Tin House began as a literary magazine in the United States in 1999, venturing into publishing books three years later, and now also hosts annual writers’ workshops in Portland, Oregon. According to the brief introduction by Lee Montgomery, it is from these workshops that this book originated, and it is a stimulating and provocative collection.
Not all of the contributing writers were familiar to me, but all of the seventeen essays are worth reading, with several being exceptionally useful, both to writers and teachers of writing, who will garner ideas aplenty. The topics discussed are place, sex, simplicity, editing (using The Great Gatsby’s evolution as an example), character motivation, fairy tales, material, time, imaginary worlds, scene-making, Shakespeare, revision, poetry, telling versus showing, and empathy. And two essays that are difficult to describe in one word: ‘Let Mot Incorrect’ by Jim Crusoe, which is about getting to the ‘right word’ through many wrong ones, and ‘Lost in the Woods’ by Antonya Nelson, a rather beautiful dissertation on lostness in story, the characters’ search for each other, loneliness and aloneness.
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