August 15, 2013
Thursday

I once signed up for a “women’s craft retreat” at the church camp my daughter attended. Held on a glorious  Pennsylvania fall weekend when the leaves had gone loden to ochre to scarlet to almost gone, I envisioned a time of communal meals alternating with walks in the woods, demonstrations and displays, and periods spent knitting by the fire in contemplation or, if you wanted it, conversation.

It turned out to be a gathering of fifty or sixty women who would all spend time in a large meeting hall, working on the same kitschy craft. A lighted snowman head was the project for the first evening. You took a two- or three-quart jar, filled it with cotton balls, wound a short string of tiny white Christmas tree lights through it, topped it with a cardboard hat, and glued decorations to the side for the eyes and mouth. Our rooms were just off the main craft room, and the noise of the laughter and the camaraderie there kept me awake well past midnight. It was a retreat only in the sense that you stayed over away from your home and family, and it was all wrong for me and my habits of being. I left before lunch the next day.

In terms of programming and the demands for extraversion on writers who are mostly introverts, Bread Loaf can be like that. You don’t go off into Robert Frost’s woods with your notebook and your muse, coming out with a rough draft of a new story. There are readings, lectures, informal talks, craft classes, meetings with agents and editors, and, of course, the workshops. And let’s not forget the numerous opportunities for socializing. You can make yourself busy every single minute. You can wear yourself out. Every year, Michael Collier, in his opening remarks, advises us to pace ourselves. Every year, some people fail to heed that advice. I am not one of them.

I went down the hill for breakfast (I stay in an apartment attached to a private house just on the edge of the campus — an important component of pacing myself) and to sign up for a craft class to be given on Saturday. It’s important to be at the sign-up wall at precisely eight o’clock. Lollygaggers will find the 25-person limit reached for most offerings. Then I skipped the morning lecture and  went back up the hill to read the set to be examined today. I had lunch with my instructor and classmates, then met them for our first workshop. And then I skipped the afternoon reading, the cocktail reception, and dinner, in order to be able to sleep off the last of the cold that has gripped me since I got back from Tennessee, and be fresh for the evening’s reading.

Jamie Quatro, who was the fellow in my Sewanee workshop last month and who is fellowing again at Bread Loaf, read from her story collection. Then Jennifer Grotz, an accomplished poet who serves as the assistant director of the conference, read from her recent work. I enjoyed those two voices, make no mistake about that. But the draw for me tonight, the reason I paced myself with a large measure of alone time today, was the reading by faculty member and fiction writer Robert Boswell.

I am not an auditory learner. I am, rather, a visual and kinesthetic learner. I understand and retain more if I read the words myself while holding the book they appear in. At Bread Loaf in 2008, I heard Robert Boswell read “Smoke,” a story from a collection that had not yet been published. “Three boys smoke and talk about sex,” it begins, and from that moment I was no longer in that “butt-numbing” chair of the Little Theater, but in the hunting cabin with those boys, hearing the stories they tell each other concerning their first time, and the truths they admit only in their own hearts. It was beautiful, and haunting, and brought me nearly to tears. I bought the collection the day it was published. You can hear him read it yourself here.

Tonight he read from his new novel, Tumbledown. It’s a big, squashy novel (nearly 450 pages) with lots of characters and multiple points of view, the kind of novel I like to read and which, it appears, I am endeavoring to write. It’s about people struggling to have a normal life, or what passes for a normal life, despite the ways in which psychological traumas have damaged them.

I let the words fall over me, glad I had come. The excerpt didn’t rivet me the way “Smoke” did five years ago, but Tumbledown will be among the books I buy before I come down the mountain.