November/December 2016
Michael Szczerban
Editor Rob Spillman talks Tin House—the magazine, the books, the summer workshop—and the pleasures, perils, and surprises of independent publishing.
Article Thumbnail:
spillman_thumbnail.jpg
Page 1
This is all the info relevant to page 1 of the article.
As an editor with one of the largest trade publishing houses in New York, I’m usually inundated by new material from agents, feverishly working with writers on books I’ve already acquired, worried about the ones that have just landed in stores, and excited by the dozens of titles a year that my colleagues publish. The work is all-consuming and feels important—which makes it all too easy to believe that American book culture begins and ends with what we at the Big Five see fit to publish.
But as much as I might like to think that our books are the center of the literary universe, the truth is more complicated. That’s why I look forward to reading this magazine’s annual Independent Publishing Issue: Some of the most engaging and adventurous work published today comes from presses far beyond the reach of conglomerate media companies. From coast to coast, indie publishers are responsible for contributing to a rich and varied literary landscape and are essential to the health and creativity of the industry at large, as well as the communities where they reside.
One of the most prominent figures in independent publishing is the editor and writer Rob Spillman. Now the editor of the literary magazine Tin House, Spillman entered the book industry the old-fashioned way: with a much-loved job at a used bookstore in high school. After college, in the late 1980s, he stuffed envelopes for a year as a publicity assistant at Random House and began to write for the trade publication Kirkus Reviews. Then, as a fact checker and freelance journalist, he worked for Spy magazine, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker. Later, he was the book columnist for Details magazine and has since written for many other magazines and newspapers.
In 1999 Spillman and his wife, writer Elissa Schappell, launched Tin House with Portland-based publisher Win McCormack. Sixty-seven issues later, the magazine is a bicoastal destination for literary writing of all kinds, and the organization has expanded into book publishing (Spillman serves as the executive editor of Tin House Books) and workshops (the Tin House Summer Workshop, which Spillman cofounded, is approaching its fifteenth year). In 2015 he received the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing and the VIDO Award from VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.
As our conversation began, I asked Spillman about his coming-of-age memoir, All Tomorrow’s Parties, which was released by indie publisher Grove Atlantic this past April.
Are you still busy promoting your book?
I’m still out there talking about it. I’m going to a bunch of fall festivals. When I toured in April, I did thirty straight days, thirty straight events…or some of those days I was doing two a day. I was going to colleges and all through the Midwest and Texas and California. I was reliving it and talking about it every day. It was a little insane.
Did you put together that breakneck tour yourself, or did Grove Atlantic?
It was a combination. Grove has been amazing. They said, “You don’t have to go to Arkansas. You can build in some days off.” They tried to get me to back off the crazy schedule. But I get asked to do events at a lot of colleges that wouldn’t otherwise work out to visit.
That is, to speak to students as the editor of Tin House?
Yes, and people who know me had heard about the book and invited me as well. I packed in a whole bunch of college things, and then put in bookstores and reading series around there. I visited almost everybody who’s ever asked me to visit, especially in places to which I wouldn’t otherwise be able to make a dedicated trip—like Grinnell, in the middle of Iowa. I drove all the way from Chicago to Denver.
That had to be a singular experience.
It was intense. The only thing I can liken it to is being a roadie for my daughter’s band. She was very successful—she was in a teen feminist band called Care Bears on Fire. They played Lollapalooza, were on Letterman, and performed at a lot of festivals. I was their main roadie. I would drive the van around and do sound check and things like that. The big difference is that musicians are treated a lot better than writers at most places.
I had a sort of awakening in L.A., five years ago, when they were playing the Viper Room on the Sunset Strip—a hard-rock club where Guns N’ Roses played. I had simultaneously set up a reading at Book Soup. I got to the Viper Room for sound check, then went over and did the Book Soup thing, and came back to the actual gig. At the Viper Room, there are all these people to help us load in, and there’s a big food spread, and they’re asking, “What else do you need?” Then I get to Book Soup, and they’re like, “Oh dude...yeah...the reading, man...I guess we should put out some chairs. We don’t have any water but I’ll give you a couple bucks to go to the 7-11 for some.” I was like, “Wait a minute! I’m totally in the wrong business here.”
The book tour felt a little like that. I went to a lot of places that are off the normal tour circuit, but those were some of my favorite places.
That tour must have been half promotion, half research into the audience for literary publishing. Who’s out there?
The best part was meeting a lot of the legendary booksellers who are out there. I went to the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute, where I met the most passionate group of readers. I’m a voracious reader, but I felt like such a slacker in comparison to the booksellers. They’re the best-read group of people I’ve ever met, and so passionate. They were excited about the obvious books that were going to be huge, like Emma Cline’s The Girls. But the big story there was Maggie Nelson. Everybody was lining up to talk to her.
Every indie bookstore I went into, I’d ask, “What are you excited about?” and it would often be something like Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies. Multiple people were pushing that. It’s from Nightboat Books, a small press. But it was everywhere. At Prairie Lights [in Iowa City], Brazos [in Houston], Powell’s [in Portland, Oregon], that was the book that people were excited about.
Living in Brooklyn, and bouncing between here and Portland, I’m used to super-liberal, very well-read, highly educated domains. But going through the Midwest and seeing passionate readers everywhere, in Decorah, Iowa, or Manhattan, Kansas, was heartening.
Did your college stops give you a new perspective on the American student or the state of the literary academy?
I saw a real range out there. As I said, I went to Iowa but also Luther College and Grinnell and Kansas State. I was really impressed with the off-the-road schools, their non-entitlement and real hunger for storytelling.
There were two in particular that are really being affected by right-wing Reaganomics governors: Northeastern Illinois, which had its bookstore closed down and summer school classes shut down because they ran out of money, and the same with Kansas State. Education is on the front line of all cuts. They’re having to battle just for basic services. Here, I teach a seminar at Columbia, where it’s sort of the opposite; we’re resource rich.
There was a real appreciation for going into those places. They have no money. At Northeastern Illinois, there was a good chance I was going to be the last invited reader because all funding had been cut. But it’s just incomprehensible to me that education would be the first thing cut on a state budget.
Let’s back up a bit. You were born in West Berlin to expat musicians, and moved back to the States when you were nine or ten years old. Tell me about growing up that way.
It was a little like Eloise at the Plaza Hotel. I would go straight from school to backstage, and didn’t spend a lot of time playing with other kids. When I moved here, my father taught at the Eastman School of Music, and I did the same thing. In Germany I spent a lot of time backstage and running around in the rafters, and I was also on stage a lot. I would get thrown into any kid’s role at the opera because I was around and would actually do it.
I was born in 1964, the same year Dr. Strangelove came out, and the Berlin Wall had gone up in August of 1961. We were in the epicenter of the Cold War. I went to the JFK International School and you could see fully-loaded B52s flying over every day. There was an Army base nearby that would scramble at night, and we’d literally see tanks in the street. During the Prague Spring of 1968, an Army friend of ours called my father and said, “If I call again, just hang up and go to the airport. Just pack and go,” because the city was about to get closed off again. German-Russian troops circled the city in case there was an outbreak like in Prague. So there was a sense of tension that I was vaguely aware of.
At the same time, West Berlin was also this incredibly liberal cultural mecca. Because it was deep inside Communist territory, it was really cheap. Berlin was also a neutral city, meaning that if you were a resident, you didn’t have to do your two years of compulsory service—kind of a wrinkle of the postwar treaty. So if you were a liberal German, you would move to Berlin to get out of the draft. And, of course, there was a cultural war going on, so the arts were heavily subsidized and it became a great place for artists and musicians to go. We never had a lock—I don’t remember having a key to our apartment. I was completely unaware of racism then. I didn’t have American TV. I was culturally blind to what was happening in the U.S. until I moved here.
How did your parents get to Berlin, and why did they return to the United States?
They were drawn by opportunity. They both got Fulbrights to go after graduate school and then it was the place to be for classical musicians. You could make a living right away out of grad school there. Here, you’d have to scrape.
My parents split when I was about three because my father is gay. My mother decided to come back to the U.S. first. She went to graduate school at Tulane to get a teaching degree, and I stayed with my father for several years. Then he got a job at Eastman, and that’s when we moved. But there were several years where it was just the two of us and I would go visit her in New Orleans.
Do you have any siblings?
No. And without any references to the contrary, I thought my childhood was totally normal.
What happened when you returned to the States?
I spent two years in Rochester, New York, and then moved to be with my mother. She remarried and moved to Baltimore. My parents had met at Eastman, and my mother remarried a classmate of theirs, a trombone player who was in the Baltimore Symphony. I enrolled in the Boys’ Latin School there, which was all white, male, racist, homophobic, and anti-intellectual. I hated it so much that I took courses to graduate a year early, at sixteen. But I was totally unprepared for college, and it was a total disaster. I left the University of Rochester and slid back to Baltimore. Where we were living downtown was worse than The Wire. I used to get mugged once a month at my bus stop. I took the city bus out to the suburbs and it would be the same group of kids, shaking down the dorky white kid at the inner city bus stop.
They were your age?
Yes. They went to the metal-detector high school near where I lived. I would have been the only white person to go to that high school. But I had no idea what that meant. I didn’t know what segregation was. I was like, “What’s going on?”
I had felt totally safe in Berlin. The only time I felt unsettled was in East Berlin—it was scary over there. But in West Berlin I never felt scared at all. When I moved to Baltimore, my mom gave me a shiny new Schwinn bicycle. I started riding around downtown Baltimore. I rode right through the middle of a football game in the middle of a street in the worst neighborhood. They were all teens, no shirts, tattooed, and I rode right through the middle of the game, like, “Hey guys!” They all just stared. Finally, one kid said, “Somebody take his bike!” I said, “What?” Then they started laughing at me and another kid said, “Oh man, let him go. He’s from Oh-kla-HO-ma.” I’ll never forget the way he enunciated it. I looked so dorky. I pedaled back home and my mom had to explain that maybe there were places I should not go with my new bike.
You had a lot of catching up to do with American culture. How’d you do that?
When I entered school here, the lingua franca was television and sports—but not soccer, though I was huge soccer fan. It was baseball and football and what was on TV. But I’d had no access to American TV at all, so I had no idea who Charlie’s Angels were or anything like that. I would go home and watch reruns just to figure things out.
I started reading heavily, but it wasn’t to figure out U.S. culture. It was more to escape and to find myself. I felt more comfortable in fictional worlds than in my own skin—much more comfortable in Narnia than in my mother’s house in Baltimore, where I didn’t know who or what I was. But in Narnia I related to the Pevensies; I wanted to be with them much more than I wanted to be at home with myself. By the time I got to Baltimore I was alienated from everything. I considered myself a Berliner even though I had no family there and my military brat friends had left too. I didn’t fit in America, but there was nothing to return to in Berlin. Reading was an escape. Trying to find other alienated people—that’s what drew me in. I think I’m still that way. I just finished the Elena Ferrante series and I felt so invested in that brutal Naples neighborhood. It felt more real to me than my own life somehow.
It’s interesting how many alienated people find a community in books and then go on to make a profession of publishing. That’s a theme of this Agents & Editors series.
Whenever I talk to up-and-coming writers or students I emphasize the non-hierarchical nature of literature, in that the only difference between them and me is that I’ve been doing it longer. The only real difference is that I’ve figured out how to be on the other side of the podium. Almost everybody in this business is a socially awkward book nerd who just loves to read and feels more comfortable in books than in their own skin.
When young writers are going out into the world and submitting their work, they need to imagine they’re submitting to someone who’s essentially just like them. You are preaching to the converted, not someone who’s sitting up on the top of a tower with lightning bolts looking to zap the puny mortals.
Plus, so much of this work is serendipitous. A lot of the work I got when I was first starting out was from being in the right place at the right time: doing something for one editor and then being in conversation with them when something else came up, and they say, “Oh, my wife happens to be an editor…. You should talk to her about that!” You could send twenty-five pitches on that same subject and get completely shot down everywhere, but an offhand remark leads to an open door.
So you washed out of Rochester and returned to Baltimore. What was your path forward?
I was running at the time. I ran cross-country in high school, and wanted to run track in college, but I was too young to run at Rochester—I was going to start my sophomore year. I enrolled at Towson University; back then it was Towson State, the local giant state school, and they had a good track team. My short-term goal was to run and fumble my way to any kind of degree. And I worked at a used bookstore—the Kelmscott Bookshop in Baltimore—and it was one of the best jobs I've ever had. It was run by this great couple, the Johansons, who were ex-Hopkins literature professors who drove around the city buying up estate sales. They completely crammed an old row house with books.
I was their first employee. They had a back room where they had thrown all the books they couldn’t deal with. It was so filled that the door would only open an inch and they were pushing books up and over the top. My first job was to clear out that back room. There were two years of books back there. It was kind of moldy and there was a bad smell coming from the back corner. By the time I got there, I found some desiccated rats that had gnawed their way down into the floor.
But it was a great job because they were absent-minded professor types who read everything. I would be trying to shelve something like The Magic Mountain, and one of them would say, “So, Rob, having been in Germany, you obviously must have read Thomas Mann.” I hadn’t read Thomas Mann—I was seventeen and didn’t want to read a seven-hundred-page book about a sanatorium. But they’d tell me about it and press the book into my hands, urging me to take it home and read it. It was a constant seminar on the history of literature.
Were you receptive to that?
It was great. I was a voracious reader, and they were constantly buying more stuff. It was a Sisyphean task to catch up with everything they bought.
I got a psych degree at Towson. I started spending my summers in Aspen, because my father ran the music side of the opera program at the Aspen music festival. I’d go out there and run in the mountains all summer, and worked at the one gas station in town. It was self-service, and only rich tourists would come in, so traffic was pretty light. I sat in a lawn chair in the middle of the lot with fives, tens, and twenties wrapped around one set of fingers to make change and with a book in the other hand. I read a book or two a day.
How did you make your way to New York?
Even though I had worked in the bookstore and was a big reader, I had this feeling that publishing was a cool-kid club dominated by the Ivy Leagues. You had to have gone to the right schools and had the right internship and known somebody to get in. I didn't think that someone who had failed out of one school and gone to a crappy state school could work in publishing.
After college I got into the University of Arizona graduate program in sports psychology and exercise physiology. After maybe six weeks in the desert, I thought, “What the fuck am I doing with my life?” I dropped out and took a redeye to New York with $150 and no connections and no idea of how publishing worked at all. I just wanted to be here. I slept on a friend’s sofa and got a job at a postcard factory in SoHo.
The cheapest apartment listing I could find in the Village Voice was a three-bedroom share on Staten Island. My rent was $90. This was 1986, and even then it was pretty cheap. I got the apartment and slept on the floor for the first two weeks. After my first paycheck, I bought a futon. I worked in the factory for a year and then through my girlfriend, now wife, I got an interview at Random House for an entry-level publicity job stuffing envelopes. I didn’t seem like a maniac, so they gave me a chance.
Spillman opener
Page 2
Tell me about Random House at that time—now almost twenty years ago.
There were a lot of old-time Random House editors there, including Joe Fox. I would sneak into his office and play chess with him while he smoked and told me stories about Truman Capote. It was an education on old-school publishing. The first two books I was even vaguely associated with were Pete Dexter’s Paris Trout and Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, which both won the National Book Award that year, in fiction and nonfiction. They were the mensch-iest guys possible, and they appreciated anything that anybody did for them. I thought, “Publicity. I can do this! This is awesome!” And then the next book was Thin Thighs in 30 Days. Everybody around me in publicity was fired up about it, ready to go, and I began to think, “Maybe this is not my thing after all.”
I lasted about a year, during which I started writing book reviews for anybody who would let me. I started with Kirkus; sometimes I’d write five a week just to build my clips. I was cranking them out and working on deadline. To this day if you ask me for eight hundred words on something, my first draft will be eight hundred and one. I’ve dialed in working fast on deadlines. I wrote for anyone who would give me a chance, not caring about the money. No one ever asked me where I went to school. They just asked to see my clips.
At the end of the year Spy magazine started up. My wife and I both went there. She was a reporter, and I was fact-checking and doing whatever else I could. It was an amazing atmosphere—all these wise-ass people who all thought it was going to be their last job in traditional publishing. We spent a lot of time making fun of everybody else. Everybody assumed we’d never work in this town again.
I’ve read about that time at Spy—a moment when a group of talented creative people had just enough of a devil-may-care attitude to do something really fresh.
It was really amazing. It started with Graydon Carter, this Canadian kid who never went to college and felt totally on the outside. He was like, “Screw you,” you know? And of course he has been the head of Vanity Fair for a long time.
Interesting, given that Vanity Fair now does an annual package anointing “the new establishment.”
I started paying the bills with both freelance writing and fact checking. I went to Vanity Fair and fact checked there, and the New Yorker. I would work a couple months on, a couple months off, and supplement it with magazine writing and book reviews.
I did a lot of work for Details at Condé Nast. When I started writing for them it was kind of the gay club-kid magazine for straight people. They had a high turnover with editors there, five editors in five years. By the time the fifth editor started, they were trying to compete with Maxim, and they started a book column. I wrote it for five years. It was a great gig: They let me write about whatever I wanted to write about; they just switched up the format. Sometimes it would be ten books a month, then just one book and an interview.
How did you decide which books and authors to write about?
Whatever I was excited about. I did the first interview with Donald Antrim, in which he talked about why he shouldn’t be interviewed because his book wasn’t out yet and he didn’t really exist in the world. It was a disaster but kind of awesome.
I’ve had a couple of gigs that came from being in the right place at the right time. For about six months I was People magazine’s alternative record reviewer. This was in 1990-’91, when alternative music and Nirvana were really big. My editor was a country music fan and had no idea about alternative music. He would occasionally assign me to do something like interview Peter Gabriel because he thought Peter Gabriel was an alternative guy. But I could write about anything I wanted there.
You must have been inundated with pitches from publicists. Are there pitches that you paid attention to—that you remember being effective?
I think the weirdest one I got was for an incredibly beautiful, weird, more or less self-published book that came out of Boston. It was by this guy, Jon Baird, who worked in an ad agency. It was a novel about an ad agency boss who wants to get into publishing but doesn't know how to do it. It was this cool, Gen-X, meta novel, but they had no idea about distribution or anything. It was so innovative and weird. I was like, “Hell yeah, I want to write about this weird-ass thing.”
After I wrote about the book they got distributed. He came down to thank me in person. Actually, when Tin House started, I hired him as my art director, because we needed someone really fast. My publisher had an idea of what he wanted from the art direction, which I was not happy with at all. He said, “Okay, show me something else.” John basically came up with the Tin House design in twenty-four hours.
The question of how to get attention for one’s work is on a lot of writer’s minds, especially now that the inches given to books in magazines and newspapers have been greatly reduced. “How do I get the attention of that editor, that critic, who with one great review could turn my writing into a career?”
My wife just retired from the Vanity Fair Hot Type column, which she wrote for over twenty years. We got every single pitch, every single book published, whether we wanted it or not. Every self-help book, every crazy thing that would never, ever get into Vanity Fair, we got delivered to our house. There are pitches with lots of bells and whistles and stuff attached to them, but I still think this is a word-of-mouth industry. There has to be genuine excitement about a project for it to lift off.
I remember getting that lesson at the first sales conference I went to. When Tin House Books started, we were distributed by Publishers Group West. We presented alongside some heavy hitters, and went out to lunch with the sales reps. They weren’t talking only about the obvious things were definitely going to sell. They were excited about Ben Percy’s collection of stories, Refresh, Refresh, from Graywolf. They said, “We know this is not going to sell really well, but we’re going to push for it. We’re going to fight for it.” You can’t fake that enthusiasm. I saw this when I was at Random House for a year in publicity. You see the machine cranking, and it can generate a lot of hype, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to translate into sales.
Let’s talk about Tin House. The first issue of the magazine was published in 1999. How did you become involved?
My wife and I were initially going to be coeditors, and we agreed to start working on it in 1998. Our publisher, Win McCormack, was based out of Portland but was bicoastal. He went around New York talking to people about starting a literary magazine. He’s on the board of the Nation and was friends with Barney Rosset [the late owner of Grove Press] and has an MFA from the University of Oregon. He had been an early backer of Mother Jones magazine and is very active politically, but he always wanted to start a literary magazine.
His initial idea was basically to start a Paris Review of the West Coast. At the time, Elissa was on maternity leave from the Paris Review, where she was the senior editor under George Plimpton. I had done a lot of work and events for the Paris Review because of Elissa. It’s awesome, but it is what it is. We made a countersuggestion to Win: “If we’re going to do this, let’s do something completely new and fun with the form. Let’s make it bicoastal.” I loved the energy and exciting stuff coming out of Portland, but New York is still the center of publishing, and you need that. “Let’s hire an art director to make it look good,” I said, because at the time literary magazines had this bland feel to them.
They looked like uncorrected proofs to me—not a lot of fun.
They had that galley feel, and really small type, and no layout. There was almost an attitude that they were like castor oil, that they were supposed to be good for you. But having worked at Spy, we thought, why not bring fun to the form and inject it with humor and employ some of the slick techniques of magazines that draw people in? When you get New York magazine, you go to the approval matrix first. It’s just what you do, even if you’re interested in the longer-form thing on the cover.
So we thought we’d have some recurring-column ideas, some short little fun things, and then the ten-thousand-word story by David Foster Wallace. From the start I wanted to do our Lost and Found section. I didn’t want to do straight book reviews; I wanted to have really good writers write about whatever they’re most passionate about.
We proposed all this to Win, and also said, “You have the means to make a splash if we’re going to do this. Let’s not sneak up on anybody. Let’s just start out with a bang, whether it fails spectacularly or catches on. Send us around to every book fair in the country and Frankfurt and London. Let’s go right to Len Riggio at Barnes & Noble,” which at the time was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of publishing and controlled distribution of literary magazines. If you could get into Barnes & Noble, that was, like, it. We were proposing a crazy commitment to Win. I was expecting him to say, “Thank you, but see ya.” Instead, he said, “Sounds great. Let’s do it.”
We were like, “Oh no! Now we actually have to do it!” The next week, we found out that Elissa was pregnant with our second child and she got a two-book deal for her fiction, with Rob Weisbach Books at the old HarperCollins. Right after the book deal, HarperCollins was bought and they made it known that they were going to fold all the imprints, so she had to get in her finished draft immediately to not get orphaned.
What was originally a 50/50 arrangement immediately became 99/1. I became the editor, which probably saved our marriage. We still fight about it, but she’s now an ombudsman, an editor-at-large, and she settles disputes and comes in for aesthetic reasons.
What values did you bring to the magazine from the start?
I really wanted to find a new form for a literary magazine, and to feature voice-driven work, both in fiction and nonfiction, that favored emotion and engagement over irony and tiny epiphanies that were neatly tied up. I wanted to emphasize not just the best writers working today, or the most established writers, but emerging writers and voices that hadn’t made it on a national level. Marginalized voices—people of color, queer voices, women—were an emphasis from the start.
With the nonfiction, I wanted my favorite writers to write about whatever they’re most passionate about, whether it had a peg or a hook or not. In the first issue, Rick Moody wrote about Brian Eno. There was no reason for this. There was no Eno anniversary; there was nothing going on with Eno that was significant at the time. But Moody had always wanted to write about Eno and no one had let him. He wrote twenty paragraphs about Eno and then put them into a shuffle program. They came out totally randomly—and it worked.
Why not try that? We were looking for those kinds of pieces from the start.
Were you accepting submissions in addition to calling upon the writers you knew?
We put the word out for submissions but also contacted agents and begged, scraped, pleaded. I was amazed by how many people we didn’t know who were willing to give us a chance. If you write a genuine, enthusiastic letter to people you are genuinely excited about, they tend to respond. That was surprising. I didn’t know Dorothy Allison at all, and I wrote to her and David Foster Wallace and Ron Carlson and they all responded. The agents were a little more wary because there are a lot of magazines that start out and don’t continue, but we also paid well right from the beginning.
I also built in time between the first and second issues. The first issue is actually pretty easy; everybody’s willing to give you a chance. The second issue is where I’ve seen a lot of magazines get into trouble. They have an Oh shit! moment where they realize they have to do it all over again. We built in seven months before the first issue and another five months before the second issue. That wound up being a good strategic move.
We also found that literary magazines are a very low priority with the big printers, and if you don’t make your deadlines you get moved to the back of the queue. They’re like, “We’ve got the new Stephen King and we need all the presses. We’ll call you next month.”
We went right to Riggio and told him, “We’ve got serious backing and we’re going to stick around. This is what’s going to be in our first two issues.” He took us on. We were in eight hundred Barnes & Noble stores right from the start.
What was the size of the first printing?
Ten thousand copies, and we sent it far and wide. We really sent it everywhere, trying to get people’s attention, using it as a calling card. It did get into a lot of stores.
What about the second issue—another ten thousand?
Yes, and that was a pleasantly surprising thing to do. Another surprise was that the cover story of the first issue, by Jean Nathan, wound up leading to a bidding war for a book. It was a crazy story Jean wrote about the woman who wrote the Lonely Doll series in the late ’50s, early ’60s. They were huge children’s bestsellers that were really messed up. They featured this doll getting into trouble and then being spanked by a father figure—just creepy. The author did parallel photo shoots of herself dressed up when she was writing these books, and she lived with her mother until her mother died at ninety-seven. When we published the piece, all these women of a certain age remembered these kind of repressed memories of these books, including [literary agent] Binky Urban. She called me up out of the blue and said, “Oh my God. This has to be a book.” So Binky ended up representing it. That helped us.
The fiction we published obviously helped too, but we were known early on for doing these offbeat nonfiction pieces. We certainly started getting more of those in after that.
What issue number are you up to, and how many copies do you print?
We’re up to number sixty-seven, and the printing is about eighteen thousand. We do digital as well now. With the consolidation of Borders and Barnes & Nobles and indies, there was a while where bookstore sales were going down but subscriptions went up. The indies are now coming back. Digital sales have steadily gone up too.
You mentioned that you didn’t want to be the Paris Review of the West Coast when Tin House started. Do you feel in competition with them or anyone else today?
I think it’s friendly competition. We all collaborate with each other and I do a lot of events with like-minded organizations.One Story is down the street from us and I love what they do. If Hannah [Tinti, the editor in chief of One Story] beats me to a story I really want, I’m like, “Damn you, Hannah! I’ll get you next time!” But I should have been faster.
Of course there is the New Yorker. I’ve lost things to the New Yorker, when I’ve come up with an idea for someone and they have the right of first refusal and then the New Yorker runs it. But I’m always on the side of the writer. If they can get into the New Yorker, that’s awesome. What really pisses me off, though, is when a writer says something like, “I just had this story accepted at X small magazine, but if you are willing to run it I will turn them down.” That’s just such bad form. Screw you—no way.
I look to see what the start-ups are, to see who is doing innovative work, like Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading. I’m excited about that kind of thing, like when McSweeney’s was at its peak, when they were doing really innovative issues where the form of the magazine itself would change. That was impressive. Dave Eggers was actually here in New York when he started McSweeney’s, living on Ninth Street and I was living on Fifth Street. We started at almost the same time. It was about going against that castor-oil feel of literary magazines. “Let’s have some fun, let’s shake things up.”
Has there been a change in the type of material you look to publish?
There are trends and vogues, but I still search out the same kind of thing. Increasingly I look internationally, but I’ve always done that—our eighth issue was an all-international issue. I’m very interested in pieces about class. That’s a pressing issue, especially in publishing, where it’s a systemic problem. We’ve tweaked a few things, but I am continually surprised by the work I see. That’s my first criteria: if I’m surprised and excited by something I didn’t know was possible.
The work that comes in is what keeps your job fresh?
Yes. I will stop if I get cynical or feel like there’s nothing out there. And then there are things like Adam Johnson’s collection Fortune Smiles. We published three of the six novellas in that book and they were all surprising to me—formally and subject-wise—and I was really thrilled to see it get major awards, to see other people recognize him.
Especially with creative nonfiction right now, with this blurring of what creative nonfiction is, there’s really exciting work out there. Maggie Nelson, Sarah Manguso, Claudia Rankine, Nick Flynn…. I’m basically just listing all of Graywolf’s lineup, but they’ve just been killing it. I like work that you can’t classify. What is this? Is it an essay, is it a memoir? Is it fiction? What’s going on here?
How big has Tin House grown as an organization?
We’re now doing twelve to fifteen books a year as well as the magazine. Tin House Books started as a joint imprint with Bloomsbury for two years a decade ago, which was long enough to figure out that we wanted to do it ourselves. We also run a summer workshop that’s grown to 250 participants and eighteen faculty, and takes up a whole week. I have a full-time person who does that and works on the magazine. There’s overlap. Another person works on the magazine and the books.
What’s your role at Tin House Books?
I’m basically a scout. I bring things in and also do a lot of events and proselytize, but I don’t edit that much.
You’re out talking to agents—the Binky Urbans and PJ Marks of the world.
Yes, and funneling things back.
Do you take unsolicited submissions for the book program?
Not anymore. We used to, but got overwhelmed. We didn’t want to be false about the fact that we couldn’t keep up, so they have to be solicited now.
But it’s a different story for the magazine.
We’ve created an infrastructure to handle submissions for the magazine. From the start I wanted to publish new voices, so that was a necessity. We actively look for new voices. We get about twenty thousand submissions a year at peak. We’re now narrowing the submission period a little bit, to reel that in. We have at any one time twenty-five readers, who are all volunteers. Some are in Portland and others are scattered all over the place. Each unsolicited piece is usually read by three of our readers, who write reader reports on them and pass them on to our dedicated slush-wrangler. He then decides if they’re going to go to the general meeting.
Every Wednesday we have an edit meeting. I Skype in to Portland and Madison, Wisconsin, where our editor Michelle Wildgen is. The slush wrangler, Thomas Ross, decides what of the slush to put forward every week. All the other editors have carte blanche to put anything else up that they’ve gotten. We have relationships with agents and contributing editors who are looking for stuff out there, and writers we’ve worked with in the past.
At any one time we’re working at least three issues ahead. Right now [in August] we’re finishing reading for our open winter issue, and then we alternate theme issues. Spring is a theme issue, Rehab; summer is open; and Fall is a theme issue, True Crime. We put up pieces with issues already in mind. We’re trying to balance new voices with more established voices, more experimental with traditional forms.
We also keep a close watch on our gender numbers, and keep them in mind to balance things out. I never select something because of gender, but I’m looking for where to put it to balance the issues.
Rob Spillman
Page 3
Tell me about the gender balance of what the magazine publishes.
It is definitely 50/50 now. Because of VIDA we are consistently even. Actually, we publish slightly more women than men. When the first VIDA count came out, our numbers were among the best, but not where I wanted them to be. It was like 60/40, skewed toward men. I was surprised by this because I thought we were even, and that was the internal perception of all of us—both men and women. But then we dug deep into the numbers.
We found a lot of surprising things. Our slush pile was pretty much 50/50, and when we’re drawing from the slush, the numbers match that ratio. Solicited work, from agents, was two-thirds male. I also started looking at things like who resubmits after I send them a direct letter. Women were four times less likely to follow up than men on a direct re-solicit. You know: “This isn’t working for me, but please send me your next piece.” Men, 100 percent of the time, and usually like ten seconds later, will send me something. Women took rejection more personally. Being married to a female fiction writer I totally see this. It’s a cultural thing.
This is a generalization, but women tend to send me much more polished material, especially on the nonfiction side—really airtight, complete work—whereas men will jot down an idea on a napkin and slide it to me at AWP. That’s how we men have been taught to roll: “Of course, we’re entitled, there’s an editor, I’ll go pitch him.” Women tend to be more thoughtful. I shifted my soliciting to be more direct in following up with women: “No, I really meant it, please do send me something!”
If a woman doesn’t send something after you solicit her next piece, do you follow up a month or two later?
Yeah, or when I run into her, I’ll say, “I really meant that.” I basically stopped soliciting men; I just don’t need to. I’m notnot soliciting men. But I don’t need to make that much of an effort. I still go after specific people.
Another interesting thing I found was in our Lost and Found series. Our numbers of writers was exactly 50/50, because my editor Emma Komlos-Hrobsky was dialed into that already before VIDA came out. But our subject matter was 80/20: Both men and women were writing about men. Men would usually write about men, and women half the time would write about men.
Do you think that’s because of the historical pattern of publishing?
Yes. It makes sense when you’re writing about unappreciated or lost books. We started tweaking our solicitations to ask specifically for women writers who are underappreciated and things like that, to manipulate the numbers back to gender parity.
Have the changes you’ve made to enact gender balance in the magazine left a noticeable effect on the quality of the magazine, the size of its readership, or anything else?
Our readership has gone up. VIDA has pointed to us as a group that actually walks the walk, and I think people support us for that. There’s been zero drop in volume as far as I can see, and we’re still getting the same number of inclusions in the Best American series, the O’Henry and Pushcarts, and so on. Those prizes are impossible to predict but we haven’t seen any drop off at all.
Something like Best American is a total crapshoot. The series editor selects a hundred and twenty finalists, and then the guest judge selects the twenty after that. Every year, we have an internal pool—we think something is definitely going to be in, and we’re wrong all of the time. We can never predict. It’s often a piece that barely got into the magazine because half of us were vehemently opposed to it. But when we’re fighting over something, that means there’s something to engage with. Those have been our longest-lasting pieces—the ones that we still return to.
What else do you pay attention to as you determine whether an issue has been a success?
There are on-stand sales, but those are hard to predict unless an issue has to do with sex or includes Stephen King. He’s written for us a couple times, and his fans are completists. They’ll buy anything he does. I look at the engagement—if people are really talking about something. It’s easier to measure what people are talking about on social media. Claire Vaye Watkins’s essay “On Pandering” broke our website when that issue came out. We had forty thousand views in one afternoon, I think, which crashed our server. I happened to be in Jerusalem at the time and it was trending there. That’s what I’m looking for, when you publish something that really strikes a nerve.
Tell me about that essay and its path to publication.
Claire gave a version of that essay as a talk at the Tin House workshop, and the whole room was just vibrating. She was articulating something that a lot of women had felt and were really uncomfortable talking about: writing to please this sort of inner straight white male, this stereotype of literary authority. Even when you have role models and mentors, there’s still Colonel Sanders hiding in the corner of your brain. She was vulnerable and open about it, and it was this incredibly electric atmosphere. I thought, “We’ve got to put this out there in the world.” I worked with her on shaping it into an essay and it generated that same reaction in the world as it did in the workshop.
How much editing happens of the pieces that you accept?
Everything gets edited—by whoever brings the piece in, or whoever is most passionate about it. I have several hands-on editors, so everything gets worked on to a greater or lesser extent.
The nonfiction tends to get worked on more because fiction is pretty airtight by the time it comes to us. For fiction, the editing is more like, “The ending feels a little rushed; let’s add a couple beats.” It’s not, “Let’s rethink this character.” If something is really good but missing one key factor, I’ll go back and say something like, “If you flesh out this character, we’ll look at it again.” But once I commit to something it’s got to be close. On a line level we’ll look at it and look at it and go back and forth. And then we have a copyeditor who’s ruthless. She’s just brutal. She works over everything, and I feel very lucky to have her.
I want to go back to what you were telling me about the VIDA numbers. That’s fascinating.
What I’m now really concerned with is race and class. Those are harder things to deal with. Subject matter is obvious. But it’s not always obvious what someone’s race is or what their class is.
How do you begin to attack that?
It’s a systemic issue. With our workshop this year, we had our most diverse faculty and our most diverse participant group as a result. You know, “Build it and they will come.” If you have one or two people of color and one LGBTQ person on your faculty, you’re not going to get that many diverse participants. This year, we got a ton of applications—more than we’ve ever gotten—but we didn’t have to select for gender or race. The quality was just there. When we were looking at the final numbers, we saw, “Wow, we’re really diverse.”
The applications reflected the fact that we’ve made it known in the world that we’re looking to publish people of color and we’re very open to LGBTQ voices, so we get a fair amount of submissions.
A harder thing is that structurally, I only hire from within—people who have been interns. If someone’s been an intern for six months, if there’s an opening, I’ll give them the job. That’s the way we work. But particularly in New York, the people who can afford to intern limits class and race. I’ve been talking to Brooklyn College about doing a paid internship for someone of color. That’s an industry-wide problem. It’s not hard for me to find work by people of color, but we need more diverse workers.
Sometimes it seems like everyone’s from Smith College. Even back in the late ’80s, when my wife hired interns for theParis Review, she was like, “Is there an underground passageway from Smith to New York?” All these Upper East Side, beautiful, young women in black cocktail dresses would be at the parties. No one had invited them. They were just thereand we would ask, “Where did they come from?” It’s still that way.
In Portland we have a much easier time because of the cost of living. Our interns there are much more diverse.
Is there a story that you think of as an iconic Tin House piece of writing?
One was Adam Johnson’s novella Dark Meadow, which we published two summers ago. It’s about an IT guy in California who scrubs child porn off of people’s computers for a living. That’s his job: He removes it from your computer so you don’t get in trouble. It’s a bit long for a story, ten thousand words, and it’s morally challenging. You just don’t know where to situate yourself at any time. You are uncomfortable from beginning to end. It’s one of my favorites because it’s so difficult but also so surprising. That you care deeply for this IT guy is an extraordinary feat.
On the nonfiction side, Jo Ann Beard has written two essays for us. Both were terrific, both were in Best American. The first one was called “Undertaker Please Drive Slow,” and it was about one of Jack Kevorkian’s last patients. Jo Ann tangentially knew this woman and interviewed her daughter, then re-created this woman’s last two years from diagnosis of breast cancer to assisted suicide. She wrote about it in the first person from the woman's point of view and called it nonfiction. We fought over that. “Can you do this? Can you call it creative nonfiction if you’re writing in the first person from the perspective of someone who’s dead?” I thought this was an amazing act of empathy, and for me, it really pushed the envelope of what is possible in that form. That was maybe eight years ago now.
Are there people who had their first publication in Tin House who have gone on to become more widely known?
Many have started with us. Victor LaValle was probably the earliest—he was a new voice in our second issue. His wife, Emily Raboteau, was also a new voice. We published her first short story, called “Kavita Through Glass.” It had been rejected by twenty-seven other places before she found about Tin House and submitted to us. We took it and it wound up in Best American. Years later she met Victor and they married.
Both Matthew and Michael Dickman, who are poets, were new voices for us. We wound up hiring Matthew as our poetry editor. That was a fun discovery. They’re also both from Portland.
Every single issue, agents call us about people who don’t have a book out yet. This last issue it was Caoilinn Hughes, an Irish writer—a crazy flurry of agents getting in touch with me over her. I think her bio said that she’s working on a novel, and that was catnip. She just came to New York and talked to a whole bunch of agents.
One of my favorite discoveries, which made me really believe in the power of the slush pile, came when I was reading for the SLS contest, the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. I was the judge and we got six hundred applications. I pulled out a story and put it on my desk at the same time as the magazine slush readers pulled out a story and put it on my desk. I loved both stories and was excited that they had both come out of the slush piles. My assistant said, “You know they are written by the same person, right?” I didn’t. I’m just reading the readers report usually, and then I jump right in.
But both stories were by the same person, Dylan Landis. She’s forty-one. I bought them both; even though the SLS one was for the contest, I wanted it for the magazine, too. They were her first two published stories. She has gone on to publish three books now. That made me really happy: to see that good work does rise, that the stories had come to me through two separate groups of readers.
I’ve rejected so many stories that I see in Best American that maybe weren’t my cup of tea, or we were all in a bad mood when we talked about it. Or we had too many really dark stories and we were looking for something funny, or we just published a story on a similar theme. Just being at the right place at the right time is half the battle.
How do you sequence the magazine, and decide the order in which the chosen pieces should go?
I try and find a balance tonally, with subject matter, weird serendipity, things playing off of each other. You need an intuitive feel for that. I’ve also been looking at the run sheet for a long time, and might move things around to create a cool contrast. “Oh, this would be the evil flip side of this story” or something like that. We have all those things in mind when we’re selecting for an issue—especially a theme issue. With a theme issue, if it’s predictable, we’ve failed.
How does the topic of a theme issue arise?
It might be something we want to see our writers engage with—like when we did “future politics”—or it might be something that is suggested by a single piece. Dorothy Allison gave us a piece that was from the point of view of a stone worker. It was really tactile, really working-class. It got me thinking about writing about physical labor and how a lot of writers have moved away from that, because they have only had white-collar jobs or writing internships. Writing about actual labor is a missing thing. We made a whole issue about work based on that one piece. There is no set formula. Some of the things that we think will be really easy are like pulling teeth, and the weirder ones…who knew that so many people were thinking about that subject? We try to keep it a little open so that we can get surprised.
Do you have a reader in mind when you’re putting the magazine together? From our conversation so far, it seems that you’re trying to choose the best work as you define it and trusting that your audience is there for it, rather than selecting work specifically for that audience.
That is definitely the philosophy. I have my reader in mind more for the whole issue than any of the individual pieces. I’m thinking about how it fits together, and what the reading experience is like, and whether you are getting a complete experience from the whole magazine. Do we have a pleasing mix of different kinds of things so the experience isn’t monotone? I try to expose readers to cutting-edge and surprising things. Hopefully the things that surprise me will surprise my readers. I love pieces about things I had no idea I was interested in. Here’s an example of that, on the nonfiction side: A favorite piece we ran was by the linguist Arika Okrent—she wrote a whole book about invented languages—and the essay she wrote for us was on Klingon, which was invented for Star Trek by a linguist. It had to be a plausible language, because there’s a scene in the first Star Trek movie that’s in Klingon, and with Trekkies being as nerdy as they are, someone was going to determine whether it was gibberish or an authentic language. It wound up being a fantastic essay about what languages are made of. I had no idea that I would care about Klingon, but it was all in her writing. I love pieces like that.
What’s frustrating is that I see a ton of pieces where the subject matter is great but the writer blows the material because they think the subject will carry the piece. We see a ton of things that are, for instance, set on the front lines in Falluja. Not to be cynical, but we all have CNN and we know about the physicality of the frontlines in Falluja. But then you get a Phil Klay story about what it’s like to be a gunner operating a huge Howitzer, where it takes nine people to operate the gun, and they’re trying to figure out who got the kill. That’s a story. That’s morally interesting.
This is a generalization, but women tend to send me much more polished material, especially on the nonfiction side—really airtight, complete work—whereas men will jot down an idea on a napkin and slide it to me at AWP.
Page 4
Can you tell me more about your publisher, Win McCormack? He’s been in the news recently as the new owner of the New Republic. How involved is he with the day-to-day workings of Tin House?
He has been our publisher from the very beginning and has been incredibly loyal to the project from the start. He’s a very political guy. We’ve done a fair amount of political stuff in the magazine, but he’s on the DNC platform committee. He’s a voracious reader and is involved on a more macro level with what we do. He gets everything we circulate for the edit meetings, and will come sit in on meetings and talk with us about the material. He’s backed us from the beginning.
Is Tin House a nonprofit?
No, it’s a for-profit. That doesn’t mean it is profitable, but the Tin House operations are all tied together financially. The magazine operates as kind of a loss leader for the workshop and books. The magazine attracts book projects as well as workshop faculty, and our applications come from that.
Do you think Tin House would be different if you were starting it today versus almost twenty years ago? Probably. We’re all different people and the atmosphere is different. I’m sure we would have some kind of integrated digital thing immediately.
Would you still have that same reaction to the “castor oil” of literary magazines that you described?
That would be the same. I had this impulse back then that people want curation and they want a physical thing that they are happy to have. Not that they’re supposed to have, but that you want in your house, that you’d keep or leave on your coffee table. That’s why we used artists to do the covers. That impulse is still there to have an actual physical object.
If you could change something about our literary culture, what would it be?
How many hours do you have? Actually, I’m excited about the literary world right now. Small presses are thriving and the indie bookstores have seriously rebounded. They were down to nine hundred and now they’re like fourteen hundred. A lot of bookstores are expanding. Greenlight here in Brooklyn is about to open a new store. And I’m excited by how much good work I see.
I think the ills are reflective of society, particularly with class. If we don’t address that, we’re in danger. But I have a lot of faith in literature. It’s always been written by the underdogs, the losers, and I’m seeing them writing their stories.
I’m also excited about globalization. I see a lot of work from international places that it’s much easier to get access to. And I’m also excited about how things are digitally sorted out and digitally curated. I find out about things that I would never know about. If Kenny Coble in Tacoma posts about something, I pay attention—he’s just got amazing taste. There are booksellers like him and Steven Sparks at Green Apple [in San Francisco] who are reading amazing stuff and will pop up. I’m optimistic.
Has Tin House been affected by the big shifts in media and retail over the past several years?
When we started the magazine, we were in the right place at the right time. Story magazine had just folded, the New Yorker went from publishing two stories a week to one story, and some other magazines stopped publishing fiction. We’ve benefited from that. Things that might have gone to the New Yorker came to us instead.
Similarly, all the mergers of big publishers created space for indie presses to take on things that the major presses weren’t, especially literary fiction. We just published Joy Williams’s 99 Stories of God. Her Collected Stories last year from Knopf did incredibly well and was a finalist for a bunch of awards. But Knopf thought this was too weird of a project for them. It had come out digitally from a company that failed, so it was sort of in the world but not really. It had never been a physical book. It looked like a messy headache to Knopf, but not to us. Same with Charlie D’Ambrosio’s collected essays. He’s under contract at Knopf, but these essays had come out in a weird limited edition in Seattle, and they said no. We benefit from that.
During the dispute between Hachette and Amazon, I saw you quoted as saying that it takes big publishers forty-seven people on staff to generate $10 million in revenue, and it takes Amazon only one person. Where do those economics leave Tin House, which is doubling dow