Tin House??? For Real This Time
I owe you guys a blog post big time. And really? I owed you one a while ago. Because I received my acceptance to the first ever in-person Tin House Summer YA Workshop back in April. I’m looking at my Submittable now.
Yeah. April 16th is when they accepted me. April 20th is when I checked my spam folder and actually saw the acceptance. LOL forever.
I’m not sure why I kept it to myself for so long. Actually, that isn’t true. I know why. I was so over the moon about being waitlisted last year because I never had even the meagerest hope that I’d get in when I submitted the app. But this year?
I was calmer than anything when I opened Submittable and saw the green ACCEPTED notification. Calm, collected, cool as a cucumber on ice. I remember doing a quiet, satisfied nod, and then emailing my response accepting the offered spot in the workshop.
I can’t explain it, but I had a good feeling about this year’s application. A really good feeling. Maybe there’s just something inherently romantic, inherently rugged and gritty and hungry about writing the first chapter of your novel’s long awaited second draft in a hut in the New Zealand wilderness using a 3 dollar primary-school exercise book from the grocery store. That's a story in and of itself.
But mostly, it felt like a promise. An oath, to myself and the universe. This is how badly I want this. This is what I’m willing to do to make it happen. Watch me sit in this hut for eight hours to avoid the rain instead of making the very-achievable five hour trek to the next hut on my itinerary, just so I can focus on getting these words onto paper. Watch me get hypothermia hiking out of the bush in a torrential downpour because I have to get back to my laptop ASAP to finish my submission materials. Watch me spend two warm, beautiful, sunwashed, blue-sky days in Auckland sequestered on the porch of my hostel putting this 4,000 word piece into different fonts and reading them aloud in different accents to find gaps in grammar and syntax.
Honestly, if anything, I’m lucky for all that. Lucky I got to write in a new, beautiful remote place, and then in blazing sunlight for two days. Better that than gray, cold Boston. Maybe that’s why I was able to cook so hard.
And it was enough! I got into Tin House. And I even got my first choice of workshop leader, Aiden Thomas of Cemetery Boys fame! I’m going to write a lot more about the workshop, like a lot. I’ve been slacking on my writing log. That’s coming soon, so get very, very excited!
xx Claire
