My first writing job was at a newspaper on Cape Cod, in my early twenties. I had no credentials, except for one clip I’d written for my local paper, about haunted houses in my Connecticut home town. (A doozy, trust me, but, as many New England towns have their share of old witches and spectres, not exactly original fare.) With that clip in hand, I packed my rusted Subaru and left what would have been considered a promising position in Madison Avenue advertising, had my salary cut by more than two-thirds, and found myself in an empty, sandy sector of the world—the Cape in winter—racing from town meeting to meeting, police to fire department, living room to kitchen table, gathering the news.
Much of the job was exhilarating, fantastic even, especially after having led life in the Habitrail of a windowless office. As a reporter, I wrote articles about everything: about the feud between the fire chief and the selectmen, about what books people secretly read at the annual town meeting in order to keep from falling asleep. When I broke some news about the mysterious killing of seals, I had my life threatened by an unhappy fisherman. I remember writing an article about a road—Queen Anne’s Road—that traversed the town, knocking on the doors of anyone who seemed interesting from the outside: junk dealers, people with a surfeit of plastic animals in their yard. But, then, there was also the dreaded Question of the Week, asked of the person-on-the-street. I perched myself outside the Post Office with a reporter’s notebook and camera, and caught people with their heads down. Maybe my smile was a little too cockeyed, or forced, conveying my own discomfort. This being New England, I got more than a few brusque blow-offs. When I asked one victim—an older fellow wearing a tam o’ shanter—whether he thought spring would ever come, the man turned to me, wincing as if someone had just stuck a needle in his butt, and in a terse Yankee drawl said, “We don’t ask those kinds of questions around here, son.”
My paper—and it was mine, because there were no other reporters but me—came out twice a week, and, inevitably, the day before it went to press turned into an all-nighter, a hootenanny of production and slapped-down words. I took the pictures and wrote the articles and features, the op-ed pieces and commentary. Many didn’t have a byline, to make it appear as if we had a staff. Sometimes, I slept for a couple of hours under my desk, or out in the Subaru. It was powerful tonic, the knowledge that a whole town waited on your words. Or a dozen of them. I was the Wizard of Oz. Or, at least, of Harwich, Massachusetts.
In college, I’d read and been inspired by Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf. I loved Zola and the Brontës, all the seemingly faraway exotics on their dirty city blocks and midland heaths. But when I first read Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop, when I read Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost (once a newspaper man himself), I felt those words enter differently. I felt those poems in my bones. New England poems by New England writers: they made a penurious, infinite kind of New England sense. They had hard Latinate surfaces and psychedelic underneaths. They seemed almost quaint, but upon further inspection were wildly eccentric. They made me see and feel things, in a different sort of way, in a way that the ocean-fringed land of your home speaks to you, or your inner mountains, with native-spun profundity and deeper spiritual revelations.
After a year of weekly all-nighters, something began to occur to me: that my faithful reporting, the automatic words I manufactured on tight deadlines, spitting and spewing them across the page like the soot off a steam engine, those words did their momentary job, then disintegrated with the newest spew of cinder. I was in the business of impermanence—conveyances in the mass-produced language of my trade (riffs of “fossil poetry,” as Emerson might have had it, language “made up of images, or tropes” which, by overuse, was utterly disconnected from its “poetic origin”)—while I was hoping, naïvely, to make something lasting. A crisis ensued, and led to my wondering: Could these words of mine, as the atomical material of expression, possess a higher purpose? If time is fleeting, how can you capture the splendor of the world in some sort of new language that is yours alone? The hardboiled practicality of my cohorts, and even the place I lived, with its ocean storms at the window, seemed to answer for me: We don’t ask questions like that here, son.
So, here’s what I dreamt: that, after a long journey, I came to a faraway place where real writers gathered in an Elysian kingdom, to talk about how to make words last, about lyric and intention and the condition of our souls. You know, all that writerly rigamarole. I dreamt that I was somewhere that wasn’t here (here being Harwich in winter, under a blinter of stars), where there was a river whose main tributary rushed with these concerns, and nourished life with this new energy. But, in reality, here I was, icebound at the trickling headwaters, blamming out deadline copy.
So: how to get there.
Having attended Middlebury College, in Vermont, I was lucky in this respect. I phoned an old professor and brought him up to speed on the vast accomplishments of my two years since graduating (the windowless office in advertising, the haunted-house article for the paper). He urged me to apply post haste to the college’s famous writers’ conference, held over ten days in August, up in the Green Mountains, before my own writerly soul was lost forever. Of course, I’d been aware of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference; every Middlebury student was. Since 1926, it had been a stomping ground for American titans of fiction, poetry, and essays, including the great patriarch Frost himself, whose summer farmstead was just down the road. Other visitors through the years had included Willa Cather and Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison and Anne Sexton. My old professor urged me to apply for a work-study fellowship, as a waiter in the dining room, which I did. I couldn’t believe my luck when I got one.
Writers’ conferences can be a strange Hall of Mirrors, everyone looking at distortions of themselves. The primordial yawp goes out and the scatterlings stop their typing, cash in their saved-up vacations, pack their cars or board planes, drawn to some remote spot, some sanctuary (in this case, an actual Vermont mountaintop) isolated from friends and family to consider art, and their aspiration to make it. In this new, temporary civilization, the real thing (the person with real books to her or his name) meets the wannabe, which creates a chain reaction of desire. In the isolation of the Vermont wilderness, at a fabled writers’ conference, then, wanting to write can become confused with many other sorts of wantings. Human vulnerabilities manifest as extreme, the preening and posturing and deep panic attacks of inadequacy are acute, occasionally insufferable. I’m quite certain that, were we to revert back to our primal selves in such a place, the peasantry would otherwise rise up and devour the hearts of the star authors. Everyone—if secretly—is thinking about their own ascendancy, or overthrow.
Of course, I knew none of this when I blithely pulled up in my battered Subaru. It was the summer of 1988; Frost had been dead twenty-five years and his hoary ghost was everywhere. Bread Loaf was a postcard of open green fields, snaking stonewalls, an old barn and inn, painted in Marblehead gold. Pastoral, yes. Silence, check. But, underneath, a cacophony of desires and desperation. Back then, the conference was notorious for its alleged “caste system” and for its nickname, perhaps well-earned, Bed Loaf. I didn’t know much about that—nor did I come to know much more about it after my time there. Because, of course, I was there for the words, son!
My roommate was another waiter, a funny, talented poet named Chris, and we were instantly fast friends. Among the phylum of Bread Loaf writers, we fit near the bottom, just above those paying full freight. As waiters, we were there, in part, to serve the star writers, to shuttle their food, to watch them eat, to listen in on snatches of their conversation, to make sure their coffee was always full and steaming. It was important not to invoke their ire, for to do so would have been to call attention to yourself for all the wrong reasons. My strategy was to avoid the prima donnas at all costs, and, if stuck with one, to attempt to serve them without dumping mashed potatoes in their lap. Meanwhile, the other writers fell into various categories of seriousness—based partly on publication track record—and, of course, we sniffed out the pretenders right away, lest we be confused with them. One guy, looking like he was just off his yacht, sashayed around with a picnic basket. Inside: fancy cheese, crackers, strawberries, a French pinot blanc, two glasses. He dripped with so much self-regard that he made himself an instant punch line, but occasionally he convinced someone to al fresco with him on the lawn, on the blanket he also carried under his arm. Who was this guy? At the other end of the spectrum was a poet, as famous for his shenanigans as for his fine work, who appeared mostly drunk and chain-smoking, who had slept with so many of his students and friends’ wives that he’d run out, and then had been kicked out of academia, and yet who still relied on old friends to invite him to conferences like this, where he could play the charming poet-wag again. Even then, I knew this was not a pretty picture—the stumbling seductions, the wasted talents—but a kind of warning. The truth always outed in the work. Every day—three times a day, after breakfast, lunch, and dinner—the main readings were held in the Little Theatre, which we packed tightly. This was where, in reading after reading, I felt myself undergoing some sort of molecular change. Released from deadlines and the Harbormaster’s ever-ringing voice, cut off from the frenzy of collecting “news” and the weekly all-nighters, I found myself ascending a little, in a state of ecstatic vibration. I scribbled new words in my notebook, collecting jewels. At the best readings, the results could be transcendent. Words and sentences were whipped and stirred. Action rose and fell. Secrets and emotion were unearthed. Of course, some flopped, with their excesses and affectations (during one poet’s reading, the woman in front of me kept absently writing “claptrap” on her notebook). But a great majority of what happened in that room, with its holy hush, happened with the impact of a meteor strike. At least for me. A fiction writer read a Vietnam story, and it seemed like everyone sucked in his or her breath at once and breathed out an hour later, when the story ended, as if punctured. In other readings, other reactions: certain audience members listened with their eyes closed, some rocked to the sound of the word-music. One established poet, with glasses and a walrus mustache, moved his hands, as if conducting silently from the back row, and when the climax came perfectly, and the poem ended in all its mystery and uplift, he was on his feet, yelling, Hell, yeah! Amen!
I was moved by his devotion, as much as by the poem itself. In the world down below, in that New England I’d left behind, where tam o’ shanter taciturnity ruled the day, this sort of demonstrative celebration might have been regarded as alien and untoward. But here, inside, I was shouting, too: Hell yeah! Amen! And not just because the poem was good. Because I’d found myself at the bottom rung, among a tribe I thought might be mine.
You know it when you’re plunked in them: Word-laden places. Landscapes with emanations. Riven with history. Striated with spirits. New England is a cornucopia: Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts, looking from the bedroom’s writing desk through wavy glass to the leaf-filled yard. The jasmine-vined garden at Emily Dickinson’s homestead, in Amherst, blossoms quivering (sometimes she placed her poems in the bouquets she gave as presents; sometimes they were sheathed in “fascicles,” envelopes that included petals from the garden). The dune shacks at Provincetown, where Eugene O’Neill, E. E. Cummings, and Jack Kerouac came to write in the summer, against the ocean storms and noonday desert sun, to make words in hopes of leaving them behind, or, as Stevens says, in hopes that their “imagination become the light in the mind of others.”
Bread Loaf was obviously a word-laden place, too. Connected to the source, lit within. There, after relinquishing my defensive pose of cynicism and my own Yankee judgment, I found myself supercharged, hungry, hopeful. Bread Loafers—all of them, but particularly the waiters—will tell you that the schedule can be gruelling. First, no one’s sleeping all that much, and the days are a literary footrace as you zoom between the kitchen, readings, your own workshops (with a big-shot writer who evaluates “your work”), kitchen again, then readings again, pre-dinner cocktail parties, waiting tables, readings, late-night parties punctuated by a couple of dances (to prove, once and for all, to the tuneful stylings of Flock of Seagulls, an indisputable maxim: writers really, really can’t dance!). In 1988, there were a fair number of M.F.A. programs, but the taught-writing industry hadn’t yet exploded as it has today, and these workshop experiences, if not novel, were more precious in their way. The biggest surprise in the ten days of the conference (besides the humid sins, peccadillos, and misbehaviors of other conference-goers, reported among the waiters each morning) was the quality of work brought by my cohorts, the other waiters. As good as the great writers were, the most sustaining thing of all was that people who resembled me—young, shaggy, of mostly meagre means–were finding their own voices, making their own fascicles, too. Yes—we were writing our own starter Book of Genesis, however crappy at first, on that mountain.
I remember the best poem of all, made by a waiter friend. She was tall with frizzy hair, ovoid eyes, and a shy smile. She was there with us in the fray, but held herself slightly apart as well. As I remember it, she wrote about a boy on a beach somewhere, with a fishing pole. The language of the poem was colloquial, unaffected. As a sort of trap, the boy had hooked a mussel shell that a hovering gull mistook for food. Alighting on the wet sand, it took the shell in its beak and flew away. And in all of that open sky, racing upward (one presumes joyful in anticipation), the gull was caught short on the line, instantly ripped from illusion, sent tumbling. The metaphor was potent, the boy on the beach spectral. It was disturbing and beautiful. And I remember it to this day, in part because I found it astonishing that here, at twenty-two or twenty-three, this poet friend of mine seemingly had found, of all things, images … metaphors … her voice. Damn—there it was, etched right there on the page!
There was also a hike we took one day, up the mountain, four of us playing hooky from the afternoon reading. The temperature, as the sun appeared and then vanished between clouds, kept oscillating. There was some rain, a blirt of pelting drops, and then, suddenly, sun and heat. We scrambled up to a pond. From this peak, here in the middle of Vermont, the water ran in both directions, south to Long Island Sound and north to St. Lawrence Bay. We stood between worlds. Or in the multiplicity of it. Running out in all directions, too. Glorious day, of many seasons at once. Or so it seemed.
If you believe that you become the place you’re in, and the people with whom you surround yourself, then the search for your voice may seem as legitimate as making a bunch of money on Wall Street. Every sentence is a stone wall; every story crumbles under its own flowering mystery. Inside the pond is another pond. That is what is written, too, on the mountain. We are the leaf in the tree. Stone and water get spun with the tune. You emerge with the first real notes.
Listen.
I left Bread Loaf on a Sunday, in mist. It was cold now, the fall upon us even in August, tassels of leaves flaring gold and red. While there, I’d met a Great American Writer who asked me to apply to his M.F.A. program (the one to which I’d soon be accepted, and which would change my life); I’d met another pretty, brooding poet, whom I’d soon meet again, and with whom I’d spend the next few years. But now I was shivering as I packed the car, in the clouds, seasons ever moving. My head was swimming with euphoria and sadness, a twin desire never to leave this place and to flee. I can’t tell you who had sex with whom, what bit of nastiness or humor attached to what drunken poet or bon vivant pretender. We lived many lives there, in a blur. And now it was over. Pulling away, I took my last mental snapshot. The high mountain meadows full of their own wilting flowers, the peaks disappearing in clouds, rain beginning to fall in planets, the stonewalls in their majesty marking out this hallowed piece of land. Pirring wind, but it was Dickinson who rang loudest:
And then I was hurtling down, down into the real world again, on the roads of New England, to the sea, the words in my head (blinter, claptrap, pirring) growing louder and louder, forming the first sentences that drowned out the radio at last.
A longer version of this essay will appear in the Wildsam Field Guide to New England, under the title 'Word, Planet, Wonder, Song.'
