The Writing Life Endures
“Time is the great editor,” writer Maile Meloy tells her audience,
a group eager to hear the secrets of the successful author of short
stories, novels, and children’s books. Meloy is delivering an evening
talk at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, now in its 42nd year.
On a June evening in a hotel meeting room, she lets published
and aspiring writers in on her process (“rituals and routines help”;
“a good day is five pages”), how she found her agent, and confirms
what they likely already know: writing can be “lonely and slow.”
It was writer, Cate teacher, and alumnus Barnaby Conrad ’40 who
with his wife Mary, founded the Santa Barbara Writers Conference
in 1972, right here on the Mesa. The brainchild of then-headmaster
Fred Clark, the conference was intended to bring in some additional
revenue for Cate during fallow summer months. With the funds came
some literary star power – deep in the Cate archives and printed on
70s-orange paper, a flyer heralds the inaugural gathering. Conrad
pulled in an impressive list of writers including Ray Bradbury, Clifton
Fadiman, Alex Haley, and Jessica Mitford. Norman Mailer’s name,
perhaps a late add, is written in by hand.
Promising lectures, workshops, personal conferences, and daily life
with famed authors “in a beautiful setting,” the organizers attracted
37 participants that first year, and an additional ten the next – plus
Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, father of alumnus Monte Schulz ’70.
By 1975 the conference had outgrown the Mesa and found a home at Montecito’s
Miramar Hotel, with its beachside bungalows well suited for the all-night smoky
“pirate sessions” that followed the scheduled events. The writer
list swelled in number and celebrity as Joan Didion, James Ellroy,
Eudora Welty, and Gore Vidal signed on.
When the Miramar closed, the conference moved to Westmont
College, which proved unfit for the writers’ evening antics, then
landed briefly at Fess Parker’s Doubletree Inn before it came to the
Hyatt, where organizers hope it has found a permanent
home. The Conrads sold it some years ago, and it had one interim
owner before Monte Schulz purchased it. He also handles some of its
workshops, listening as writers read their work and then deftly mixing
criticism with praise, encouragement with editing.
This year, both Schulz and Barnaby Conrad’s son Barnaby Conrad
III are in the hotel lobby after Meloy’s talk, where she is signing
books in a pop-up bookstore. Here writers mingle, talk, and
perhaps ready themselves for the pirate session to follow, during
which novels, stories, and poems are revised, completed, or tossed –
depending on the feedback from fellow scribblers.
Barnaby Conrad III is—no surprise—also a writer, and a conference
presenter this year. He took some time to reflect on the staying
power of the annual event his father pioneered.
“As ‘faculty brats’ and then teachers ourselves, Monte and I have
been part of this annual ritual for decades because we love it as much
as our parents did. This year, the camaraderie and writing quality of
the workshops is particularly high. And to think the summer magic
that started so long ago at Cate is still going on! I know my father
would be very pleased.”
This article appeared in the Fall 2014 Cate School Bulletin. Read more about author Maile Meloy here.
