“We were pretty sure Win was going to want a hockey team within five years,” Schappell said, “and so part of our thought was: ‘Here’s this guy. He’s got this money, he’s got some good ideas. We really want to change things.’”

Image It was a longtime dream for the publisher Win McCormack to start a literary magazine, he said. Credit... Randy Rasmussen

McCormack wanted the magazine to be based in Portland, but Spillman and Schappell, who live in Brooklyn, persuaded him to make it bicoastal.

“Tin House was an opportunity to really kind of stick our thumb in the eye of traditional publishing,” Schappell said. When she told Plimpton that the editors of Tin House intended to publish a new writer or poet in every issue, she recalled that he was skeptical, telling her they’d have a tough time discovering enough new writers of high caliber. But every issue of Tin House, including the last, featured at least one writer in the New Voices column.

“It was important for us right from the start to get not just unrepresented voices, but voices from outside of the sort of standard literary lane,” Spillman said. (Spillman, 54, has remained vocal about the need to support underrepresented voices in literature and his own efforts to ensure a gender balance in the pages of the magazine.)

There’s a “huge world of writers — people of color, transgender people, women — who haven’t been given a fair shake in the literary world,” Schappell, 55, said. “That’s on the editor. You have to go out and find that work,” she continued, “because we all know the only people writing are not white men.”

‘These were the conversations you wanted to join.’

Traditionally, literary magazines have been an archaeological dig of the white male imagination. But reading an issue of Tin House was an act of discovery — of literature’s great variety of styles and subjects and voices. The author Karen Russell first encountered Tin House in graduate school in the 2000s. “I definitely had the impression,” she said, “that Tin House was where the party was at — these were the conversations you wanted to join, the brilliant weirdos with whom you wanted to share a dance floor.”