The magazine has consistently housed some of the best fiction, poetry, and essays to be read anywhere. In a joint letter from publisher/editor-in-chief Win McCormack and departing editor Rob Spillman, the details are laid out. McCormack writes:
Spillman adds:Given the current costs of producing a print literary magazine, I have decided to shift resources to Tin House’s other two divisions: Tin House Books and the Tin House Workshop. This will allow the workshop to create more scholarship opportunities for its participants and expand the scope of what types of classes it offers, while our book division will look to publish more titles in the coming years. We will continue to publish original fiction, nonfiction, and poetry online at tinhouse.com, with a focus on publishing new voices, a cause the magazine championed throughout its 20-year history.
As a co-founding editor, with Elissa Schappell, I am proud of the magazine’s dedication to promoting new voices and lifting up overlooked ones, for leading the way in gender balance among literary magazines, and for expanding the ethos of inclusivity and genre-bending to our book division and summer workshop. It has been an honor to work with such smart, dedicated colleagues, and to publish the most exciting, vital voices of our time.In the Portland literary landscape, this is fairly calamitous—Tin House was not just the city's most prominent literary magazine but one of the finest and best regarded in the country. As print media in all its forms continues to recede, literary magazines must inevitably be lashed to that mast, but this is a loss that's going to be felt acutely among writers and readers in not just Portland, but across the globe.
Tin House's final issue comes out June 2019. After you've read it, you can use its pages to blot your tears.
