Summer Camp for Writers

It’s August, and that month has always carried a lot of meaning for me. My birthday is August 25, and because school always began on the Thursday after Labor Day, August was our last chance to head down the shore for a vacation. Or for me to walk to the woods at the end of our street and pretend I was an explorer.

August also reminds me of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, held on top of a wooded mountain outside Middlebury, Vermont.

As an English major at Penn, I wrote a creative thesis under the guidance of the poet and writer Judith Moffett. She suggested I might like Bread Loaf, where I could be exposed to a wide range of literary novelists, poets, and nonfiction writers

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Back then, you could attend as either an auditor or a participant. Participants had fifty pages of their work reviewed by one of the senior faculty, who included such luminaries as John Irving and John Gardner. I had Irving sign my tattered paperback copy of The World According to Garp, which I adored.

Because I applied late, I was accepted only as an auditor. But Ron Powers, a journalist and television critic who was there as a nonfiction fellow, took pity on me and read my pages anyway. I greatly appreciated his kindness.

I have wonderful memories of sitting on the lawn in an Adirondack chair, sipping gin and tonic and talking about books and writing. I met people like Jessie Dolch, a poet I’m still friends with today. I played volleyball with poet and short-story writer David Huddle. Late at night, we gathered around the piano in the Barn while David Haward Bain played and Stanley Elkin chimed in.

Bread Loaf was where I first learned about this thing called an MFA in creative writing, something that would shape my life in many ways. It also exposed me to well-known authors like Erica Jong. In my notes, I quoted her talking about “the first chapter that lies there like a lox.”

Each night, one of the senior faculty gave a reading in the Little Library, a rectangular building with tall windows. We crammed inside on folding chairs or sat cross-legged on the floor.

Even my fellow students seemed remarkable. One was a Yale Younger Poet. Another had written a nonfiction book reviewed in The New York Times. Some of the people I met went on to win major prizes, including Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.

The workshops were on a higher level than the ones I knew from college, and so were my fellow students. A Vietnam vet wrote evocatively about combat, and a woman worked on a biography of her father, a famous painter. People talked about Robert Frost, whose cabin was down the road. There was a froth of excitement in meeting people from all around the country who wanted to be serious writers.

We were reminded that Bread Loaf wasn’t a place to write. It was a place to learn, to talk about writing, and to have fun with like-minded people.

Summer camp for writers.

I’d love to go back someday. But the truth is that Bread Loaf is primarily a place for literary writers, while I’ve planted myself firmly in genre fiction: mysteries, romances, and adventures. These days, I’m also not sure I’d be quite as enthusiastic about climbing all those stairs to rooms in the Inn or the annex, or suffering through cold-water showers.

But I’m delighted that Bread Loaf still exists.

I went there as a college student who loved to write and came away with a glimpse of what a writer’s life could look like. I didn’t become the kind of writer I imagined I might become at Bread Loaf. I became a mystery novelist, a creator of gay romance, a teacher, and eventually the author of more books than that young man sitting in an Adirondack chair could possibly have imagined.

But I think he would have been pretty happy to know how things turned out.

P.S. I’ve been delighted by the warm reviews coming in for Dog of Secrets, the newest Golden Retriever Mystery. Thank you to everyone who has read, reviewed, or recommended it. Those reviews truly help other readers discover the series.