Bread Loaf: It's great, it's exhausting, it's complicated.
This was my third consecutive year spending two weeks in August "on the mountain" in Vermont, attending the Bread Loaf Writers Conference as a work-study scholar. (I served as the Blue Parlor Coordinator again, leading nightly open mics & special readings, which I love.) These conferences are seen by some as retreats or vacations -- and they are, in some ways -- but the Loaf, to me, has always been an intensified social microcosm of the larger cultural moment. There are microaggressions, call-outs, conspiracies, even crimes, and there's also overwhelming compassion, generosity, breakthroughs and reckonings. (And miracles: it's where I met my sweetheart.)
I had an incredible workshop with the incomparable Luis Alberto Urrea and Elena Passarello, and got to forge friendships & collaborations with some of the most kickass writers & women I've ever met: Jennifer Hope Choi, Jaquira Diaz, Aurvi Sharma, to name a few. Read them now.
On the afternoon of the eclipse, we hiked to Lake Pleiad and the birds went quiet as the moon passed in front of the sun. (Vanessa Hua, author of Deceit and Other Possibilities, wrote about the moment & ghost stories for SF Chronicle.) After a week of never-ending cocktails & literary conversation (both smalltalk & deep debate), a gang of writers just gaped, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, at the sky.