Events

Jumma Prayer

Join us for a congregational Jumma prayer including a Khutba (sermon). 

McCullough - Mitchell Green Lounge

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: Director's Welcome - Bread Loaf Writers'

Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences Director, Jennifer Grotz, welcomes you to the August Lecture Series.

Virtual Middlebury

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: "On the Writing Life" with Carl Phillips

Virtual Middlebury

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: “Friend to Friend in the Endtime: Imagining Solidarity, Writing the Future” with Jess Row

Dystopian or post-apocalyptic novels like Parable of the Sower, Station Eleven, Severance, Fiskadoro, and Dhalgren often imagine relationships of love, companionship, and interdependence across lines of race, gender identification, class, age, and nationality. This lecture raises the question of why these stories seem so attractive in the future, yet impossible in the present, and what we can learn from dystopian narratives about creating better characters in any story.

Virtual Middlebury

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: “The I As Multitudes" with Reginald Dwayne Betts

The ways in which writers engage the I has always been worthy of discussion. But mostly not for what the I says about the writer - and yet, what we imagine the I says about the writer is what frightens so many of becoming multitudes. This class asks questions about the I and what it means to embody multitudes, what it means to be more than ourselves on the page.

Virtual Middlebury

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: “The Art of Describing” with Jane Brox

The most memorable prose descriptions make use not only of word choice but of syntax, context, rhythm, and sound for their effectiveness. In this class, we will discuss examples of exemplary descriptive prose as a means of helping participants enhance their own powers of description.

Virtual Middlebury

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: “Literature in Real Time” with Craig Morgan Teicher

Diary, daybook, to do list: these quotidian forms can be fruitful fodder for works of imaginative literature in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, spurring and dramatizing consciousness self-discovery in what feels like real time. This lecture will examine works by Hilton Als, A.R. Ammons, Sarah Manguso, Enrique Vila-Matas, and others to see what can be accomplished when these kinds of real-time check-ins are used as literary forms.

Virtual Middlebury

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: “An Anatomy of Surprise in Fiction” with Tania James

Surprise creates a rupture in the reading experience; we are stunned, stilled, caught. In this class, we’ll discuss surprise in terms of craft, and consider ways in which to manage surprise, suspense, reversals, and plot twists in fiction. The class will include discussion of published stories as well as in-class exercises aimed toward rendering surprise on the page.

Virtual Middlebury

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: “White Elegies: On Whiteness and Cultural Appropriation in Poetry”

Join us for “White Elegies: On Whiteness and Cultural Appropriation in Poetry,” with Paisley Rekdal.

Virtual Middlebury

Jumma Prayer

Join us for a congregational Jumma prayer including a Khutba (sermon). 

McCullough - Mitchell Green Lounge

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: “Slightly Odd or Profoundly Bizarre: Notes on Defamiliarization” with Matthew Oltzmann

This lecture will explore the idea that poetry should “make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.” How does something recognizable or mundane suddenly find itself charged with mystery? How does something wild and surreal feel immediately connected to our daily lives? At a glance, it might seem like I’m describing two very different types of poems: one invested in our ordinary world, the other reaching for the absurd. The real and the unreal. However, in each of these modes, the effect I’m describing is actually achieved through similar means.

Virtual Middlebury

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: “Fiction Forms" with Tiphanie Yanique

Poets use form to challenge themselves by the form’s limitations. Poets also use form to participate in poetic tradition. In many cases, poets push against the limitations for forms as a way to push against the traditions which created those forms. Specific forms, however, have specific strengths which allow for specific dynamics to arise in the poem. To this end, poets have often created new forms as ways to reference new cultural limitations, create new traditions and make possible new dynamics.

Virtual Middlebury

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: “Through a Child’s Eyes; Childhood Memoirs and Their Narrators” with Reyna Grande

Capturing the “voice” of our child selves can be daunting but deeply rewarding. In this lecture, we will discuss successful approaches to child narrators in memoir and explore techniques you can apply to your own work.

Virtual Middlebury

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: “Charisma and Characterization" with Charles Baxter

What makes us fixate on a character so that we cannot look away? What causes a character to have power over us? Why do such people make us think about them? This is an immensely important and difficult topic, especially in these times, and I would like to talk about such characters as Morrison’s Sula, Melville’s Ahab, Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin, and possibly one of Shakespeare’s characters as “magnetic personalities.”

Virtual Middlebury

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: “Magnitude and Bond: Imagery and the Sensual in the Work of Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Cli

“Magnitude and Bond: Imagery and the Sensual in the Work of Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton” with Vievee Francis

Vievee Francis will explore the way Brooks’s and Clifton’s provocative and surprising use of imagery allows broad readings of the black body’s restraint and boundlessness. Through this exploration we may all find a means of (re)claiming our bodies for ourselves.

Virtual Middlebury

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: “A Belief in Angels: Joy in Poetry" with Victoria Chang

What is a poem of joy? Or a line of poetry that evokes joy? In this talk, we’ll think through what joy means, what a poem of joy might look like, and how a poem of joy might affect its readers. In the process, we’ll look at poems by various poets such as Frank O’Hara, Robert Hass, Li-Young Lee, Ross Gay, Elizabeth Bishop, and many others.

Virtual Middlebury

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: “Creatures of Impulse: What Fiction Writers Can Learn from TV” with Dean Bakopoulos

This lecture will focus on the way popular TV series hook the viewer, construct scenes, build character, and structure an episode, and how this can easily be adapted to add energy to short stories and novels.

Virtual Middlebury

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: “Fragmentation, Witness and the (Power) Structure of Story" with Ana Menéndez

This lecture concerns itself with the fragmented narrative as a vehicle for bearing witness.

Virtual Middlebury

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: “Remember When We Talked About the Future? Memory and Aspiration in Poems" with Gabrielle Ca

“Remember When We Talked About the Future? Memory and Aspiration in Poems” with Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Virtual Middlebury

Bread Loaf Lecture Series: “The Art of Revision" with Peter Ho Davies

Virtual Middlebury