On Writing at Bread Loaf

Bread Loaf Campus, Vermont

One of my most memorable early lessons in writing happened when I attended the wrong class. 

I went to Middlebury’s Bread Loaf campus in Vermont as a teenager. With its distinctive yellow buildings, closely flanking a road that was clearly once a narrower, unpaved route, the campus is near the former summer house of Robert Frost. I traveled over a mountain and through river valleys to get there. Other young writers came from across New England.

Vermont is where I started as a writer. Before I had my own words to write, I used my mother’s. While she sat at the typewriter, clicking new words into her draft of “West Brookfield and Thereabouts,” a local history, I took one of her discarded pages and began to copy it out by hand. I didn’t fully understand what I was writing. But I knew it felt good to see the words unfurl, letter by letter. 

In third grade there was a story about discovering the Easter Bunny was my dad. I described waking to the sound of candy clattering into the aluminum pie pan I had left by my bedroom door. The myth came to an end.

In fourth grade there was a paragraph writing assignment that ran on for pages. Handwritten. No indentations. My teacher thought perhaps we should revisit the definition. I didn’t yet know about Virginia Woolf.

In high school there was the start of my first novel, inspired by a train ride along the border between East and West Germany—a wire fence through quiet countryside. The story was about a fantastical nation divided in two, having forgotten why. That’s the story that earned me my first visit to Bread Loaf. 

Most of the time was a blur of meeting interesting young writers and attending sessions on craft. But the first day of workshops stood out. 



“How do you come up with your first sentence?” asked the lecturer. 



That question made me pause. A path to my future unfurled. 



I would come to realize it’s not just about being able to write paragraph after paragraph of prose. It’s about knowing how to start. And then it’s how you go from there. Sentence by sentence. Each with a reason for being and a cadence, like your own version of Bach beginning in your head.



I was in the workshop for poetry. Mistake realized, I fled to the fiction one where I was supposed to be. Our assignment there was to write paragraphs at a time. I churned out nothing of interest. In my early teens, I did not know enough about people to spin a new scene on the spot. 



I wanted to return to the poetry session where every phrase and sentence mattered, taken into the light to be examined like a string of jewels. Years have passed, but the memory of that one question remains.



This June, I’m heading back to Bread Loaf. Once again, there will be talented writers to meet and sessions on craft. Once again, I’ll be in the Green Mountain state that made me.

I wonder, this time, what insights will linger.