Fifty Summers of Storytelling: The Enduring Legacy of the Southampton Writers Conference

To understand the legacy of The Southampton Writers Conference, you need only stand on the upstairs patio known as “Missy’s Place,” named after the late great Melissa Bank, a beloved longtime workshop leader at the conference. You can rest your elbows on the railing and look out over the sprawling green campus and imagine the white tents that shelter hundreds of writers from the July sun as they chat over lunch about their characters, their plot twists, their fears.

For 50 years, writers have gathered on the Shinnecock Hills campus — which was once Long Island University and now operates under Stony Brook University — armed with manuscripts and pens, immersed in the act that they love. They’ve found a community — a place where they make sense.

The Writers Conference started in 1976, at a time when the cultural event calendar of Southampton was sparse relative to the frenzied pace of Hamptons summer events today. Then-Director Arnold Blair brought in Edward Albee, Irwin Shaw and James Jones as a few of the workshop leaders of the inaugural conference, and within a few years, James Baldwin and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. had joined the team. It’s on the shoulders of those giants that the conference was built, and their legacy continues with National Book Award finalists like Diana Khoi Nguyen teaching last year and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Chloe Cooper Jones leading a workshop this year. But it’s not just about the gravitas of the faculty — it’s about their approachability.

“The strength of the conference has always been about the art — the democratic culture,” said Robert Reeves, a former associate provost of the Southampton campus who led the conference into a new heyday during his tenure. “With writing, whether you’ve published 10 books or no books, you still face the blank page, and everyone has the same opportunity to succeed or fail.”

Matt Klam, who’s been a workshop leader at the conference for over 20 years, attributes some of that democratic “all in this together” mindset, to the legacy of Frank McCourt, who was a devoted workshop leader in the early 2000s until his death in 2009.

“He was the most famous person there and also the least assuming,” Klam said. “He became world famous at 65. He had been a high school teacher for a hundred years, and he was just so relaxed and easy to be around.”

There was a running gag about how famous McCourt was.

“He was playing the Big Shot,” recalled Carla Caglioti, the associate dean of the Southampton MFA in Creative Writing who has been involved with the conference since the 1980s. “Frank McCourt would ride in on a golf cart wearing this yellow linen jacket, and he said he was such a big writer, he couldn’t do introductions anymore.”

But that was all a joke — his fame never got in the way of how easy he was to connect with at the conference. The same was true for countless other literary stars, like Melissa Bank.

“Melissa came to the conference two years after ‘The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing’ was published,” Klam said. “It was one of the biggest collections of short stories in the last 40 years. But she formed friendships with the students. I remember whenever I’d be finishing up a class, I’d look in her window, and she’d be busy not finishing a class. She was just all in all the time.”

Many workshop leaders have become reliable fixtures, like poet Billy Collins, short story writer Frederic Tuten and novelist Meg Wolitzer. But as the times have changed, so has the conference. Current Director Christian McLean, who, full disclosure, also happens to be my husband, has focused much of his energy bringing in new workshop leaders who can ensure the conference speaks to the needs of contemporary writers and represents a multitude of voices.

“I try to find people whose work is compelling, who are smart and funny, and who are pushing boundaries in what they’re doing,” McLean said. “And I try to make sure that our students are reflected in them.”

One of the incredible voices that he’s brought to Southampton is Carmen Gimenez, a poet and finalist for the National Book Award in 2019. She taught at the conference two years ago and is returning for a second time this summer.

“Students loved Carmen’s workshop,” McLean said, “and she was just fun to be around. The fact is that all our workshop leaders are so intelligent, and they also get that it’s also about play. When I was thinking about who to invite back for our 50th, Carmen was one of the first people to come to mind.”

This year, Gimenez’s workshop will be generative, which means her students will be creating new work in the time they’re together, as opposed to workshopping existing work.

“It’s about how we get out of our own way to create writing,” she said. One exercise she’s planning she calls a “maximalist exercise.”

“I ask students to write a new sentence in between each sentence they’ve written. It helps us to understand what lives in the gaps of a poem.”

Workshops have been locked in for months, but there is an opportunity for the public to enjoy the wit and wisdom of the Writers Conference by attending readings and lectures with a Listeners’ Pass, or by attending Selected Shorts, an evening where professional actors — including Edie Falco and Richard Kind — will read work from Patricia Marx and Kurt Vonnegut. That will take place on July 11 at 8:30 p.m. and tickets are available at stonybrook.edu/commcms/southampton/avram/events.

As the Southampton Writers Conference looks at its 50th summer, the principles of humor, humanity and humility have all remained in place. Perhaps it’s best summed up by Reeves, as he recalls the countless evenings at the estate of the late Laura Sillerman, a beloved benefactor of the program.

“Every afternoon, there was a rush to claim the sunset,” Reeves said. “Frank McCourt would comment on its beauty, and Billy Collins would interject and say, ‘No, Frank, sunsets are for poets to name. You stick to your miserable childhood and leave the sunsets to the poets.’”