Just wanted to say you captured the two weeks perfectly. I left there feeling overwhelmed by great writing and didn’t try my hand at fiction again for about 20 years. But I can’t think of a better or nicer group of writers to make me feel inadequate!

p.s. I wish you’d post the rest of the diary – it’s not even slightly moronic.

The feeling it mutual. Just to set the Gardner business to rest, however, the airplane incident definitely took place because I was there to see it, though apparently it wasn’t in ’77. I was there yearly from 1985-71. I’m guessing Joan rented the plane in ’78, the same year Gardner arrived on the black BMW with a pretty young woman (Liz Rosenberg) seated behind. The contrast with the preceding year was dramatic. Then, Gardner had arrived with his wife and several tow-headed kids in a white Mercedes and established himself in a big house at the end of the property. They’d all troop in at mealtimes together but Gardner held forth in Treman until the early hours. I remember this because I was staying in Treman that year and on a number of occasions had noctournal visitors of both sexes who mistook my room for the bathroom–or so they said. It was a raucous and virulently politically incorrect time. I have to say I miss it as I met people there who turned out to be close friends for life and have never before or since felt so validated as a writer, though MacDowell came close.

I guess it is true, as David Milofsky seems to confirm it. But it didn’t happen in 1977. He and Joan, his first wife, separated only the year before, and I’m not even sure they were divorced then. The next year, in September 1988, he began directing the creative writing program at Binghamton — that’s where I used to write him. He met Liz Rosenberg there and married her in 1980, divorcing her two years later.

When he was killed in the motorcycle accident in September 1982 — I didn’t write about it, but twice I witnessed him riding it and he seemed a little reckless — it was just a few days before his planned wedding to Susan Thornton.

One thing I recall from Bread Loaf — it’s funny that I didn’t write down some of the stuff that’s stayed with me the longest — is Gardner discussing how writers could make a living. He advised us the easiest way was to “marry money.” When I told that to Liz, she said, “That’s funny because he never did.”

http://www.rebeccamead.com/2001/2001_10_15_art_writer.htm

“Gardner, in particular, set the Bread Loaf tone by drinking heavily, holding forth brilliantly for hours to a circle of admirers at Treman, and bedding the odd enthusiast. Gardner’s first wife once hired a plane to drop leaflets over the campus declaring that the author of “On Moral Fiction” was a neglectful father who was late with alimony payments, the kind of large gesture absent from today’s conference.”

Oh, and my sentence in the comment above contains a misplaced modifier making it sound as if I liked Ron Carlson’s stories *only* until 2000-01. That is not the case! It should read: “Although I loved his stories, I did not meet him again until 2000-01…”

Jade, I’m glad I helped you with the feeling you describe, and I hope that you will experience some new works as I did. Hearing them was much more exciting than I was able to describe. It’s interesting that I have very definite memories of things at Bread Loaf which were not recorded in the diary. (That is often true of my diary.) For example, I took away from William Meredith’s lecture his comments that as he became older, he felt less and less the need to publish so promiscuously and to write so often. Maybe I remember that so well now because I’m old enough to feel the same way.

Patrick, I don’t know if I can answer your first question since I have always kept a diary. I don’t think I have read these entries since the early ’80s. I just store the diaries in my family’s house — I mostly have lived in a different city — and so I rarely look at them or think about them. I do worry about them being destroyed in a fire. I would like to have them in some library someday, but I don’t know how to go about how to ask libraries who might be interested. Each book is the same hardbound red standard diary; they’re not notebooks.

I didn’t remember, I think, that Marvin Bell was at Bread Loaf that year, as I had dinner with him and his wife in South Florida a few years ago. Also at that dinner out was Liz Rosenberg, who was Gardner’s second wife, perhaps his wife when I was there. Suzanne, I can’t imagine Liz hiriing a crop duster and so perhaps it was Gardner’s first wife, although I suspect the story is apocryphal.

Patrick, it was useful to me to read this, but I wouldn’t presume to advise anyone to keep a daily diary. Everyone is different. Obviously I’m obsessive-compulsive to keep writing every day.

Suzanne, I never did go to Treman. Now I realize how idiotic and impolitic that was. My excuse was that I don’t drink.

Tayari, I love your work. Ron Carlson is probably the single best creative writing instructor I’ve ever witnessed. I spent an amazing day with him in February 2006 when he was our guest at the Jewish community high school where I was then teaching. Ron is energetic, generous, remarkably intuitive and manages to bring out the best in writing students. I did not see him for many years although I loved his stories until 2000-01 when I taught at Arizona State as a part-timer in the English Department and looked him up. I was shocked that he remembered me and even seem to know I’d published stuff. He has since been very kind to me. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Ron Carlson.

Matthew, I would like to go back and read _On Moral Fiction_ again. One thing that’s not in my excerpts is that there was a lot of bashing of Robert Coover’s _The Public Burning_, which I liked a lot. But Gardner was a terrific person, one of the few people from Bread Loaf I did end up corresponding with. He is a character in my first book and calls my story immoral — and then my story gets its revenge on him, necessitating a tetanus shot. He thought that was hilarious and showed the story to people at Bread Loaf the year my book came out (two years after this diary).

Some famous writers were at Bread Loaf that year that I never mentioned or even got to meet.

The next spring there was a reading at the National Arts Club, and those four of us who had fellowships, scholarships or waiters’ scholarships from the Club were named Fellows for the year. They were Raymond Sokolov; Tom, the guy I had a crush on; me; and a poet whose name I can’t remember but whose work I liked a lot as it got published in literary magazines (I think I recall he died of AIDS in the mid-80s).

Sandy Martin, the co-director of the conference, came to the reading, and so did William Meredith. When I later wrote my friend Rick Peabody how nice it was for Meredith to attend the reading, Rick wrote back, “You dummy, don’t you realize that ______ is Meredith’s boyfriend? How do you think he got the other scholarship?”

My favorite bit of Bread Loaf lore is that Gardner’s ex wife once hired a crop duster airplane to leaflet the campus with flyers stating that he had not been keeping up his support payments.

What’s it like having this chronicle of your life 30 years later? How often do you go back and read your daily entries? When you read them can you recall the moments you’re describing, ones you might not be able to recall w/o help from the journal? Even though you think it’s moronic and without reflection do you think this was a useful exercise? Did it improve your writing ultimately? Constant sophisticated might not have been the point of the journaling, I think, as that would have been exhausting. Better to get the events down and save the reflection for later.

I was too young to have the notion of Song of Solomon as a “new work,” or World According to Garp as a “new work” either. You have helped me taste that feeling.