Bread Loaf

In August 2024,  the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury University in Vermont, founded almost a century ago in 1926, brought emerging writers together to work with a diverse and committed faculty. For ten days, Participants and Fellows worked under the guidance of notable writers, including MacArthur Fellows, U.S. Poets Laureate, and recipients of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. The 2024 cohort included more than two hundred writers. Nick Makoha talks with Jennifer Grotz and Lauren Francis-Sharma, director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Nick Makoha (NM): What is Bread Loaf and what is the vision of it? 

Jennifer Grotz (JG): A lot of people come to Bread Loaf thinking it’s a writing retreat, but that’s the last thing it is; it’s so much more than that. That’s why it’s called a conference. It’s really about writers coming together and mentoring each other. It was part of the School of English and a bunch of writers, including Robert Frost, decided that they wanted to get together and talk with each other and also mentor other young writers, figure out how to help each other and, in particular, how to get published. So that’s what Bread Loaf is really, where creative writing as a practice (or at least in American pedagogy) began. My goal for it as Director has been to carry out its original mission of writers teaching writers. I’m always looking for faculty who are really amazing writers but who are also gifted teachers – because those are actually two different things – and then putting a bunch of people together on a mountain and seeing what happens, basically. 

Lauren Francis-Sharma (LFS): Much of our goal, since Jen and I began together has been bringing really talented writers together at very important points in their careers. We have people who have just begun in their writing career, people mid-career and then, obviously, the faculty represents people who are considered more ‘masters’ so to speak. But we also wanted to level out the hierarchy and we’ve done a lot of work trying to make sure people didn’t feel as if you couldn’t access people at a more advanced stage than you, and making sure that everyone is in the same space, all feeling the same things about this beautiful work that we’re trying to do. Sort of flattening it out. Bringing in a diverse group of thinkers on race, gender, expressions, so that everyone is learning from each other in all ways possible. 

NM: What did it take to create that space?  There are many types of retreats and many types of conferences, but it’s not quite that, it’s something else.  What did it take to maintain that? And what are your visions for the future? 

JG: It takes our staff working year-round. I also think the location is a really important part of it. How it takes a lot of things out of your hands, like worrying about meals, or feeling like you need to go run errands. We’re all on this mountain top and we’re actually overstimulated compared to our regular lives, but we’re also really simplified, and we’re in this beautiful natural landscape. You kind of feel like you’re in this utopia. You know you can’t really stay there but it’s a magical place; you’re just thinking all the time and encountering and absorbing stuff. 

This next summer is the 100th session of the conference, I only point that out because I think part of what Bread Loaf is, is because it has had a hundred years of trial and error. 

LF-S: One of the other things that our team does well is really listening to the people who come and reading their evaluations and trying to make ourselves better for the next year. Right now, we’re very focused on celebrating the centennial, so we’ve been spending a lot of time in the archives, looking at photos, and recordings and we’re hoping that we can make so much more of that available to people in the next couple of years. 

JG: I think of Bread Loaf ideally as the place where we’re always in the vanguard of what best practices are in terms of writers teaching each other and mentoring each other. The world is changing very quickly and the conversations we are having are changing very quickly. The kinds of writing we’re looking at and the ways we talk about it all need to become more sophisticated. And so Bread Loaf needs to be part of that and not just part of the past.

Pedagogically, I’m always looking for the kinds of people we can bring that will help us have the right conversations we need to have at this moment. In recent years we’ve had a couple of offshoot conferences. We’ve had the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers conference and the Bread Loaf Translators conferences. We need to have access to stories in different languages. And we need to be influenced in a more global way. We also need to find ways to tell stories about the environment and the climate that will keep us human and save our lives, hopefully, and the planet’s life. I think that’s also part of the future, tweaking what we do based on those needs.

 NM: Another thing I’m impressed with is how you have different levels of engagement, all working together: the tutors, the fellows, the alumni, and the staff. How are you getting so many poets, prose writers, fiction writers, storytellers to sit down, to listen, to read, engage, go on runs, to eat?

 JG: You know, Nick, over 2500 people apply every year. There’s no shortage of talented writers. The hardest part for Lauren and I is the literally thousands of rejections we end up sending every year. So the people who do make it tend to be pretty extraordinary people. 

I always love hearing how Bread Loaf trickled off the mountain. Communities started after people met at Bread Loaf and then they carried it forward in different ways. After I went to Bread Loaf for the first time, when I was living in Portland, Oregon, I came back and I started a lecture series. I started writing grants, I worked for a little writing centre. I tried to copy the best parts of Bread Loaf in that community. I think that was the beginning of me being an arts administrator as well as a poet.

LF-S: There’s something about those first few lectures, even if the lectures are planned months in advance, that they begin to speak to one another without it actually having been planned.

I was moderating a panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival this past weekend, and it was raining and it was miserable, I really did not want to be there, but as I looked out in to the audience, there were probably a dozen Breadloafers who had come just because I was moderating the panel. I see that happen all the time and it felt incredibly beautiful to have people come up and say ‘Hey, I know you from Bread Loaf’; or ‘I saw you on the schedule I wanted to come in.’ I hope that’s what we’ll do for each other forever.

NM: You are the custodians of Bread Loaf, do you get to write? When does the Breadloafing happen for you both?

LF-S: That’s really hard. I have to say I have a little envy on the mountain that I don’t get to go to the workshops. I do sneak into some classes on occasion. My Breadloafing happens long after the conference is over. I sit and I take notes during lectures. And I’ll go over the audio months later and be thinking about things that can apply to my work. I’m not always able to do that on the mountain. I don’t know about you Jen, but I’m always looking to see what the new conversation is that’s happening in literature. Because my mind is always thinking about Bread Loaf and how to make it better, I’m also keeping up on conversations and learning as a writer as well, so the job helps me be a better writer. 

JG: What I would add, Nick, is that I’m in an incredibly privileged position, because I first came to Bread Loaf almost 30 years ago, as a very young poet, and it rocked my world, and it really formed me, I learned more at Bread Loaf than I did in my graduate schools. So, in a way, Bread Loaf happened to me already. and now I see my goal as stewarding that for others. Not in years have I written a word on the mountain, I don’t even try to write on the mountain, I can barely read on the mountain. But I make my goal to just listen and absorb as much as I can and be as present as I can and that rewards amply every time.  

Now when I sit down at the desk to write a poem, the little theatre is my audience in my head, the Bread Loaf is there, is my ideal, what the literary world is where I’ve been happiest as a writer, so I sort of carry Bread Loaf with me. And I literally visit the archives all the time. I’m dipping in and going back and reading the books of Breadloafers. It’s true we don’t get to sit in on workshops. It’s still an embarrassment of riches for us too.

NM: Thank you to you both for giving me your time.

Nick Makoha

Poet Nick Makoha's debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity, was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and was one of the Guardian’s best books of the year.