It has spawned a cottage industry
of writers' conferences, yet there's
still nothing quite like Bread Loaf.
By Matt Jennings
Illustrations by Michael Witte
In the end, there was a tear.
It was a psychogenic lacrimation, an emotional tear that had escaped a young woman's left eye and slid, slowly, along the curved ridge where nose and cheekbone meet. As it crested the rise of her cheek, it picked up speed, sliding more quickly now, forces of gravity at work, streaking down her smooth face until it was in freefall, bound for the dusty floor of the Little Theater, where its journey ended with a simple, silent splash.
For 11 days, 280 people had put their regular lives—in their myriad forms—on hold to learn how to live one common life, that of a writer. They were promised exhaustion; they were warned to pace themselves; they were encouraged to lay bare their emotions; they were urged to confront their fears and acknowledge uncertainty; and they were exposed to the gamut of raw emotions inherent in such an endeavor.
All of which may explain the presence of the tear at the end of such a journey. Except it doesn't, not quite. But more on that later.
* * *
Here are some facts about the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference:
It's the oldest writers' conference in the country, founded in 1926 and inspired by Willa Cather and Robert Frost, both faculty members at Middlebury's fledgling graduate school of English in the early 1920s. Frost and Cather believed that courses in compositional writing would fill an educational void in the graduate curriculum, and both cited Bread Loaf's mountain campus as an ideal location for such a pursuit. Though Cather was never affiliated with the writers' conference, Frost certainly was, spending 29 years on the mountain as a speaker and faculty member.
Frost was a trailblazer, his imprimatur on this novel idea attracting a legion of compatriots and literary offspring to the mountain each August. Sinclair Lewis, Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and William Carlos Williams all left their mark on Bread Loaf. So, too, did Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Ralph Ellison. As did Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and John Irving.
It is one of the largest writers' conferences in the country, as well, with participants, faculty, staff, and guests swelling the numbers to well over 300 and filling the Bread Loaf Inn and cottages during the literary fortnight.
The breakdown of attendees looked something like this: 19 faculty members, with several books each to their name, led workshops of 10 students—held every other day for two hours—in three genres: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The faculty was assisted by 23 fellows, a coterie of writers who had published at least one book each of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. Fifteen scholars joined the fellows in leading classes on the craft of writing; typically, each scholar had published stories and poems in a number of publications and literary reviews. A little more than 30 people served on the Bread Loaf staff. Staff members were essentially work-study employees—poets, essayists, and fiction writers who performed administrative duties, organized social events, and provided technical support in exchange for a waived tuition and free room and board. Several staff members had worked as waiters at a previous conference (as had several scholars and fellows).
Being a Bread Loaf waiter—a position that comes with a full tuition waiver and free room and board—is a point of pride. More than 600 applicants vied for 25 waiter positions this year, with the criteria for selection based not on an ability to clear tables, refill drinks, and serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a communal dining room the size of a large high school cafeteria, but on one's promise as a writer. ("And to think, less than two weeks ago you were just poets, essayists, and writers," quipped the conference's director, Michael Collier, acknowledging the waiters' stellar on-the-job training at the conference's finale dinner at the end of the week.) The bulk of the attendees—roughly 175 people—pay the full tuition of $2,081. In the past, those who paid full freight were characterized as subsidizers of the tuition scholars and as fantasy-camp attendees, willing to pay top dollar to mingle with the stars sprung from the pages of the New York Times Book Review and—fingers crossed!—hopeful that this magic literary pixie dust would rub off and turn their journals and notebooks into receptacles for musings worthy of, well, Frost and Stegner. It's a characterization loathed by Collier and, frankly, most everyone else associated with the conference. (This insinuation in a New Yorker article five years ago still raises hackles among faculty members and attendees, fellows, and staff members today.) The College underwrites the conference's scholarships and financial aid packages, Collier will tell you, and the idea that anyone willing to pay is offered a VIP pass is belied by the fact that more than 1,500 people applied for full-pay admission and, of those, only 17 percent were accepted.
"In the last five years, the number of applicants has exploded," Collier said over breakfast in the largely empty dining room the morning before the conference began. "And the depth of this applicant pool has allowed the admissions board to choose really great writers."
Collier is the author of four books of poems, one of which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He first came to Bread Loaf as a scholar in 1981 and served as a fellow and associate faculty member (a position since abolished) before being named director of the conference in 1994. He's of medium build and has a head of hair that is thinning at the crown and is changing in color from brown to more of a senatorial gray. Actually, he somewhat resembles a former presidential candidate—if the junior senator from Massachusetts were to don jeans, a heather sweater, and flip flops and comport himself in the smooth, relaxed manner of a poet.
Collier is largely credited with infusing the conference with faculty members who embrace their role as teachers—who will place humility before the art, but also won't shy away from offering honest and direct (read: tough) feedback in the workshops. At the same time, many say that Collier has managed to create a more egalitarian and democratic environment, where there's a greater connection between participants at all levels. "Michael has kept everything that was good about Bread Loaf and expanded it," a longtime faculty member said this year. "At the core, it's become a strong teaching conference; that's the backbone."
Which leads us to another important fact, what may be the most important fact about Bread Loaf—what it won't do. "There's a misperception that we promise people that we'll teach them how to write," Collier said as he folded a layer of raspberry yogurt into a bowl of maple oatmeal, a Bread Loaf specialty. "You can no more teach someone how to write than you could walk up to someone on the street and claim that you can teach them how to sing," he explained. "But we can teach them how to be a writer, how to live that life. We can instill in them a seriousness of purpose, teach them that through dedication and repetition—through a lot of hard work—they can acquire a work ethic that can be applied to their craft. After that, it's up to them."
Collier rested his spoon on the rim of his bowl and leaned forward. "After 11 days, when people leave Bread Loaf, we want people to be able to go home and have the courage to face that blank page."
* * *
The conference opened on one of those perfect Vermont summer days that you read about in guidebooks or see pictured on postcards. Puffy cumulus clouds with just enough color to them to make you think that it could rain, somewhere, maybe over there, but it probably won't, dotted a brilliant blue sky, and there was a buzz to the campus, a giddy energy most often associated with the first day of school or sleep-away camp out in the woods. Just a day earlier, Collier likened this very moment to "having a fist slap you on the side of the head by the beauty of the surroundings, before entering the inn and experiencing something akin to the first day of summer camp." Except in this case, the camp is populated by young graduate students and retired executives, established writers and mid-career professionals (the average age of attendees is in the mid-30s).
An area for registration was arranged in the inn's parlor (the room's blue Victorian wallpaper has provided the space with the moniker, the Blue Parlor). Three staff members—a perfect triumvirate of poet, fiction writer, and nonfiction writer—manned the registration table, but for long periods of time, there wasn't much to do.
Megan Riley, the poet, was slumped in a wingback chair, gazing wistfully out the window. "It's sooooo nice outside. Cool. Clear. Bright. When I left D.C. this morning, I felt like my face was going to melt off." Riley lives in the nation's capital and works at the University of Maryland; this was her third year serving on the Bread Loaf staff. "I think people are so excited to get up here that they just drop their bags on the front porch and stay outside. I bet everyone shows up in a big rush right at five o'clock."
At just that moment, a pair of older women walked in and spotted a gentleman seated on one of the parlor's sofas, where he'd been quietly reading. Judging by appearances, he was Amish. He was wearing dark denim work pants, a long-sleeved cotton shirt, and traditional Amish hat, and he had a long black beard, sans mustache. The women—both a little over five feet tall with short, snow-white hair and outfits (jeans, white T-shirt, blue blazer, for one; khakis, orange polo shirt, for the other) that one often sees in Vermont during the summer—recognized him right away. "You weren't supposed to be here. You told us last year that it was your last year at Bread Loaf," exclaimed one of the ladies as she reached out to hug the man, who was now standing.
"You weren't supposed to be here, either. Both of you told me that last year was going to be your last conference," he replied.
"Well," said the other woman, "that's because we thought we'd be dead!"
Much laughter ensued, and the woman who had predicted the demise of her and her friend sighed, smiled, and said "This is, indeed, old home week."
For many, Bread Loaf is old home week. The Amish gentleman was G. C. Waldrep, a poet and Bread Loaf veteran, who was returning to the conference as a fellow after several years in attendance as a scholar and waiter. The women, Carol Armstrong and Barbara Earle, both poets, are both retired and have also attended Bread Loaf (health permitting) for a number of years. Noreen Cargill, the administrative manager for the writers' conference, says that many of those in attendance this year were returning to Bread Loaf for at least the second time. Several were writers and poets—such as Ellen Bryant Voigt, Arthur Sze, and Edward Hirsch—who have served on the faculty for a number of years. Others were fellows who had once been scholars, scholars and staff members who had once been waiters, and students, like Paul Austin, a nonfiction writer and emergency room doctor from Durham, North Carolina, who was returning to the mountain for his fourth year—or, he self-deprecatingly explained, until he gets it right.
Austin has a full head of floppy brown hair, a bushy mustache that is more white than brown, and round, rimless glasses. He talks in a thick Southern drawl, which becomes more pronounced, he said, when he's "up North" (perhaps, he explained, because he gets nervous and self-conscious about the way he sounds). There's a gentle intensity to Paul Austin that any emergency room patient would find comforting, and it's a character trait—an acute sense of purpose—that doesn't recede when he talks about writing. His hands are constantly in motion when he talks, and he'll emphasize a point by forcefully tapping his finger—once, twice, three times (tap! tap! tap!)—on the nearest surface, be it a wooden breakfast table or the writing surface of a school desk.
He wrote a detective novel during his medical residency at the University of Pittsburgh several decades ago, but he never showed it to anyone. Ten years passed before he wrote anything again, and he didn't start writing seriously—what he calls "writing with intent, a single-mindedness of purpose"—until about five years ago. It was around the time that Austin treated a man with chest pain and sent him home. "He came back dead," Austin said quietly over breakfast in the inn's dining room. "That was difficult to live with. I began writing about this episode, just pouring everything out on paper. I wrote and revised, wrote and revised, and I came to understand the situation better. Ultimately I decided to call the widow and apologize; it was a step I had to take, and I didn't realize it until I wrote about it. I've found that my work as a doctor informs my writing, but my writing also informs my work."
He has dissected several medical cases in articles written for Discover magazine and has published a number of essays in literary journals. Many of his essays ("Tucker Put His Gun to His Head," "Damn Man. Why Don't You Do Something?") share a common theme—that in medicine, like in the world at large, some things can't be fixed, no matter how compassionate or skilled a doctor might be. Austin hopes to publish a collection of stories that will illustrate the messy (and often heartbreaking) collision between compassion and the inflexible. He had brought to Bread Loaf an outline of his proposal for a 22-chapter book with a working title of "Do No Harm." The typed outline was covered with hand-written notes, advice and criticism gleaned from his nonfiction workshop led by the New Yorker writer and author Susan Orlean. "Susan's great at asking, 'So, what?'" Austin said, as he began to carefully cut a peach into symmetrical sections and one by one drop the sections into a bowl of Cheerios. "Right away, she focused on the most basic element that you can apply to a story in a collection or a sentence in a story. Does the sentence advance the story? Does the story address a greater theme? In my case, each story had to shed light on the aspect of compassion and what happens when it collides with the inflexible. I'm going to go back over every story now, and every sentence of every story, to make sure this criteria is met."
Austin was actually one of two doctors in Orlean's workshop, which also included a children's hand surgeon, a Houston energy consultant, a freelance writer, an MTV production person, and the ex-wife of a CIA agent. Orlean was returning to Bread Loaf, too, having served as a fellow in 1996. Since then, she's published several books, including the bestseller The Orchid Thief, which was the inspiration for the recent Charlie Kaufman motion picture, Adaptation. In Kaufman's fevered mind, the New Yorker writer morphed into a drug-addled, sex-crazed murderer. In reality, Orlean is married and the mother of an infant son. She's relatively short and has eyes the color of the clearest, bluest lake you've ever seen and thick, wavy, auburn hair that falls below her shoulders. And while she looks nothing like Meryl Streep, the Oscar-winning actress who portrayed her onscreen, Orlean definitely has a certain star quality; perhaps it's a natural confidence that goes along with being one of the finest nonfiction writers of our time. So it's somewhat surprising to find that she's as down-to-earth, humble, and friendly as your next-door neighbor (and depending on your neighbor, maybe friendlier).
"This is going to sound sentimental, but I mean it genuinely: I have been honored to spend time with these 10 students, who have spent so much time dedicated to writing," she said the day before the conference wrapped up. "I'm serious," she insisted. "They could be doing anything—watching TV, playing video games, going to the beach. But they're here, and they are doing something so passionately, so intensely, knowing they may not make one red cent from their efforts. It's remarkable. And it's humbling.
"And I'll tell you what surprised me, somewhat: How many of them—and this includes really good writers—said that they had never felt like writers until this week. You may laugh, but to me, that sentiment is beautiful. It's quite lovely."
Though not one of Orlean's students, Andrew Miller would be one of those writers. Miller is 37, a poet, and lives with his wife and son in Denmark, where he has taught English as a second language for the past eight years. In the late 1990s, he studied under the poet Ellen Bryant Voigt in an MFA program. At the time, Miller was writing a very loose style of poetry ("It's all I knew how to do," he would say nearly a decade later), and it was Voigt who helped him tighten his focus and shape his writing so that, according to Miller, it would be more accessible to others. But Miller got frustrated, fleeing to Europe (a flight that proved to be both literal and figurative), where he struggled, in relative isolation, with his writing. He reached out to Voigt, who encouraged him to apply to Bread Loaf, telling him, somewhat cryptically, "What you haven't had for so long is here."
On a cool, dreary afternoon, Voigt and Miller met in Bread Loaf's cavernous barn, where they had pulled a pair of bamboo chairs around a small round table and were poring over Miller's latest manuscript. There was enough of a bite in the air for the Bread Loaf staff to have lit a fire in the inn's lobby fireplace, but in the barn, the air was heavy and damp, the smell of wood strong. The barn's towering wooden support columns had been wrapped in Christmas lights, but they weren't plugged in. Voigt had pulled a black fleece over a teal buttoned-down shirt and was leaning back in her chair. She twirled her glasses in her right hand, while Miller looked at her intently. Suddenly, she sat up. "You want to be careful of having two poems with the same kind of structure back-to-back. So," she said, "I would not put these two poems together. I absolutely would not." And she pulled two sheets of paper out of a dozen or so she had in her right hand and dropped them on the table. "So, if 'Sparrows' comes out,"—she rapidly flipped through the papers remaining in her hand—"then we can put this one here, then this, and then end with this poem." She had placed three sheets of paper, one on top of the other, on a stack of about 30 pages. "So you have the frame, now you're looking for the middle."
Miller looked unsure and remained silent. Finally: "Interesting."
"I respect your hesitation, I really do," Voigt said.
"You know, Ellen," Miller said, slowly, "I'm not sure the last poem is written." She nodded, and a half-smile crept across her face.
"It has to be something personal," Miller continued, more forcefully now. "It has to be something about me."
"The thing about writing," Voigt would say several days later, "is that one's always on the precipice. One's always on the brink of enormous failure." Voigt was exhausted (it was the last day of the conference) and battling allergies. She was relaxing on the porch of Maple Cottage before heading over to the Little Theater for a poetry reading that afternoon. She had affixed a small round button to her shirt. It was red, with white letters that said, "It's lovely, but I have to scream now."
"When you're in the middle of this struggle—as Andrew had been—the exhilaration that stems from the camaraderie that naturally occurs when you're surrounded by people who have the same problems, the same challenges . . . it breathes new life, renewed confidence into the writing," she said.
"You come here and you are handed a lens, which you can then use to take a fresh look at what's been stalling you. And we—the faculty—need it as much as anyone. It keeps us young. And if not young, then awake!"
And Voigt laughed, a full, strong belly laugh that echoed off the surrounding cottages and carried out over the open meadows.
* * *
On the morning of the conference's first full day, the poet Edward Hirsch delivered a lecture, "The Enigma of the Creative Process." Hirsch has an imposing presence. He's large, without being fat, and has a stern look about him. He towered—hulked, might be a more accurate description—over the battle-scarred wooden podium in the Little Theater, and when he made eye contact with the audience, his angular face had an almost hawklike quality to it. But Hirsch also has a sly sense of humor, a sneaky wit, and when he smiles—which he does often—his expression does a complete 180. A devil-may-care, adolescent persona seems to take hold, and when this happens, even his hair—tightly shorn and gray—takes on a boyish quality.
He opened with one of his poems, "The History of My Stupidity: Volume 3, Chapter 5," a humorous illustration of his central argument that the creative process is predicated on a state of unknowingness. "I have been writing poetry for nearly 35 years—I have written three prose books about it—and yet I still don't know what poetry is," he said. (Remember, humility before the art.) "I don't know what music is either—who can explain the combination of beauty and pain that pierces the notes? There is probably something immutable about the need to make art, though the boundaries of our genres keep shifting. The imagination is defiant and limitless."
Afterward, in an extensive question-and-answer session, he explained the creative process this way: "You can't have art without the unconscious imagination, but you also can't have art without conscious labor. When the two come together, then you have something special, and it's a thrilling process.
"Most young writers fail because they don't work hard enough," he continued. "It has nothing to do with creativity. Your task is to fully realize what you've been given. Keep pushing toward your ceiling. Very few people come close to doing that."
Around the theater, people sat up straight. Heads nodded in affirmation. A charge had been issued. It was a far different message than the one intoned by a drunken Sinclair Lewis in 1928 when he swayed behind a Bread Loaf lectern and told a room full of literary aspirants that they would never be creative writers, and if by some chance they did achieve this goal, it wasn't worth attaining ("writers are a bastard lot of human beings").
Midway through his lecture, Hirsch had also touched on an interesting topic: The effect art—in this case, poetry—has on a person. "Emily Dickinson recognized true poetry by the extremity—the actual physical intensity—of her response to it," Hirsch related. " 'If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body feel [so] cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry,'" Hirsch said, quoting Dickinson. "'If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know. Is there any other way?' "
Several years ago, a biochemist at the St. Paul-Ramsey Medical Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, conducted a study that attempted to determine the cause of emotional tears, psychogenic lacrimations. Researchers learned that emotional tears contain roughly 20 percent more protein than reflex tears (tears caused by irritation), but were stymied as to what the proteins are, why they're more abundant in emotional tears, and what triggers them. Essentially, emotional tears remain a great mystery, relegated to a state of unknowingness, understood better by a 19th-century poet than 21st-century scientists.
Which leads us, as promised, to the end.
On the conference's last night, Yusef Komunyakaa, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, had been tapped to conduct Bread Loaf's final public reading. Enthusiastic applause preceded an abrupt hush in the crowded Little Theater when Komunyakaa, a tall African American with close-cropped hair that's more white than black, strode purposefully to the podium. Komunyakaa's voice is a rich, earthy baritone, and as he read, if you were sitting close enough to the front, you could actually feel his voice. In between poems, the audience quickly shifted in their collective seats—a chorus of 300 seats creaking all at once—in an almost frantic attempt to get settled before Komunyakaa began to read his next selection; while he read, in contrast, nobody seemed to breathe, much less move. People were frozen. Some cupped their heads in their hands, their elbows dug into their knees, torsos perched forward. Others held their hands, palms together, fingertips at the points of their chins, as if in prayer.
And it remained that way for 25 minutes or so, until Komunyakaa, a Vietnam veteran, concluded with a selection from his watershed collection Dien Cai Dau. In "Facing It," Komunyakaa visits the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—and revisits the past. "My black face fades / Hiding inside the black granite. / I said I wouldn't, / Dammit: No tears. / I'm stone. I'm flesh," he began.
As Komunyakaa continued, many closed their eyes, letting his words wash over them. One woman had leaned forward so that her folded arms rested on the empty seat back in front of her, her head resting on her forearms. The poet likened his clouded reflection in the black granite to a bird of prey, and he searched the names half-expecting to find his own. And then the poem, and the reading, came to an end: "In the black mirror / A woman's trying to erase names: / No, she's brushing a boy's hair."
And an emotional tear escaped a young woman's left eye and slid, slowly, along the curved ridge where nose and cheekbone meet. As it crested the rise of her cheek, it picked up speed, sliding more quickly now, forces of gravity at work, streaking down her smooth face until it was in freefall, bound for the dusty floor of the Little Theater, where its journey ended with a simple, silent splash.
During the 11 days he spent as an observer at the Writers' Conference, Matt Jennings felt as if he had discovered nirvana.