Hannah Tinti on Learning to Shoot a Gun for Literature

At the 2017 Bay Area Book Festival, Literary Hub went backstage to interview authors and panelists on a wide range of topics: the personal, the professional, and the political. In the below video, Hannah Tinti, who visited the festival for a panel with Dani Shapiro called “My Literary Friend,” discusses the lack of empathy plaguing contemporary culture, and talks about learning how to shoot a gun for The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley—but perhaps more importantly, finding common ground with some of the people one finds themselves spending time with when learning how to shoot a gun.

Hannah Tinti: “The thing that seems to be lacking these days is the ability to empathize and see other people’s points of view. People get very righteous and tunnel-vision, rather than trying to actually understand and see the other side. I feel like artists of all kinds, and writers in particular, can try to find ways to get readers to understand those other points of view, no matter how difficult they are.”