Empathy. Mercy. Grace.
One of the finest literary magazines out there must be Tin House, a beautiful quarterly headquartered in Portland, Oregon. It began its amazing run in the literary world in 1999 featuring and discovering fabulous writers, in addition to hosting an annual summer writers’ workshop, plus, it was and still is known as a top-notch book publisher.
In 2019, the literary magazine itself ended print publication for reasons mostly centered on the cost of production. The closure of Tin House, despite its stature in the lit mag world, is the unfortunate reality of the publishing world: it’s just not a lucrative business. Rather, the source materials—paper, printing presses, and yes, writers themselves, are getting harder to come by.
But of course, there’s an endless supply of writers. Anyone who writes a tweet, a Facebook or Instagram post, or publishes a blog is a writer. It’s the ancient craft of writing, working with an editor or a mentor, and then garnering the attention and eventually the love of a publisher to bring your work to life that’s on the wane.
In the early 2000’s I was lucky to attend the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and it forever changed me as a writer. There, I was immersed into the literary world sharing my words, celebrating others’, and living in a ten-day dream.
My mentor was Steve Almond, best known for his treatise on the candy industry, Candy Freak, his numerous short stories, essays, and books on politics and civility, and most recently, his co-hosted podcast “Dear Sugar, with Wild author, Cheryl Strayed.
In class, just behind his often comedic affect was a sober voice of reason about the path we, his love monkeys, were embarking on. When he said writing and everything that goes with it was a dying art, he wasn’t wistful so much as he was stone-cold honest.
The reality of what we were doing together in that room that summer, twenty-some mentees and a mentor critiquing each other’s stories, was a modern-day version of the oral tradition of humanity. We were the storytellers of the new day, and so we had better take it god damn seriously.
I think of Steve and the few classmates I still keep in contact with when I come back to the blank page. I think about what we learned in that room: empathy, mercy, and grace—things not taught in school, or modeled by many people these days.
It was those talks around the imaginary fire, sharing legends, fables, and myths that we taught each other our ways. Those are the moments that will be with me forever. It’s those moments that will always live, even as the art withers.
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Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash
