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There are very few places in America where it can be claimed definitively that
poets kick ass, and one of them is the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, which
takes place over eleven days every August in the Green Mountains of Vermont. At
Bread Loaf, which is the oldest and most prestigious writers' conference in the
country, poets are not the effete, marginal figures of popular imagination. This
was amply demonstrated at this year's poets-versus-fiction-writers football
game, a regular fixture in which those who traffic in metre and rhyme go head to
head on the Bread Loaf meadow with crafters of experimental, semi-autobiographical narratives. Granted, the poets had the advantage of including
among their number Matt Miller, an aspiring writer of lyric verse who happened
to have been a defensive starter at Yale five years ago. They also enjoyed a
fine showing from their quarterback, a gangly twenty-nine-year-old named Spencer
Short, whose recently published début collection, "Tremolo," brings to mind both
T. S. Eliot and McSweeney's ("One need only stand in the aisle / marked Produce
to understand how the wan light / obscuring the bruised fruit makes all / of our
decisions more difficult"). The poets scored a touchdown, then were briefly
matched one-all by the fiction writers. Poetry then pulled ahead with five
consecutive touchdowns, and won, 36-6. "We totally owned the game" was the
verdict delivered later that evening by one of the poets, an earnest young man
named Chad Reynolds, who teaches English to eighth graders in Cincinnati, and
has not yet decided whether to publish under Chad, Charles, or C. L. Reynolds.
The literary-fiction writers were crushed. It's humiliating enough to be beaten;
but how much more humiliating to be beaten by the only genre that generates even
lower book sales than yours.
Bread Loaf, which was founded in 1926 and is administered by Middlebury College,
has an alumni list that reads like a syllabus for an Introduction to American
Literature course: former faculty include Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Ralph
Ellison, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Anne Sexton, John Irving, Mark Strand, Toni
Morrison, and, most famously, Robert Frost, who attended a total of twenty-nine
Bread Loafs, and lived nearby in an intriguing ménage with the conference's then
director, Ted Morrison, and his wife, Kay. For the two hundred and fifty writers
who attend each year, being a Bread Loafer means being associated with the grand
tradition of American letters. It also means being surrounded for eleven days by
other people who believe that the tradition of American letters matters, a
concept that these days can seem as quaint as the Adirondack chairs
strategically positioned under trees all over the campus.
Bread Loaf is not a writers' retreat, like Yaddo or MacDowell, where fellows are
provided with quiet and space and box lunches and thereby have no excuse to do
anything other than write for eight hours a day. Bread Loaf is more of a
writers' onslaught, with a full schedule of lectures, classes, and readings from
nine in the morning until horribly late at night, punctuated by occasional
breaks for social events: cocktails on the lawn; picnics at Frost's cabin;
after-dinner coffee and cake served in the barn. (The conference draws its name
from a forested, loafish-shaped mountain nearby.) Bread Loaf is both a mini-course and a fantasy camp for would-be Nobelists: the lawyers who write short
stories on Sunday afternoons, the middle-aged historical novelists with grown
children and supportive husbands. Bread Loaf also provides an opportunity for a
bunch of post-collegiate would-be professional writers to relax among their own
kind and to have their work read by someone other than competitive classmates or
parents who say things like "I loved that poem where you talked about the time
when you were thirteen and we took you to a therapist." Bread Loaf is the kind
of place where over dinner there are rapturous discussions of walks taken
through the woods, and where an ordinary conversation is likely to begin with,
"I really enjoyed your work, but I have some enjambment issues I'd like to
discuss."
The writers' conference is a peculiarly American institution, combining an ethic
of self-reliance and self-improvement with the sunny conviction that all things
worth having can be bought or taught. Writers' conferences, like the M.F.A.
programs and other writing courses that have proliferated in American
universities since the middle of the twentieth century--there are now upward of
two hundred and fifty of them--are predicated on the principle that the ability
to write does not depend solely upon God-given talent but can be acquired. The
price of a Bread Loaf education is eighteen hundred dollars for tuition and room
and board, though about a third of the students receive scholarships. (These
include twenty-five highly coveted "waiterships," in which promising young
writers earn their keep by serving three hearty meals a day to the paying
guests.) The most celebrated writers' program in the country, the Iowa Writers'
Workshop, established the industry's ruling metaphor, which is that writing is
something like woodworking: you put on your apron, roll up your sleeves, and
practice your craft. Iowa has also helped popularize an unfortunate neologism,
"workshop" as a transitive verb, the use of which is endemic to a place like
Bread Loaf (for example, the sentence "My writers' group workshopped the hell
out of this poem, but I still have to resolve some enjambment issues").
The debate over whether writers' programs are a blessing or a curse for American
literature is as old as the writers' programs themselves; what is certain is
that they provide employment to a whole class of writers whose work, whatever
its aesthetic, moral, or other virtues, does not necessarily have much weight
when it comes to that other ruling metaphor of cultural life, the marketplace.
If you're a writer of serious literary fiction, you'd better have either an
inheritance or a teaching position at a university. If you're a poet, it helps
to have both. Most of the teachers at Bread Loaf have day jobs at universities,
and, in spite of Bread Loaf's illustrious history, today's faculty tends not to
consist of household names, unless you belong to an unusually literate
household: among the higher-profile writers this year were the novelists
Antonya Nelson and Lynn Freed and the poets Arthur Sze and Ellen Bryant Voigt,
none of whom have ever read at a Presidential inaugural. Still, Bread Loaf
remains the most competitive of writers' conferences: four hundred people apply
for the twenty-five waiter spots, and other scholarships are also
oversubscribed. If you're willing to pay, though, you stand a better than fifty-per-cent chance of getting in. (Fee-paying Bread Loafers are known as
contributors.) The conference largely consists of M.F.A.-program teachers
leading classes stacked with M.F.A.-program students whose dearest desire is to
get a job teaching in an M.F.A. program and ultimately return to Bread Loaf as a
teaching fellow or a faculty member. From the outside, the whole business looks
weirdly self-replicating, like a psychoanalytic institute whose members spend
most of their time training new psychoanalysts.
None of this, of course, is the kind of thing to which participants give much
thought as they traverse Bread Loaf's lawns, or congregate on the porch of the
Victorian Bread Loaf Inn, which was willed to Middlebury College in 1915 by
Joseph Battell, an heirless Vermonter with literary aspirations. Battell's
magnum opus, "Ellen, or the Whisperings of an Old Pine," consisted of a Socratic
dialogue between a young girl and a pine tree. (Michael Collier, who has been
Bread Loaf's director since 1995, read aloud from "Ellen" in the Bread Loaf
Little Theatre on the conference's opening night, to much tittering from the
assembled unpublished writers.) The kind of things Bread Loafers do give thought
to are: How can I find an agent? Where can I find a drink? My wife doesn't need
to know, does she?
The triple compulsions of Bread Loaf have, traditionally, been getting
published, getting drunk, and getting laid; and, though each is honored more in
the breach than in the observance, the reputation lingers. The conference is
informally known as Bed Loaf--it comes as something of a disappointment to
discover that, in coining a nickname, the finest literary talents of the
twentieth century couldn't come up with anything better than a low pun--and for
many years it was as notorious for its debauchery as for its higher-minded
pursuits. The official history of Bread Loaf, "Whose Woods These Are," by David
Haward Bain, gives accounts of many celebrated Bread Loaf couplings, including
that of Louis Untermeyer and his fourth wife, Bryna Ivens, who met at the
conference in the nineteen-forties. Attendees of conferences dating to the early
nineties will, when pressed, tell of finding conferees rutting in hedgerows, and
sometimes will even confess to engaging in some rutting themselves. Similarly,
Bread Loaf used to be famous for the quantities of alcohol ingested: the faculty
would take off for Bloody Marys before lunch and Martinis before dinner, and
some could be found still boozing at dawn in the faculty lounge, Treman Cottage,
if they had not already taken off for the hedgerows.
Bread Loaf, like all of America, is a primmer place now. State law prohibits
drinking anywhere on campus except in private rooms and at organized events such
as cocktail parties or dances. This means that for Bread Loafers without what
are grandly called "Treman privileges" there's nowhere to get a beer. A.A.
meetings were, however, held in the Bread Loaf Barn at eight-thirty each morning
this year. Sex, too, is less in evidence. Included in the introductory material
that was sent to participants in this year's conference was a document
delineating the policy on sexual harassment, which casts lechery in terms of the
First Amendment. ("A speech act may go beyond being the expression of an opinion
or attitude, and may constitute an act of intimidation or sexual harassment in
the judgment of a reasonably tolerant person.") These days, the sexual
preoccupation of most Bread Loafers appears to be figuring out whether anyone
else is getting any, rather than getting any themselves. There are, though,
intense bonding experiences between roommates, such as the two women in their
thirties who, one night at a bonfire party, announced that they had discovered,
while changing into their pajamas, that their breasts were exactly the same
shape.
The Bread Loaf faculty in the seventies and eighties was, by all accounts,
something of a boys' club: John Irving and John Gardner and Tim O'Brien were
regulars, with a feminine element provided by such guest teachers as Erica Jong,
who arrived at the 1981 conference wearing mauve harem pants and riding in a
Mercedes. Gardner, in particular, set the Bread Loaf tone by drinking heavily,
holding forth brilliantly for hours to a circle of admirers at Treman, and
bedding the odd enthusiast. Gardner's first wife once hired a plane to drop
leaflets over the campus declaring that the author of "On Moral Fiction" was a
neglectful father who was late with alimony payments, the kind of large gesture
absent from today's conference.
The Bread Loaf of old was intensely hierarchical, but the faculty insists that
it is much less so today: the instructors no longer dine together at an elevated
table with their backs to the plebs; a daily series of contributors' readings is
held in the Blue Parlor of the Bread Loaf Inn, where the unpublished get their
chance to stand at a lectern and declaim. However, the contributors feel the
weight of the hierarchy as much as ever, mainly because they are at the bottom
of it; they can often parse the class differences between waiters and scholars
and fellows, as if Bread Loaf were Victorian Britain.
In recent years, Bread Loaf has strained to include more non-white, non-straight, non-male participants. Among this year's students were a poetry-writing drag king who looked as if she could be Sean Penn's younger brother and
who has an act in which she plays a John Travolta impersonator named Johnny T.;
and a flamboyant Afrocentrist who descended to the conference each day in
increasingly dramatic outfits, an array of ankle-grazing jackets and sweeping
stoles which culminated, on her final evening, with a white satin halter-necked
ball gown.
It was she who organized a "Voices from the African Diaspora" event, introducing
a number of the conference's black participants with a sung incantation to their
ancestors. As the conference progressed, other themed readings proliferated: an
Asian-American reading, a Latin-American reading, and a gay-and-lesbian reading.
(A controversy erupted when it was announced that fee-paying contributors could
participate in only one reading, so if you'd already been gay you couldn't also
be Latino, but that ruling was quickly revoked.)
The atmosphere started to change at Bread Loaf in 1994, when Robert Pack, the
conference's director since 1973, was ousted by the Middlebury Bread Loaf board,
whose members felt that Pack's permanent faculty had grown stale. Pack delivered
his opening lecture on the first night, then walked out of the Little Theatre
and straight to a car that his wife had idling at the curb; the Packs drove off,
never to return. A memorial stone on a lawn commemorating Pack's tenure bears an
unfortunate resemblance to a gravestone.
Today's Bread Loafers seem less concerned with celebrating the debauches of the
past than with transforming their own histories, debauched or otherwise, into
literature. Among the members of one nonfiction workshop was a woman who was
writing a memoir of her alcoholism and a man who was writing about his addiction
to pornography. (The class also included a devout young woman whose memoir
recounted her experience of almost becoming a nun. The alcohol memoirist and the
porno memoirist agreed that it was beautifully written but needed more sex.)
That workshop was led by Jim Paul, a faculty member who first came to Bread Loaf
in 1980, and who mournfully theorized one afternoon that, at Bread Loaf and
beyond, the artistic model of behavior was being supplanted by the professional
model. Paul nonetheless allowed that he had an excellent bottle of tequila
stashed in his room.
The professional model dominates the conference workshops, which combine the
detached efficiency of a committee meeting with the emotional exposure of a
group-therapy session. Some Bread Loafers take criticism better than others, and
certain faculty members compared notes on whether they had any criers in their
groups. This year's most serene participant seemed to be one of the waiters, a
thirty-two-year-old poet named G. C. Waldrep, who studied at Harvard and Duke
before undergoing a conversion and joining an Amish community six years ago.
(Waldrep arrived at Bread Loaf by Greyhound bus, which is, he explained, how the
Amish travel when they go beyond horse-and-buggy range.) "The part of me from
which the poems come is not touched by criticism," Waldrep said of his workshop
experience. His enviable calm was, perhaps, enhanced by the fact that he took a
pass on the extracurricular activities--drinking, staying up all night--in which
most of the waiters indulged.
Many Bread Loafers spoke of the compulsion to write as a kind of calling, though
one that they hoped to channel in a direction that might appeal to a publisher.
A number of agents and editors are invited to Bread Loaf to give seminars on the
publishing business; the question they are most commonly asked is "Will you read
my manuscript?" Each year, a small number of participants do get discovered this
way, though they tend to be plucked from the select ranks of waiters and
scholars rather than from the fee-paying crowd. But there is hope even for them.
One evening, Sandra Benítez introduced her own reading by describing how she had
published her first novel at the age of fifty-two, having come to Bread Loaf as
a paying contributor eighteen years earlier only to be told that the book she
was working on was garbage. "I went home to my husband, to my writing group, and
I went off to bed for two weeks in my little flannel pajamas and moose-head
slippers," she said. "The awful thing is that he was right. I knew it would
never be published. So I gave it a proper burial. I bought a filing box and lit
a candle, and I said a prayer and I thanked the book for teaching me what it is
to write a novel. And I put the box under my bed, where I sleep over it still."
Several members of the audience were in tears at this story, although perhaps
not many of them would have had the resourcefulness to do what Benítez did after
that reversal, which was to take her mother's Puerto Rican maiden name--she had
been writing as Sandy Ables--and start writing on Latin-American themes instead
of about the Missouri town in which she'd grown up.
An alternative case history was provided by Norton Girault, an eighty-three-year-old Bread Loaf veteran who has been attending the conference since 1974, and who says that a high point of his writing career was being introduced to
John Gardner's agent. (The agent declined to take him on.) For the majority of
Bread Loafers, the ascent up the literary ladder is slow and difficult, and
publication is a far-off goal; a more immediate preoccupation is reaching the
level where they get a personal rejection letter rather than a form one. Such
handwritten letters are scrutinized for embedded meanings as if they were the
Dead Sea Scrolls, and are recalled with absolute precision. One young woman, who
had given up her job as an advertising copywriter to concentrate on fiction,
announced to a group in a seminar, "I sent something to The Atlantic Monthly,
and I got a personal note back from a senior editor, saying, 'We found your
piece to be very well written, but slight and predictable. Please try us again.'
" There were gasps of empathy all around.
By the conference's end, a degree of shaking out had occurred: the hot writers
were being circled by agents. This year, the buzz was all about one of the
waiters, a female M.F.A. student whose hip and funny short stories seemed to
have a "Girls' Guide"-ish marketability. Some members of the faculty seemed
drained by the eleven days. "This place is the shocking culmination of all that
is foolish and ill-conceived in the writing programs," said Vivian Gornick, who
led a nonfiction workshop. "The boosterism, the childishness, the prolonged
collegiate atmosphere. It's like a fucking parody." Gornick will not be
returning to Bread Loaf.
On the very last day of the conference, Michael Collier, sitting out in the
meadow, said that Bread Loaf was still a work in progress--he'd like to reduce
the hierarchy further, and also establish a place where the contributors can
socialize after hours without having to slink off to their rooms or try to crash
Treman. Collier added that the fact that Bread Loaf rarely leads to publication
for the writers who attend is not an argument against the conference's validity.
"I would hate to think this is all a kind of program of supporting delusions,
and I don't think we're just making people comfortable about what they're
doing," he said. "What I believe is that you can make people better writers. You
can't make them writers, but you can teach a kind of appreciation of literature,
which is important for every culture. It's like the scene at the end of
'Fahrenheit 451,' where they are all reciting the books they have memorized in
order to keep themselves alive. In some ways, we are preserving that aspect of
literary culture."
And those writers who had not yet been discovered were preparing to return to
their desks with marked-up manuscripts, a comfortingly diminished sense of their
own comparative weirdness, and a restored conviction that, as the novelist and
essayist David Shields explained one evening, a major criterion for success as a
writer was how badly you wanted it. That, and the incomparable experience of
having inhaled the same air, imbibed the same cocktails, and undergone the same
absurd recreations--including the traditional Bread Loaf hayride, during which a
wagonload of drunken, shrieking poets and novelists are hauled around a bumpy
meadow by a local farmer driving a tractor--as Robert Frost and friends once did.
On the last night, there was a farewell dance in the Bread Loaf barn. Norton
Girault was there, as he had been for the past twenty-seven years, cutting a
surprisingly light-footed dash to "Dancing Queen" and "We Are Family." Paisley
Rekdal, the poet and memoirist, was shimmying away in a glittering skirt. The
drag-king poet, in a borrowed cowboy hat, did some of her best Johnny T. moves.
G. C. Waldrep, the Amish poet, had to take a pass on the event, but the
roommates with the same-shaped breasts showed up; and so did the alcohol
memoirist and the porno memoirist; and Michael Collier was there, barefoot in
the midst of a crowd of sweaty, unhinged waiter-scholars. Some of the
conference-goers had faultless timing, while others flailed like flightless
birds; but in the Bread Loaf barn there was nobody who couldn't dance.
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