Talking Writing

Conferences for novices

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say, 'Don't listen to writers talking about writing or about themselves.' " So said Playwright Lillian Hellman, but America's aspiring authors obviously disagree. This summer would-be poets, playwrights and authors flocked to some 90 conferences across the country to learn about style and craft from established writers and to submit their own work for review. Special interest groups had their own gatherings: a Mystery Writers' Conference in Aptos, Calif.; a New England Conference in Children's Literature at Northampton, Mass. Beach-loving authors could even soak up inspiration at the Caribbean Writers' Workshop in the Virgin Islands.

But the most prestigious conference was, as it has always been, Bread Loaf, the venerable grandfather of the breed. Founded in 1926, and made famous by Robert Frost's presence for 27 years, Bread Loaf is held in late August on Middlebury College's 2,000-acre Bread Loaf campus, high in Vermont's Green Mountain National Forest. This year 224 students--chosen from 650 applicants--converged on the campus' Victorian inn and cluster of yellow cottages for the twelve-day session. Ranging in age from 17 to 78, the participants included 66 teachers, 15 lawyers and executives, and even a bank-vault attendant. They came armed with fledgling manuscripts and beginners' questions for the 14-member staff, which this year numbered, among other notables, Novelist John Gardner, author of Chaucer, Grendel and the Pulitzer-prize-winning October Light; Poet William Meredith, who teaches at Connecticut College, and Maxine Kumin, whose Up Country won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Contributing writers paid $265 tuition to attend lectures and have a manuscript evaluated, while auditors were billed $235 to take part in the sessions.

All were immersed in lectures, readings and discussion groups from the 7:30 reveille gong each morning through a final 8 p.m. session. A typical meeting convened high in the loft of Bread Loaf's huge converted barn, where ten eager fiction writers ringed John Irving, an assistant professor at Mount Holyoke and author of three novels. A stocky former wrestler, Irving listened sympathetically while one man described how he had chosen the wrong narrator for his story and then had to stop when "I realized what I was writing were lies." Irving admitted that he had once had to discard about 100 pages and start all over again. He suggested that first-person narrative was a good device for new writers. Said he: "It makes the story sound like a family album. The 'I was there' is one of the most reassuring voices in fiction."

When someone asked for a foolproof formula to get a story going, Irving said: "Whatever gets you started is fine." He had few kind words for procrastinators: "You've got to be able to write when you don't have time to write." How can you tell if your work is any good? Irving's advice: "Read it aloud to someone you know well and trust. Faces don't lie."

For Carrie McCully, just 18 and a freshman this fall at Brown University, Bread Loaf was a chance to meet others like herself who "feel passionate about their writing." Then there was Dr. Theodore Badger, 77, a ruddy-faced professor emeritus at the Harvard Medical School, who began his writing career at the age of 70 with a column in Medical Dimensions magazine. Said he: "I just wanted to come and steep myself in the intellectual atmosphere."

And of course the students all secretly hope that they will be "discovered" at a conference. Occasionally that dream comes true, as it did for soft-spoken Tom Gavin, now an assistant professor at Middlebury. He first went to Bread Loaf as a contributor in 1973, with 75 pages of manuscript under his arm. "What I needed was someone to say 'Hey, you're on the right track,' " recalls Gavin. He was duly encouraged and returned the next year with 125 pages, which Gardner then analyzed, suggesting a revision in the rhythm. This year Tom Gavin was back at Bread Loaf as a staff assistant to John Irving. His Bread Loaf manuscript is now entitled Kingkill, a novel published last June by Random House.

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