paper • 39.95
ISBN: 978-1-971810-00-3
eISBN: 978-1-971810-01-0
July 2026 • Anthology

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Welcome to the Mountain

A Portable Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference

Lauren Francis-Sharma and Jennifer Grotz, Editors
About the Anthology

In this impressive array of American writers who have taught, learned, or otherwise taken part in the last one hundred years of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Welcome to the Mountain recreates the experience of being on the mountain for the writer and reader interested in apprenticeship and literary community. This volume, edited by Lauren Francis-Sharma and Jennifer Grotz, includes select lectures and readings first delivered at Bread Loaf, from the historical to the contemporary, from well-known chestnuts of American literature to the unusual and surprising. 

Table of Contents

Take a look at the unparalleled sequence of texts inside…

1. AT THE PODIUM IN THE LITTLE THEATER: MORNING LECTURES

Toni Morrison, from Song of Solomon

Edward Hirsch, “A Made Thing: How to Read a Poem”

Alan Shapiro, “Why Write?”

Ange Mlinko, “Poetry as Expatriated Language”

Peter Ho Davies, “A Study of Provincial Life”

Vivian Gornick, “The Art of Personal Narrative”

Garth Greenwell, “Enamored of the Abyss: On the Place of Affirmation in Art”

Charles Baxter,  “Things About to Disappear, the Writer as Curator”

2. INSPIRATION IN THE WORKSHOP

Maria Hummel, On the Friendship Between Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter, “The Rope”

Eudora Welty, “A Piece of News”

Michael Collier, On William Meredith

William Meredith, “The Illiterate”

William Meredith, “Parents”

William Meredith, “A Major Work”

Paul Yoon, On Amy Hempel and Percival Everett

Amy Hempel, from “The Dog of the Marriage”

Percival Everett, from I Am Not Sidney Poitier

Paul Yoon, “Person of Korea”

Laura van den Berg, On Her Friendship with Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff, “The Wind”

Laura van den Berg, from The Third Hotel

Donald Justice, “Variations on a Text by Vallejo”

Patrick Phillips, “Variations on a Text by Donald Justice”

Tania James, On Inspiration from Samantha Hunt

Samantha Hunt, “Beast”

Tania James, “Bark”

3. AT THE PODIUM IN THE LITTLE THEATER: THE AFTERNOON READING

Rebecca Makkai, On the Legacy of the Podium

Archibald Macleish, “Ars Poetica”

Charles Baxter, On William Maxwell

William Maxwell, “What Every Good Boy Should Know”

Tom Sleigh, On Anne Sexton: “Cut to the Heart”

Anne Sexton, “Her Kind”

Anne Sexton, “The Ambition Bird”

Anne Sexton, “The Black Art”

Gloria Naylor, from Mama Day

Jamel Brinkley, “A Lucky Man”

Rick Barot, “The Wooden Overcoat”

Rick Barot, “The Flea”

Paul Otremba, “Surfing for Caravaggio’s Conversion of Paul”

Arthur Sze “Salt Song”

Sally Keith, On C.D. Wright

C.D. Wright, from Deepstep Come Shining

Victor LaValle, from The Changeling

Randall Kenan, “Acts of Velmajean Swearington Hoyt”

Louise Glück, “At the River”

Louise Glück, “Noon”

Louise Glück, “The Setting Sun”

Jhumpa Lahiri, “Mrs. Sen’s”

4. A WALK IN THE LANDSCAPE

Kamran Javadizadeh, “Poetry of the Closed Door: On Robert Frost”

Octavio Paz, from “A Visit to the Poet,” translated by Michael Schmidt

Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird”

Robert Frost, “Birches”

Robert Frost, “Out, Out–“

Robert Frost, “Directive”

Czesław Miłosz, from “From the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference,” translated by Jennifer Grotz

May Swenson, “RF at Bread Loaf, His Hand Against a Tree”

May Swenson, “The Truth is Forced”

Theodore Roethke, “The Meadow Mouse”

Carson McCullers, from “Ballad of the Sad Café”

William Carlos Williams, “[By the road to the contagious hospital]”

William Carlos Williams, “Poem XVIII: To Elsie”

William Carlos Williams “A Sort of a Song”

Emily Raboteau, from “Shelter in Place”

Paisley Rekdal, “Driving to Santa Fe”

Carl Philips, “Luck”

Carl Philips, “Gold Leaf”

5. THE SOCIAL

Patrick Phillips, On Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety

Wallace Stegner, from Crossing to Safety

Alan Shapiro, On Ross Gay’s “A Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude”

Ross Gay, “A Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude”

Luis Alberto Urrea, from House of Broken Angels

Matthew Olzmann, “Nate Brown is Looking for a Moose”

Lorrie Moore, “Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens”

Gabrielle Calvocoressi, “My Perimenopausal Body Cistern Disappointing How Surprising”

Shirley Jackson, from We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Ralph Ellison, from Invisible Man

Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”

Robert Hayden, “Plague of Starlings”

Robert Hayden, “Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’”

Adrienne Rich, “Hunger”

Agha Shahid Ali, “Land”

Agha Shahid Ali, “Arabic”

Philip Levine, “The Simple Truth”

Philip Levine, “You Can Have It”

Eavan Boland, “Quarantine,”

Natalie Diaz, “Post-Colonial Love Poem”

Tim O’Brien, “On The Rainy River”

Bernard deVoto, from a letter to William Sloane on July 14, 1949

6. BUILDING A WRITERLY LIFE

Joan Didion, “Why I Write”

John Gardner, “Individual Exercises for the Development of Technique”

Sigrid Nunez, from The Vulnerables

Joseph Brodsky, “[That evening, sprawling by an open fire]” translated by George L. Kline

Czeslaw Milosz, “Report”

Czeslaw Milosz, “Late Ripeness”

Stacey D’Erasmo, On Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House

Willa Cather, from The Professor’s House

Garrett Hongo, “Kubota to the Chinese Poets Detained on Angel Island”

Rabih Alameddine, from An Unnecessary Woman

Alexander Chee, “On Becoming an American Writer”

Galway Kinnell, “When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone”

7. AT THE PODIUM IN THE LITTLE THEATER: THE EVENING READING

Natasha Trethewey, “Myth”

Natasha Trethewey, “Graveyard Blues”

Natasha Trethewey, “Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath”

Truman Capote, “A Tree of Night”

Yusef Komunyakaa, “You and I are Disappearing”

Yusef Komunyakaa, “Ode to the Maggot”

Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It”

Ilya Kaminsky, “we lived happily during the war”

Jericho Brown, “Duplex [A poem is a gesture toward home.]”

A.E. Stallings, “First Love: A Quiz”

A.E. Stallings, “Burned”

Ellen Bryant Voigt, “Groundhog”

Ellen Bryant Voigt, “Sleep”

Terrance Hayes, “The Golden Shovel”

Richard Wright, “Big Black Good Man”

Tomás Q. Morín, On Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Closing Time: Iskandariya”

Brigit Pegeen Kelly, “Closing Time: Iskandariya”

Vievee Francis, “I’ve Been Thinking about Love Again”

Anthony Hecht, “A Hill”

Yiyun Li, “What a Fine Autumn,”

Joy Williams, “Stuff”

Julia Alvarez, “Bread Loaf in All Seasons”

 
About the Editors

Lauren Francis-Sharma a Pushcart nominated writer, is the author of Book of the Little Axe, a 2020 finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award in Fiction, ‘Til the Well Runs Dry, winner of the Honor Fiction Prize by the Black Caucus of the ALA, and Casualties of Truth, a finalist for the 2025 Caricon Prize and a “Best Books to Read” by NPR. Lauren has written the new introduction to the latest edition of the classic South African novel, Cry, the Beloved Country and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan Law School, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Lauren serves on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and is the Assistant Director of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Jennifer Grotz is a poet and translator. She serves as the Arthur Satz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Rochester and is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.