New England Young Writers Conference

With Spring comes the annual New England Young Writers Conference hosted at Middlebury College's Bread Loaf campus in Ripton, Vermont, the idyllic New England small town where renowned American poet Robert Frost once resided. And with the New England Young Writers Conference comes dozens of published writers invited to teach small groups of students, dozens more volunteers and directors who coordinate the program, and of course, the nearly three hundred student attendees admitted on the basis of a single, one-page writing sample, representing around twelve percent of the applicant pool.

May 2010 was the month when students from across New England arrived in Ripton, population 556, with their suitcases and notebooks, eager to write and to meet others like themselves who share a passion for the written (and spoken) word. Writing is an art form. One of the fine arts, it is often overlooked in favor of the drama of theater, the motion of dance, the sound of music, and the majesty of visual art, but writing is the art of sculpting words to craft impressions on the mind. It is the art of returning to the original intent and purpose of language, and finding within words a power unparalleled by any other art form.

And so, like the other fine arts, writing takes many forms and subgenres, to create a diverse array of possibilities of transforming mere words into writing. There are those who craft what is called poetry. Others write of their own lives, in a form called memoir. Still others craft stories and characters in prose. These three overarching categories themselves are not wholly representative of the possibilities of form in writing, but even so, they hold within themselves further possibilities. Because that's what art is: possibility. It is the possibility of something greater than the self, something greater than the mind of the writer, that at once connects the writer with the reader and the world around them, and yet brings an enlightened sense of reason to what would otherwise be mere sentimentality for its own sake. This then is what makes writing an art - it draws the reader and the writer into a world separate from our own, and yet innately connected, and it stands on its own in literary testament to the lives we have lived, and the lives we can only dream of constructing for ourselves.

This is what we learned while at Bread Loaf. To think of writing as a solitary endeavor is selfish. By its very nature, writing demands companionship. The writer and the reader are inextricably connected, and the words on the page are a bridge between them. To this end, we have endeavored to create this collaborative blog as a way of sharing our musings with the wider world. Whether our words will be remembered or read is another matter, but the purpose of these shared musings is not to garner hollow fame or readership, but to offer our artful creations, our literary sculptures, for all to see, as a gift for ourselves and the world around us.