Bread Loaf School of English Update for Summer 2021

We hope you have stayed safe and well during this particularly taxing year. As you know, this moment has generated an ever-changing series of uncertainties, inequities, and challenges. In planning for summer 2021, we’ve taken these as our passion and our cue and developed a short- and long-term vision for Bread Loaf’s second century—a vision that will amplify our strengths by increasing our diversity, accessibility, and creativity as a learning community.

Building on the lessons of our 2020 Summer of Writing, our 2021 program—Bread Loaf 100+—will again operate remotely. We will offer small group tutorials: the Advanced Writing Tutorial (2 units), which will allow students to pursue major creative, critical, and pedagogical projects; and the Tutorial in Critical Writing (1 unit), which will concentrate on writing practices. The session will run for six weeks, from June 21 to July 30, with tutorial meeting times set by faculty in consultation with their students.

Much is new. Tutorial discussion and projects for the Advanced Writing Tutorial (AWT) will be anchored on an author or a text, topic, or genre that the faculty mentor has selected. Among them:  Paradise Lost, Mansfield Park, Beloved, Animal Farm, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Proust, 20^th century diaries, eco-poetry, ethics in education, anti-racist teaching, disability in young adult literature, solo performance, journalism, and Sondheim. New and returning students will be able to enroll in either the AWT or the Tutorial in Critical Writing, so to choose the learning experience that best meets their current needs. Our co-curricular program will include new opportunities for students and faculty to connect with each other around areas of shared interest. And the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble will be on hand as part of our teaching force, to inspire the work we do inside and outside tutorial.

Essential still is what 2020 participants identified as the motivating joy of their “remote” experience and what we will continue to build into our program in the years to come: a sustained opportunity for faculty and students to engage at close range in an intensive mentoring relationship based on student work and writing.

We are all eager, of course, to return to our campuses and to reconnect in person. That time will come (2022, save the date)—and come with a gradual expansion in the times, places, and venues in which and through which we teach and learn. So stay tuned. For the moment, we join with Middlebury in the belief that running a remote program in 2021 is the best way to protect our collective health and well-being. We will be posting more information with details about our remote programming soon.