Win McCormack on How Summer Workshops Changed the Way Writers Learn

For much of the twentieth century, writers seeking serious instruction had few options.

They could spend years learning largely on their own, submitting work to magazines and publishers and getting rejection letters with little explanation. Or they could pursue an MFA, committing several years to a graduate program.

Summer writing workshops offered something in between.

Programs such as the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference had been around for decades. Still, the short, intensive workshop became much more common as universities, literary organizations, magazines, and nonprofits began developing programs of their own.

Win McCormack saw that change from inside the publishing world. The Portland publisher, editor, and writer built a career that has included magazines, books, journalism, and literary education. His own reporting and essays on Oregon politics and culture began well before writers could choose from the range of short-term programs available today.

With Tin House, McCormack helped create one of those programs.

Creating Another Way for Writers to Learn

A summer workshop asks for a very different commitment than an MFA.

Participants may spend a week or two working closely on manuscripts, reading other writers' work, attending craft talks, and meeting authors, editors, or agents. They can then return to their jobs, families, and everyday lives.

That makes the format available to some writers who wouldn't be able or willing to relocate for graduate school.

It also changes what writers can expect to learn in a relatively short period.

No one is going to learn how to write a novel in a week. A workshop can give a manuscript sustained attention and the chance to hear how other serious readers respond to it.

The Oregon Writers Workshop, formerly known as Tin House Summer Workshop, became known for pairing participants with published writers for close manuscript work while also bringing editors and agents into the same environment.

A writer could leave with pages to revise, a better understanding of the publishing process, and relationships with people working in the literary world.

For someone accustomed to writing alone, even that can be a significant change.

A Workshop Can't Do the Writing for You

The workshop model has its limitations.

One of the most familiar formats asks a writer to listen while other participants discuss the manuscript. Ideally, that gives the writer a chance to hear how the work lands without immediately explaining or defending it.

It doesn't always work perfectly.

A group can become overly focused on consensus. One reader's advice may contradict another's. An unusual choice that gives a piece its personality can be treated as a problem simply because several people aren't accustomed to it.

The writer still has to decide what to use and what to ignore.

But learning to make those decisions is part of the experience.

Participants aren't only having their own manuscripts discussed. They're spending hours reading other people's work closely enough to explain where they became interested, confused, impatient, or surprised.

That can change the way someone returns to a draft.

The same is true of learning about publishing. Writers working alone may know very little about what happens after they submit a story or manuscript. Conversations with editors can make that process less mysterious: how submissions are read, why good work still gets rejected, what an editor looks for in a revision, and how a manuscript changes before publication.

A week doesn't replace the years someone spends learning to write. It can give those years more direction.

Tin House Connected Publishing With Writer Development

McCormack's involvement with workshops makes sense in the context of the larger organization he built.

He launched Oregon Magazine in 1976 and ran it for twelve years before moving into regional and national publishing. In 1999, he founded Tin House magazine. Tin House Books followed in 2005, and the operation also developed the Tin House Summer Workshop.

Those pieces created different points of entry into the literary world.

A workshop could help writers develop manuscripts. The magazine and book operation could publish literary work. Editors, established writers, and emerging writers could connect through the same broader organization.

That kind of structure also addressed a practical problem for literary publishers: finding and developing new work doesn't happen separately from publishing it.

For McCormack, supporting writers and publishing writers became connected parts of the same operation.

Workshops Also Became Part of the Business of Literary Publishing

Summer programs also have a financial side.

Literary magazines and independent presses have rarely operated with comfortable margins. Workshops can provide another revenue source alongside subscriptions, book sales, donations, and other forms of support.

That creates an arrangement in which the educational program can help support the publishing operation.

It can also create tension.

A workshop needs participants to cover its costs, and literary organizations still have to decide on tuition, cohort size, scholarships, faculty, and programming. The pressure to fill seats can sit uncomfortably beside the promise of close attention and serious manuscript work.

That makes a program's structure worth examining before a writer pays to attend.

How many people will be in the workshop? Who will teach it? How much attention will each manuscript receive? Are scholarships available? What access will participants actually have to editors, agents, or visiting writers?

Those questions tell a prospective participant much more than a list of impressive names on a website.

Win McCormack spent decades building publishing ventures before and alongside the workshop. Tin House's program was connected to an organization (known today as the McCormack Writing Center) already involved in editing, publishing, and promoting literary work.

The workshop wasn't separate from that ecosystem. It became another part of it.

Shorter Programs Can Open the Door to More Writers

One of the clearest advantages of a summer workshop is time.

Graduate school may require two or three years. Even when an MFA is fully funded, attending can involve relocating, changing jobs, rearranging family responsibilities, or otherwise reorganizing a large part of someone's life.

A week is easier to fit into an existing life.

Cost can still be a barrier, especially once you include tuition, travel, lodging, and time away from work. Scholarships can make participation possible for more writers, but short-term programs aren't automatically accessible simply because they're shorter than graduate school.

They do provide another option.

A writer who doesn't want an MFA can still spend concentrated time working with an experienced instructor. Someone who has been writing alone for years can see how the work responds to sustained critique. A person curious about publishing can meet editors and learn how manuscripts move through the process.

The growth of online publishing and digital distribution has also changed the environment around those writers.

Authors have more ways to discover publications, follow presses, submit work, and find books outside traditional publishing centers. Readers can encounter new work through digital magazines, newsletters, independent publishers, and online catalogs, including while browsing books and authors on a phone.

A workshop is one part of that much larger literary world, not a required entry point.

Knowing What a Workshop Can and Can't Offer

The number of writing programs available can make choosing one difficult.

A strong faculty list doesn't guarantee useful feedback. A beautiful location doesn't say much about instructional quality. And promises about access to the publishing industry deserve scrutiny.

Writers are better served by looking at what they'll actually be doing for the week.

A good workshop can offer time, attention, experienced readers, and conversations that are hard to arrange on your own. It can introduce a writer to people and publications they didn't know before.

What it can't do is shorten the part of writing that takes years.

Writers still have to read. They still have to draft, revise, throw pages away, start over, submit work, get rejected, and decide which advice improves the manuscript and which advice doesn't belong in it.

The workshop simply gives them somewhere to do part of that work with other people in the room.

What McCormack Saw in the Workshop Model

McCormack's career has crossed several parts of literary life: writing, editing, magazine publishing, book publishing, and the development of writers themselves.

The summer workshop fits naturally into that history.

Publishing depends on people continuing to write work worth reading. Writers, especially early in their careers, often need something that can be difficult to find on their own: thoughtful readers who will spend real time with unfinished work and tell them what they see.

A workshop can provide that for a week.

Then everyone goes home.

The writer still has to sit down with the manuscript and figure out what comes next. But now there may be notes in the margins, conversations still running through their head, a few names they didn't know before, and a clearer sense of what the work is doing when someone other than its author reads it.

For many writers, that's enough to make the week useful.

About Win McCormack

Win McCormack is a publisher, editor, and writer based in Portland, Oregon. He founded Tin House magazine in 1999 and later expanded the organization to include Tin House Books and the Tin House Summer Workshop. He has served as owner and editor-in-chief of The New Republic since 2016.

His earlier career in magazines, books, and investigative journalism included launching Oregon Magazine in 1976 and reporting on the Rajneesh movement in Oregon, work that earned him the William Allen White Award.

McCormack studied government at Harvard and earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon.