August 19, 2007
Sunday 

I shall be telling this with a sigh,
Somewhere ages and ages hence . . .
                     — Robert Frost, 1874-1963
                         American poet

In order to type today’s date and day, I had to look in the corner of my computer’s system tray. It is, indeed, August 19, a Sunday, but here at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, that has little meaning. It’s Day 5 of the conference, and if you’re a poet or a nonfiction writer, you have a workshop session this morning. I’m here in fiction (that’s the way we introduce ourselves to others), so I have nothing scheduled today until 2:30, when I’m going to a class on writing personal stories within the context of larger realities. The topic is intended for nonfiction writers, but the lines delineating what kind of instruction or conversation is suitable for what kind of writer are blurred here on the mountain.

I’ve been here a week, three days before the conference officially started. At left is a picture I took at the entrance to the Robert Frost Interpretative Trail, a mile-long loop through natural settings marked here and there with selections from Frost’s work.

I last walked the trail in 2002, the year I came here almost on a whim after a friend’s casual remark about “roads not taken” prompted me to change my itinerary on a research trip to the region. Instead of swinging by Yale from Boston to study my subject’s papers held there, I recrossed Massachusetts and came north to revisit the place where I’d sojourned as a graduate student thirty years before. I was here that year in the interim between the end of the School of English session and the beginning of the Writers’ Conference. I walked about the campus in search of the spirit of my younger self and finding her in a landscape that had changed little. The walk along the Frost Trail helped me form the intention to apply to the Writers’ Conference.

I’ve been admitted five times now, and when I see the ochre-colored buildings of the campus for the first time each year, I know that I have come home. I stay alone in an apartment attached to a private residence that overlooks the campus, where my days take on a rhythm of inner and outer endeavors. Over the years I have learned which activities beyond my official workshop sessions are profitable for me. I have breakfast every morning with three friends who are also perennial attendees, and then pick and choose among the lectures, craft classes, readings, and discussions that are offered. It’s a rich atmosphere, and it takes a lot of energy to take in even a small portion of it.

My manuscript, a short story that came together for me during the creative windstorm that swirled through me and around me last winter, was addressed in our very first workshop on Day 2. It’s about a high school senior from a working class background who is at a crossroads in his life. “Get your character in trouble early,” said an instructor I worked with more than a decade ago. The trouble I chose for my young man was his girlfriend’s unplanned pregnancy, and I worried that in treading such a well-worn path I ran the risk of presenting a manuscript that would strike these sophisticated readers as banal and predictable.

To my amazement, it was quite well-received. A young man in my group who comes out of a background similar to my character’s complimented me on my ability to write about class, especially the working class, without stereotypes or condescension. Two men in their forties praised the way I portrayed my character’s tenderness toward his girlfriend without getting sentimental and without creating a man who talks and acts the way women wish men would talk and act. This morning someone told me that a reader on the admissions panel was talking about how strong my work is.

I read last night at the second open reading for contributors. Faculty members and the teaching fellows present their work at formal readings in the Little Theater either in the late afternoon or the evening. Each usually takes thirty or forty minutes. The tuition scholars and the work-study waiters give readings that are less formal and a little shorter. Those of us on the lowest rung of the ladder here get exactly five minutes each at a very informal gathering in the Blue Parlor, a small room in the Inn presided over by the stern visage of Joseph Battell, who built this campus and then gave it to Middlebury College.

I’m a novelist, and habitual readers of this space will know that brevity is not the most salient characteristic of my work. In recent years I have been developing the ability to write scenes and fragments that keep the muscles of my imagination limber. The result is that I found three or four pieces in my current inventory that seemed suited to a slot in a Blue Parlor reading.

I chose a 900-word scene that began as an exercise in a class I took here in 2004 with fiction writer Carol Anshaw. “Think of something that happened to you before you were ten years old,” she said, “and then write what you don’t remember.” I thought of a dead cat I saw on my way to school one morning in 1955, when I was eight years old. Or maybe my friend Donna saw it and told me about it. Maybe we snuck out of the schoolyard at recess to look at it, maybe I went alone, and maybe I never even saw it but have only Donna’s, or someone else’s, description of it. In any case, that dead cat has lived in my memory for fifty years, and somehow became the childhood experience that inspired one of my characters to become a hospice nurse.

Three people stopped me this morning outside the dining hall. One was a faculty member, one was the teaching fellow assigned to my workshop group, and one was another contributor. They congratulated me on the reading, thanked me for choosing such a lovely, poignant piece, even made specific comments on the content of what I had read.

Such attention and such praise nearly overwhelm me. These people know what they are talking about and have no obligation to say anything at all to me. They must be sincere, I conclude, and they must be right as well.

It’s hard to be in this place for this purpose without quoting Robert Frost a lot. “The Road Not Taken” is a poem that even people who don’t know much about poetry know something about. When I used it with eleventh grade American Lit students I’d talk a lot about what the sigh might mean. Why will he be telling this with a sigh? Is it a sigh of regret? Of sorrow? Of disappointment?

I shall be telling this with a sigh of gratitude and great humility for the support and encouragement I continue to receive on this mountain.