>Bread Loaf: Day 3 (Friday)

>It’s beginning to get a little hard to know what day it is, but I think yesterday was Friday. We started the day with a craft lecture by Robert Boswell (for the uninitiated, he’s Anonya Nelson’s husband). It was a wonderful reframing of how we look at stories: Process & Paradigm. His main point, I think, is that one can imagine, instead of worlds in which characters exist, social relationships, or paradigms, in which they participate. It is the friction within that paradigm, and the changes that occur, that drives a story. Enlightening.

I was free to read in the morning and then in the afternoon, boldly, Mary and I went on a long hike into the Breadloaf Wilderness Area. It was strenuous enough to make me (us?) happily tired when we came back. So, instead of killing that high by going to more readings, I continued to critique workshop stories and relax. It was a nice break and evidence, apparently, that I’ve learned to pace myself.

The evening readings were by Robert Hill, whose fiction seems to take the form of a character’s rant–or dramatic monologue, to put it more technically–which has both tragic and comic effects. Then Barbara Klein Moss read from a story call “Interpreters” about historical interpreters at Plymouth Plantation–she had to read only pieces of it, so it was hard to get a complete sense of the story, although I enjoyed what I got of it and the concept was terrific.

The readings for the day concluded with Kevin McIlvoy reading his story “Permission” which was quite provocative. At the Barn Pub afterwords there was much discussion about what the various implications of the piece were. Great story.

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