For eight summers beginning in 1974 and ending in 1982, John Gardner was on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. This conference is held annually on the Bread Loaf Mountain Campus of Middlebury College in Vermont. It wasn't what they expected. To understand Bread Loaf in those years, imagine an isolated summer camp of keyed-up adults with adolescent wants and add a patina of liquor. Writers come to writers' conferences to get published.
Literary anecdotes abound.
The young poet Langston Hughes, working as a waiter, slipped his poems under the plate of Richard Wright, the honored guest at the banquet. Wright stormed the kitchen, clutching the poems, and Hughes' literary career was born. Let's go call my agent. John was a teacher who was more than happy to contribute to students' hopes of publications. He read any manuscript any student was brave enough to press into his hands, and his lectures on writing technique seemed to promise that if you sat still, listened hard, took good notes, and did everything he said, you'd break into print.