Tin House

I’ve written a week’s worth of blog posts about the Tin House Writing Workshop:

Saturday, July 17

Where did the time go? One day I’m searching for coffee in the morning, and the next thing I know it’s the last day of the conference. There are no morning lectures today, only our last workshop session from 10 to 12:30, and then Robert Boswell’s lecture at 2 o’clock on complexity in fiction. Tonight at the student union — the long room that is like a miniature converted barn, or 1920’s stock room, with hardwood floors, double-hung windows, and huge wooden beams running through the space of the cathedral ceiling — is the dreaded dance party. There is nothing left to do but try to sketch a few scenes from the workshop. Herewith, some of my favorite moments, or at least the most memorable.

The Coffee Wars

I wanted coffee when I first woke up, before I’d even showered. It didn’t seem like much to ask.

But I didn’t want to dress and dash over to the cafeteria just to get a cup of coffee. Besides, I wasn’t sure exactly when they opened. Meanwhile, there was a coffee machine in the lounge near my room, with paper filters even. It was just sitting there on the counter of the kitchenette, taunting me.

The other morning I decided to make the trip to the cafeteria for coffee at 7:00, because I was desperate, I guess, but when I got there, I learned that the cafeteria doesn’t open until 7:30. Defeated yet again.

OK, I decided, I will walk to the edge of campus. Surely I’ll find a convenience store or something. I went north and, sure enough, a ten minute walk took me to the edge of campus where, across the street, there was a 7-11. But at the door I realized I hadn’t brought my wallet. It was, at least, a nice 20-minute morning walk.

That afternoon I made the trip again and, finally, I had a pound of coffee to throw in the freezer in the lounge.

So for the last two mornings, today and yesterday, I’ve had my glorious cup of morning coffee first thing out of bed.

And each day, as I left my room to go next door to make a morning pot, I have accidentally locked myself out.

The first day it happened, Zach, another student in my workshop who just happened to be leaving his room to take a shower, let me call security on his cell phone. Today, luckily, I found a phone in the lounge, and discovered that when you dial “0” you get the switchboard.

“Can you connect me to security?” I asked the woman who answered.

“Actually, this is security,” she said. “It’s the same number.”

It was the woman I had spoken to the day before, the first day I stood in the hallway in my boxers, a cup of fresh-brewed coffee in my hand, asking myself why life is always throwing at me one more thing than I can manage.

“Um,” I said, starting to laugh, “I locked myself out again.”

“Yeah,” she said, “I recognize your voice.” Now both of us were laughing. “I’ll send someone over in a minute,” she said.

The Reed College Crest

The official seal of Reed College is, it appears, a griffin (a winged lion with fangs and fierce claws protruding from its paws) emblazoned on a crest. Around the border of the crest, on each of its three sides, where the Latin motto of any other college would be, are the words “Atheism,” “Communism” and “Free Love.”

Yesterday I bought a coffee travel mug decorated with the seal. It plays a wonderful trick on the eye, because when you look at the seal you expect to see the typical inscrutable Latin words. But no. Instead you see this wonderful heresy, inscribed with all the trappings of authority.

Seeing the official seal of the college on the coffee mugs in the book store reminded me that Reed College was founded by, or at least in the name of, John Reed, the American communist portrayed in the movie “Reds” starring Warren Beatty and Dianne Keaton. It’s wonderful there is a college established in his memory. It’s a small and beautiful campus that feels like an enclave or a bubble. It also makes me wonder, though, if places like this — remote, small, and thankfully serene — represent the last bastions of liberalism in our country. I try not to think so.

The Fire Kids

They were just out there on the quad one evening, when all of us were spilling onto the grass with our drinks after the readings ended. It was still light out and they were juggling and spinning hula hoops. We wondered if they were from some kind of summer theater program, or maybe a small circus. One of them was masterfully keeping four juggling pins aloft.

When night fell, they lit their implements on fire. One young man lit up a pair of poi balls (balls tethered to ropes about 2 feet long), which he swung around rhythmically. You could smell the fuel in the air. Then he lit the ends of long bar that he spun in his hands and balanced on his shoulders. Another man lit a whip and snapped it, sending flames into the air. A woman lit a hula hoop on fire and, after pausing to let the flames die down, spun it around her hips, her mid-section, and her neck. They were all fit, beautiful, and young, and the flames lit their perfect bodies in a kind of sunset glow.

As I was leaving I walked over and asked one of the guys about them. Maybe they were from a theater program? Were members of a circus? Were passing through from out town?

“No,” he said, “we’re just students here. Actually, most of us are psychology majors.”

Antonya Nelson’s Craft Lecture

In one hour yesterday, Antonya Nelson brilliantly reduced fiction writing to a ten-step process. She proposed a method for writing a story in ten drafts, each of which incorporates a new narrative element and makes the story more complete. Sitting there, listening to every word and writing down the steps and the examples she was giving, it really seemed like it would work.

Doing the Wave for Karen

All the crazy ideas have been Shelley’s. She’s been leaving items on the workshop table for Karen to find when she arrives each morning — a menu from the cafeteria, a croquet mallet, a salt and pepper shaker — and she arranged the off-campus dinner and trip to Powell’s on Wednesday night. It was her idea that we sit in the front row the night that Karen read, and do the wave when she was introduced. Every member of the workshop joined in. Karen seemed slightly overwhelmed.

“Oh my God!” she said. “That’s never happened before.”

Wednesday, July 14

I’d seen her around, and she’d told me about how after the cancer she became a stand-up comic, and then went to the Kennedy School, where she showed a YouTube clip of her stand-up to Roger Rosenblatt, who said, “Your mission is to find a way to tell your story.”

At a writing conference in Maine last summer her instructor said, “Tell your story in only three word sentences.”

We were just finishing breakfast, and had decided to skip the morning lecture so we could keep talking.

She asked if she could read me her story in sentences of only three words. I said yes, but I also tried to imagine a string of three-word sentences, and frankly didn’t see how it could be good.

Then she started reading.

“Day after Christmas. It’s your doctor. It’s bad news. Really bad news. You have cancer. The bad kind. Ovarian, stage two.”

And so it went. Relentless. Each sentence a short, sharp, stab. When she read the last paragraph, in which she had recovered, and was walking on an island off the northeast coast with her partner, her new life before her, promising to take better care of herself, to stop trying to save the world and save herself instead, I broke down into tears.

Why was I crying? I had just slept 9 hours. I wasn’t tired. She took my hand. What she had read was so beautiful. I asked her to turn her laptop toward me. “That’s so beautiful,” I said. “It’s so beautiful.” I wanted to see what exactly had affected me so strongly, why what she had written had cut me so deep. Even when the writing is powerful, I don’t usually cry.

But when I looked, all I saw were the words on the screen. Individually they seemed so simple, so innocuous. Yet when I read them again, they had the same effect. The simple story of a woman who had survived a brush with death, walking with her lover on a coastal island, recommitting herself to creating a safe harbor in her life in which she could be happy. Even though I was reading to myself, my eyes welled up a second time.

Tuesday, July 13

Yesterday Karen gave us a writing exercise: Write the obituary of an inanimate object. Here is what I wrote:

Barbie Dead at 5 after Long Struggle with Progressive Obsolescence

    The plastic toy doll Barbie, of the bedroom of Jessica Humphries of 14 Glenwood Place, Peoria, Illinois, died Friday after a long struggle with progressive obsolescence. She was five.

    Barbie was given a perfunctory eulogy, in a brief ceremony conducted by Jessica’s mother, Marybeth Humphries, in Jessica’s bedroom. “I’m putting Barbie in this shoebox with the dominoes,” Mrs. Humphrey declared, as she slotted a red Macy’s shoebox into a square space between a dollhouse and a “Chutes and Ladders” game. “But you can always get her out by asking me.”

    “Mom! Jeez!” Jessica replied, “can’t you see Marnie and I are playing Clue?”

    It had been a rough three months for Barbie, who battled ever-increasing periods of inactivity and neglect, which, according to those who knew her, began shortly after she received an unsightly gash in her abdomen from Tango, the family Golden Retriever, in a harrowing fetching incident. But the end came when Brian Farquar, of Jessica Humprhies’ sixth grade class at Rosedale Elementary, seemed to notice Jessica for the first time, and asked for her help with a vexing multiplication problem assigned by Mr. Andrews in fifth period. Brian even let Jessica lean in close to him, so that she was almost whispering in his ear as she demonstrated how to carry the three and add it to the left-hand column to produce the final result. The next day, Jessica asked her mother if she could wears boots and a skirt to class instead of jeans, and less than one week later — the exact time of death is not known — Barbie became completely dead to Jessica. On Friday, Mrs. Humphries memorialized the doll’s death by relegating Barbie to the closet shoebox, along with the other toys and games Jessica no longer asks her parents to play, including Go Fish and Uncle Wiggly.

    Barbie’s death marked the end of a vibrant if unexpectedly short life in which the plastic, quasi-anatomically correct doll enjoyed such pastime as shopping, riding in the Corvette convertible of her platonic companion Ken, shopping, going to the beach, shopping, going to Paris with Hello Kitty, shopping, talking on her cell phone to her platonic companion Ken, and, in one particularly memorable outing, traveling to the Moon in the plastic lunar landing module constructed by Jessica’s older brother Kerrigan.

    Jessica could not be reached for comment, but her mother offered this assessment of Barbie’s life: “She’ll be right here if you want her, ” Mrs. Humprhies said, “I can always get her back down for you.”

    “OKAY,” Jessica said. “I heard you the first time.”

    Barbie is survived by her platonic companion Ken, the stuffed Hello Kitty doll Jessica’s friend Andie gave her for her fourth birthday, and a myriad of stuffed animals the Rosedale Elementary sixth grader still keeps on her bed.

Monday, July 12

Monday Morning

Already I am in the heart of the whirlwind. I remember this from two years ago. The schedule doesn’t look packed when you see it on the page, but there is never enough time. These entries are going to have to be short.

The main news: I have found, this morning, in the cupboard in the lounge across the hall, a coffee maker and a set of paper filters. All I need to make coffee every morning is a bag of the stuff, pre-ground. There is a God.

I remember this from two years ago — when you wake up in the morning there’s no way to get coffee. The cafeteria doesn’t open until 8. It seemed then, and does now, like a kind of small crime, that there was no way to have coffee first thing in the morning. And I remember scouring the dorm I stayed in two years ago for a coffee machine, without any luck. How could there not be a single coffee maker? I asked. I finally found some instant coffee packets at the student union, and a hot pot from another dorm building. My fellow workshop attendees thought my efforts to arrange my morning cup were comic. I thought it was a kind of even smaller crime (a lesser included offense) that they thought this, but I didn’t hold it against them.

People come to this conference, of course, to learn the magical secret of writing fiction. You might, for example, read one of the stories in the short story collection of my workshop leader Karen and ask, how does she do it? Well, after sharing a meal last night in the cafeteria with her and my workshop classmate and McSweeney’s writer Marco, I have the answer: She simply writes down what she’s thinking. That’s really all there is to it. She sits at the keyboard and just transcribes the torrent of genius that is coming from whatever part of the brain produces language. I guess I don’t know if this is really what she does. I’m saying, this is really all she needs to do.

It’s really something. To give just one (fairly mundane) example from our hilarious and excited conversation over dinner, Marco was at one point arguing that pigeons were not really so bad. They had gotten a bum rap, Marco thought. “What’s wrong with pigeons?” he asked.

“They’re disease carriers,” Karen said, laughing, “disease carriers with demon-red eyes.”

Of course she also spoke, in the course of our normal conversation, of rivers of death, and a dans macabre going on over our heads. Not to suggest that she is possessed, or anything, but you can kind of see why she is such a great writer. She talks in Gothic sentences that are already half in-touch with the demon world.

In the evening Nick Flynn, Elissa Schappel and Robert Boswell read. They were all great, but Boswell was my favorite. Afterwards I bought his new collection, as well as a book he has on writing fiction, called “The Half-Known World.”

Here is an excerpt from “The Heday of the Insensitive Bastards” — it is the morning after the two ne’er-do-well characters have eaten shrooms and drank too much at a party that got a little out of hand:

Morning arrived. The sun should have heated me up, but my body held tenaciously to the cold. We stopped at a diner on the highway and ate eggs. Clete told me about the party, as I hadn’t been there. Stu had come around enough to have several drinks and pass out.

“His essential movement is to seek unconsciousness,” Clete said.

Our booth had bad springs, which put our heads close to our eggs, a handy convenience this morning. A scrambled bit of egg escaped my mouth and his the plate. Its brief contact with my palate had turned it an unnatural red, the color of maraschino cherries.

“Do I look funny?” I asked Clete.

Clete shrugged. “I’ve known you too long to say.”

Sunday, July 11

I’m writing this from a tiny first-floor dorm room on the Reed College campus in Portland, Oregon. The dorm is like a Holiday Inn Express but without the lobby and the free pastries, with sturdier walls, and with cheaper but somehow more comfortable and welcoming furniture. It’s like they furnished the student dorm rooms with Ikea, which I think is a nice touch. And, incidentally, pretty much the same furniture I have in my apartment in D.C. The walls in my room are painted sky blue. There’s no air conditioning, but the windows open, although there are no screens on them. I just killed a mosquito, in mid air, by clapping my hands.

I’ve never been to Oberlin, but I would describe Reed as the Oberlin of the West Coast. It is a small private college with stately red brick buildings in a Victorian/Gothic style arranged around several large green fields. There is a quad with criss-crossing sidewalks and, behind the cafeteria and student activities buildings on the north side of the quad, a hillside leading down to a lake. On the hillside there is an outdoor amphitheater with wooden benches. The amphitheater is where the evening readings are held. The campus lies within the Portland city limits, about 10 miles from downtown. I’m guessing a couple thousand students go to college here.

In short, the setting is idyllic.

The Tin House Writing Workshop is one-part intensive creative writing workshop and one-part fantasy literary camp for wanna-be writers. In the mornings there is a lecture, then workshop from 10 to 12:30, and after lunch a series of panels on the various elements of writing craft, including a panel on how to find an agent or shop a manuscript. After dinner there are evening readings by the faculty and some visiting writers and, after that, drinking in the beautiful open student center, a large room with a dark-stained oak floor and windows that open out onto the quad. Or you can take your gin and tonic onto the quad itself.

The schedule basically creates a whirlwind intensive week in which participants spend the their time: 1) Talking through one more time with your peers in workshop why the story you have labored over and poured your heart into doesn’t quite work; and 2) enjoying the life of an organic and authentic, but temporary literary community. In a way the workshop is like a drug that puts out of your mind the awful reality of how difficult it really is to write a good short story.

But all of this is mere prologue. The real questions are: Will I have as much fun as I had here two years ago? Then, Stephen Elliott hugged me when he first saw me on the quad. Later, he organized a pickup basketball game and invited me to join. At the closing dance party I danced with Aimee Bender, and at the end of the evening she looked me in the eye and said, “I’m sure we’ll see each other again.” Aimee Bender probably wouldn’t remember this exchange, which lasted five seconds, but it stuck with me. That summer was only two years ago, but sitting here in my little dorm room, getting ready to go to the introductory meeting, it feels like ten years and a thousand miles away. Stephen Elliott isn’t here, and neither is Aimee Bender. In the time since I was last here I have attended an artist colony and written a column for McSweeney’s, but I feel strangely less confident as a writer, at least as a writer of short fiction.

And it goes without saying, of course, that Aimee Bender and I have never crossed paths.