Bread Loaf Bakes Up Writers and Degrees

Author: Lanford Beard

Just 15 minutes away from Middlebury, a community unto itself sits in Ripton, Vt. This community is Bread Loaf, a thriving environment where writers each summer learn from mutual exchange of ideas and experiences.

Set in the Green Mountain National Forest, the most exciting feature of Bread Loaf is its diversity of intellectual offerings. Annually hosting scholars of all ages, from Middlebury College, the United States and beyond, Bread Loaf unites scholars with its nationally recognized educational opportunities.

The idea for a community that we now know as Bread Loaf first began when Joseph Battell, breeder of Morgan horses, proprietor of the local newspaper and ardent nature lover, began acquiring lands in Ripton in 1866.

Over the years, Battell purchased over 30,000 acres of forest and farmland in the mountains. During his lifetime, he cultivated these lands and built cottages to house summer guests. In 1915 he willed all of the land to Middlebury College.

In 1920, the College established a School of English on the Bread Loaf campus. This school would serve as a postgraduate program for people desiring to more intimately understand the written language.

Throughout the years the program has employed distinguished literary figures such as Harold Bloom, George K. Anderson, Carlos Baker, Reuben Brower, Elizabeth Drew, A. Bartlett Giamatti and John Crowe Ransom, among others.

However, among all of its faculty throughout the years, poet Robert Frost left the most striking mark upon the school. Frost first came to the Bread Loaf School of English at the invitation of Dean Wilfred Davison in 1921. Throughout the next 42 years, Frost loyally returned every summer, with the exception of three summers. The College now cares for the historic Robert Frost Farm near the Bread Loaf Campus.

Today, the School of English is one of the largest master of arts programs in the country, with programs in Juneau, Ala., Santa Fe, N.M., and Oxford, England.

All of these programs also a master of letters course of study and nondegree curriculums of continuing education and undergraduate honors study.

According to School of English Director James Maddox, Bread Loaf would also like to open a school in Mexico to accommodate the growing diversity of teachers and students in schools across America.

Maddox commented, "I would like the Bread Loaf population of students to reflect the population of America, and that means getting as broad of a demographic of teachers as possible."

Perhaps one of the school's most important benefits is the rapport that teachers form at the school. Maddox observed, "Bread Loaf is one of the few places in the world where public and private school teachers meet and get to know each other's worlds."

"We have rescued more teachers in danger of burn-out by making them members of a community and a network — both face to face and through telecommunication. Most simply we do more to help struggling teachers in America's classroom than anywhere else in the world," he remarked.

The oldest writer's conference in America, the Bread Loaf conceptcame to fruition in 1926, many years before the concept of a creative writing major was even available in American colleges and universities.

Other important figures in establishing the writer's conference were Willa Cather, Katherine Lee Bates and Louis Untermeyer, who all held staff positions at Bread Loaf in 1922.

Editor John Farrar first undertook the task, organizing the writer's conference, which was designed to fit between the end of the School of English's summer session and the beginning of the academic year.

Today, the Bread Loaf Inn, the central building on campus, hosts over 300 people each summer with the School of English, the writer's conference, and the New England Young Writer's Conference (NEYWC), the newest addition to the Bread Loaf enterprise.

One of the more interesting learning techniques that the School of English incorporates is the hiring professional actors to assist with in-class demonstrations as well as mount the summer's major production, supplemented by additional performances by Bread Loaf students.

The program coordinators feel that this approach is oriented towards bringing students into contact with theater professionals in all fields.

Likewise, the Writer's Conference takes advantage of many creative techniques to educate students in the art forms of fiction, poetry and nonfiction writing.

From June to August of each year men and women travel to Bread Loaf in the United States or England to perfect the craft of writing, but the experience does not end there.

Participants can set up meetings with agents and editors, go on hikes on the nearby Long Trail or ventures to Lake Dunmore, as well as seek out individual stimulation in the Davison Memorial Library and the "Apple Cellar" computer lab.

The program is an interactive experience, as Director Michael Collier notes on the conference's Web site. "Bread Loaf is not a retreat — not a place to work in solitude. Instead it provides a stimulating community of diverse voices in which we test our own assumptions regarding literature and seek advice about our progress as writers."

With its Bakeless Literary Prizes, fellowship and scholarship offerings and the NEYWC, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference has certainly spread its influence to an international level throughout its 76 years of existence.

Starting this May with the NEYWC, another inspiring season for Bread Loaf will begin, and the voices along the way will fill historic Ripton.

Nestled amid its rolling meadows and pine forests, conference attendees will form visionary communities.

Their collective stories, poetry and essays will bear witness to the love of nature and the edification of creativity that Joseph Battell embodied over 150 years ago.