The Visible and The Invisible,
D.A Powell in conversation with Mary Szybist
This conversation will focus on the larger ideas present in poetry: the way we interrogate our own anxieties over love and life, the presence and role of the reader, and the challenge of the craft itself in light of the difficulties inherent in language. Looking at 5 key poems, we’ll talk about the duties of the poet, and how poets transform those prescriptive duties into art.

Wednesday, July 13th

2:00 pm
Architecture and Impulse: Building the Short Story, with Charles D’Ambrosio and Joy Williams, moderated by Rob Spillman
A writer may find inspiration in every corner of life, but transforming inspiration into art is, well, everything. You write a first draft. You think you’ve nailed it. You drink, celebrate. Then you revise. You revise and discover you didn’t have the first clue what you were writing. In this talk, we will discuss how ideas are generated and refined, and how to keep the momentum going long after the initial spark of inspiration has withered

3:00 pm
Narrative Time Travel,
With Lan Samantha Chang
In this talk, we will discuss the use of various time travel mechanisms, from Proust’s souvenir involontaire to the repetition and compulsion in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. We will focus the discussion on a specific type of literary time travel: that which relies upon the presentation of a specific character, a magnetic temporal agent, in whose presence a protagonist finds himself obsessed, transported, and ultimately transformed by an involuntary journey into the past.

3:00 pm-Capehart
The Marriage of Music and Meaning,
With Dorianne Laux
In this talk, we will examine the musical patterns of poetry. Though there are many formal names for the poetic devices that bring together written word and sounded pattern, the emphasis will be
on the syllable and the line.

Thursday, July 14th

2:00 pm
The Theory and Practice of Trust: Writing as Ghost Story,
With Luis Alberto Urrea
In the twenty-six years it took me to research and write The Hummingbird’s Daughter and its forthcoming sequel, Queen of America, I was often in the presence of medicine men and women, shamans and curanderas. Many of these wise people were unlettered–yet they offered transformative wisdom about the process of writing. At the same time, I was reading many Asian poets and consorting with other writers seeking a liberation from the usual western grind of career and competition. Although I am not even certain that these concepts can be lectured about–we really should be out in the far landscape waiting for animals and weather–I will try to offer what they offered me: story.

2:00 pm-Capehart
Black Cat Blues,
With Kevin Young
The blues are the backbone of American music. But what can the blues’ blurred notes, ironies, and what Ralph Ellison calls “a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” teach our writing? Through examining blues poems and lyrics in a fresh way, we will craft a “talking blues,” examining not just the music but an aesthetic that finds the sacred in the profane, and weds a public voice to a private pain. We will find in the blues fresh metaphors for the process of writing, and even an apt correlative for life itself.

3:00 pm
Get a Job: The Importance of Work in Prose and Poetry,
With Benjamin Percy
This lecture will examine the way a job (whether your story takes place in a taxidermy studio or a war zone or a cubicle-crowded office) can and must richly serve characterization, voice, point of view, metaphor, and theme. We’ll look at examples from Tim O’Brien, Andrea Barrett, Joshua Ferris, Philip Levine, and Bruce Springsteen, among others.

Friday, July 15th

1:00 pm
I Know Myself Real Well. And That Is The Problem,
With Jim Shepard
A consideration of the commonplace assumption, often enacted in literary fiction in the form of the epiphany, that an enhanced level of self-awareness is inherently liberating. The analysis will primarily take the form of a close reading of Robert Stone’s short story “Helping” as an exemplary text.

2:00 pm
Fairy Tales,
With Aimee Bender
What is plot, and how is fairy tale plot different than character-motivated plot?  How can we address that balance on the page between what happens to us and what we make happen? How is event different in a literary landscape than how it is in an everyday regular life kind of way?  What are some of the (possibly) unhelpful restrictions we place on the idea of plot by insisting that it stick to a realistic model? (i.e.: ‘what does the character want?’) This will be a roundabout discussion of narrative of various kinds, including a short reading of an excerpt, discussion and analysis of a song, a writing exercise, and possible high-level stick figure drawings on a chalkboard.

3:00 pm
Everything is Personal: Nonfiction From All Angles, a panel with Steve Almond, Lee Montgomery, and Luis Alberto Urrea, moderated by Elissa Schappell
Few writers believe in a neat divide between fiction and nonfiction. Most of us, regardless of our genre, use our lives, in one way or another, as jumping off points and framing devices for the stories we tell. In this discussion, we will look at different ways one can approach nonfiction, from the personal essay, memoir, to creative journalism.

Saturday, July 16th

1:00 pm
A Sort of Leaning Against: Writing With, From, and For Others,
With Maggie Nelson
“Should there ever be more/ than a sort of leaning against and trust a food/ for another from out of one,” Alice Notley asks in her poem “Lady Poverty.” This talk will explore the creative possibilities of this “leaning against”: the ways in which a certain dependency on others—especially on the ideas and words of others—can generate our own original form and content. Topics discussed: forms of address; perils and promises of quotation; raw vs. digested ideas; “fact” and its aporias; non-narrative pacing; abundance in impoverishment

2:00 pm
Talking Dialogue,
With Dorothy Allison
Let us talk about dialogue, not only ‘he said, she said, none of them said a thing’ but the whole range of language issues–what is said and not said—how people speak on the page, dialect and rhythm, pacing, patterns in speech and expression, and most importantly the language of gesture and avoidance. On the page avoidance is subtle and telling and requires a certain amount of grace in detail. It is what we realize that we know about a character that surprises and remakes what the action would seem to have been suggesting.

3:00 pm
Funny Is The New Deep,
With Steve Almond
Contrary to popular belief writing funny doesn’t mean sacrificing depth. On the contrary, for most literary writers the comic impulse is inexplicitly linked to tragedy. In this informal and possibly incoherent session, we’ll look at the work of Simon Rich, Lorrie Moore, George Saunders, and others, in an effort to understand why the path to our grief is so often paved with jokes.

READINGS
To be held in Cerf Amphitheater

Sunday, July 10th

8:00 pm
Reading and signing with Scott Sparling, Dorianne Laux, Jonathan Dee

Monday, July 11th

8:00 pm
Reading and signing with Karen Shepard, Mary Szybist, Benjamin Percy

Tuesday, July 12th

8:00 pm
Reading and signing with, Lee Montgomery, Lan Samantha Chang, Dorothy Allison

Wednesday, July 13th

8:00 pm
Reading and signing with Maggie Nelson, Luis Alberto Urrea, Steve Almond

Thursday, July 14th

8:00 pm
Reading and signing with Pauls Toutonghi, Matthew Dickman, Peter Rock

Friday, July 15th

8:00 pm
Reading and signing with Charles D’Ambrosio, Kevin Young, Joy Williams

Saturday, July 16th

8:00 pm
Reading and signing with D.A Powell, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard

Once accepted and registered into the program, Workshop participants who have completed a book of stories or poems, a novel, or a memoir and want to receive a consultation on ways to improve their manuscripts are invited to apply for a mentorship with select faculty, guests, and editors. To be considered for this program, please fill out the mentorship application included in your acceptance packet. Tin House will then submit a query to your choice of faculty member. If the mentor is available, the student is required to submit his or her book-length manuscript before the Workshop begins.

A mentorship is not an edit, but a manuscript evaluation. Students can expect to meet with their mentors two to three times throughout the week of the Workshop and receive a comprehensive three-to-five-page manuscript evaluation.

For an updated list of faculty, staff, and guests available as mentors, please email Lance at workshop@tinhouse.com or call the office at 503-219-0622. Mentorships are highly competitive. Acceptance into the Workshop does not automatically qualify students for the mentor program. Please keep in mind, if your manuscript exceeds 250 pages, the cost of the mentor program will increase and we do not accept manuscripts over 350 pages long.

MENTORSHIP:
$750.00 for manuscripts under 250 pages
$1000.00 for manuscripts over 250 pages