August 11, 2009
Monday

All through dinner, amid high decibels of noise, talk swirled around me. One woman, a short story writer, kept waving to others across the room and jumped up frequently to hug old acquaintances. She announced that this was her nineteenth consecutive year at Bread Loaf. . . .
                  — Dorothy L. Stephens, b. 1924, American writer
from “Looking Back at Bread Loaf,” The Larcom Review, Spring/Summer 1999

Dorothy Stephens attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1997 as a tuition scholar. Her book, Kwa Heri Means Goodbye, a memoir of the two years she lived in Kenya, had been a finalist for the Bakeless Prize in Nonfiction the year before. Her brief essay recalling her experience at Bread Loaf appeared in the premiere issue of The Larcom Review, a now-defunct literary journal that showcased the work of New England writers.

I don’t know how that issue came into my possession. It was probably a promotional copy sent to me because I was on a mailing list from some academic conference. I don’t remember ever reading anything in it, nor do I recognize any of the writers whose work appears in it that I might have wanted to read and thus kept moving the volume from shelf to shelf every time I restacked my “To Be Read” pile. (Okay, piles, plural.) A few weeks ago it was headed into the latest purge when I scanned the table of contents and saw the piece about Bread Loaf.

I know the woman described in the portion I’ve quoted. For purposes of this piece we’ll call her Ruby, and when I met her in 2003 she was, according to my notes, enjoying her twenty-third sojourn on the mountain. (As I recall, personal matters had caused the gap years.)

My first year at Bread Loaf had been difficult for me. I was shy and unsure of myself, certain that everyone here was a more accomplished writer than I was. I had difficulty establishing relationships. One woman I did seem to connect with, a newspaper columnist from Ohio, left the conference after about five days without saying goodbye. I felt out of place in my workshop, where one participant made fun of my hat (she called it “cheesy”) and another wrote a character sketch of me which emphasized (actually, exaggerated) my excess weight (and also made fun of the hat). Worse, there was a very bad fit between the workshop leader and me. She seemed to dislike me on sight, was clearly bored by my work, and refused even to discuss it with me in the private conference each writer gets, saving all her disparagement of it for the in-class session. (Understand, the criticisms were valid. It was the manner of delivery that cut like a knife. I expect, and value, criticism that makes me wish I’d written the piece differently. I don’t expect to come away from a workshop wishing I’d never been born.) Two workshop members with whom she had apparently bonded closely gave similar devastating opinions. That they were obviously the wrong audience for my apprentice-level historical fiction did not soften the blows.

I was determined that no one was going to see me cry and left the session with my head up. I stayed away from dinner and that night’s reading. I didn’t come back to campus until lunch the day after the debacle. There I found myself sitting with Ruby and unburdening my disappointments and my uncertainties about my talents. She listened and offered history about that particular faculty member that at least let me know I wasn’t alone in having a bad experience with her. She comforted me. She understood me. Barely twenty years older than I, she became my yiddishe bubbe.

My subsequent years at Bread Loaf were dramatically different from that first. I made friends, got attention and encouragement from faculty and fellows, both those whose workshops I was assigned to and those with whom I fell into conversation in the dining hall, in the Barn, at the participants’ readings, on the porch. Ruby returned every year, and she and two other perennial attendees formed the core of my peer group. In 2005 my mother-in-law died in the middle of the conference, and I went home for three days (returning after the funeral at Ron’s insistence). Ruby went to the craft class I had to miss and took notes for me. She collected handouts for me and checked my mail.

Some say they saw the signs in 2007. Age and obesity were catching up with Ruby. She would have knee replacement surgery in the fall, but in the months leading up to it her pain increased while her mobility decreased. (The Bread Loaf campus, designed in the nineteenth century, is a navigational challenge for almost anyone not in top physical condition.) Those with some experience in elder care, two physicians in particular, detected subtle cognitive problems. By 2008, anyone could see that Ruby was declining. Perhaps the knee surgery, which had not completely mitigated her pain, had also wrought some mental changes. Perhaps it was something else.

It seemed that every time I saw her, she remarked at how beautiful the sunset had been the night before. It might indeed have been, but it’s hard to see from where we are. She became like the Ancient Mariner, stopping people at random on the paths that wind through the campus and repeating stories about her dogs. She asked me at lunch one day if I were a poet or a fiction writer. Later, when she introduced herself to me and asked me if this was my first time at Bread Loaf, I knew.

As much as I love Ruby and my other Bread Loaf friends, we don’t typically communicate much during the year. When the application period opens and faculty are announced in January, we sometimes check in with each other. Bread Loaf went all electronic this year, with an online submission process instead of a paper manuscript and other materials sent through the postal system. Ruby wrote that she was having trouble using the new process. She couldn’t figure it out. Others received the same note from her. This was clearly troubling, since if you can send an e-mail with this information, you can probably figure out the submission manager.

We got the official word in June, by way of Ruby’s daughter who informed the conference director, who in turn informed those of us known to be close to her. Ruby had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and was now in an assisted living facility. She was not responding to e-mail nor other forms of communication.

My experience at Bread Loaf last year was the most intensely productive one I’d ever had. I was occupied every minute, it seemed, learning, reading, talking to the talented and generous people who looked at my work and gave me valuable feedback. I hadn’t spent much time with Ruby, not only because I was busy, but because it had become increasingly hard to have a meaningful conversation with her. On the last Sunday morning, as I sat in the half-empty dining hall, I saw her standing in line waiting to board the van that would take her to the airport in Burlington. I went out, embraced her, wished her a safe trip home. And, with an inkling that I might never see her again, I told her that I loved her and thanked her for her many kindnesses to me.

I could, of course, probably see her again. She lives in New York City, not a difficult trip for me. Would she know me, though, and if she did, would seeing me and others of her Bread Loaf connections only exacerbate the anger and the anguish we’re told she feels at her change in circumstances.

The campus is still mostly empty as I write, some thirty-six hours before the official opening of the conference. Staff and scholars and fellows and waiters and some faculty have arrived, and though I haven’t stepped onto the campus yet (the house I rent is at the easternmost edge, a quarter mile from the center of things), I’ve seen a few people I recognize as I drive by on my way downtown for supplies.

And I’ve seen Ruby too, as I remember her, sitting on the porch, making her difficult but determined way along the paths to the theater and the classroom building and the library. I will miss her this year. I will miss her for the rest of my life. I hope, at some level, she knows that.
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