The Bread Loaf Ethnic?

from "How to be a Writer: What goes on at America's most competitive literary conference?" by Rebecca Mead, published in The New Yorker (issue of 10/15/2001)

Many Bread Loafers spoke of the compulsion to write as a kind of calling, though one that they hoped to channel in a direction that might appeal to a publisher. A number of agents and editors are invited to Bread Loaf to give seminars on the publishing business; the question they are most commonly asked is, "Will you read my manuscript?" Each year a small number of participants do get discovered this way, though they tend to be plucked from the select ranks of waiters and scholars rather than from the fee-paying crowd. But there is hope even for them. One evening, Sandra Benitez introduced her own reading by describing how she had published her first novel at the age of fifty two, having come to Bread Loaf as a paying contributor eighteen years earlier only to be told that the book she was working on was garbage. "I went home to my husband, to my writing group, and I went off to bed for two weeks in my little flannel pajamas and moose-head slippers," she said. "The awful thing is that he was right. I knew it would never be published. So I gave it a proper burial. I bought a filiing box and lit a candle, and I said a prayer and I thanked the book for teaching me what it is to write a novel. And I put the box under my bed, where I sleep over it still." Several members of the audience were in tears at this story, although perhaps not many of them would have had the resourcefulness to do what Benitez did after that reversal, which was to take her mother's Puerto Rican maiden name--she had been writing as Sarah Ables--and start writing on Latin American themes instead of about the Missouri in which she'd grown up.