Image of cover of first annual brochure.

1970 - The Non-Conference

Hall and Fuller initially rally their own resources, families, and friends to mount the first summer workshop. That first year, traditions of egalitarianism are established. Those who lead workshops are not called “teachers,” but “staff”; those who attend are not “students,” but “participants.” Adopting this nomenclature is part of a purposeful effort to level the playing field between mentor and mentee; they knew how unexpectedly these roles upend, how the career of apprentice may outstrip that of master. In those days, all staff and all participants are housed in cabins in the Valley, rather than in hotel rooms, so that there was the possibility of late-night talks and early-morning breakfasts, all of which helped create a “community” that can be lacking in this often-lonely enterprise. Tuition includes dinner, at which staff and participants eat together; this, too, is instituted purposefully, to eradicate a false sense of hierarchy. While other writers conferences stressed the hierarchy, the Community of Writers embraced the continuum. 

“We named ourselves the ‘Community of Writers,’ because this was the 1960s and community was an in-word,” Oakley Hall writes in Writers Workshop in a Book published in 2007 (Chronicle Books). But the name perfectly evokes what the week-long gathering becomes.

Image of cover of first annual brochure.The “Non-Conference”
The first workshop runs from August 22 – 29, 1970, with about 50 participants in poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. It is staffed mostly by San Francisco writers including Niven Busch, Herbert Gold, William Eastlake,  David Perlman, Max Steele, Barnaby Conrad, and John Leggett, the latter two of whom go on to found, respectively, the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and the Napa Valley Writers Conference.  The founders remember with irony that the project was a good excuse to see their fellow writers, drink wine, play tennis and for  writers to see their East Coast agents and editors.

The 1970 bright yellow brochure states: “…A Community of Writers at Squaw Valley…will conduct a “non-conference” for writers this summer at the Squaw Valley Lodge. One of the first sessions was called, “Can Writing Be Taught?” Tuition was $125 which included two dinners, one at a Lake Tahoe beach and the other at a mountain-top restaurant via an aerial tramway ride above the valley floor.

Over the years, tennis and more recently music, is something the writers can do between workshops. At the most recent poetry workshop, three Pulitzer-Prize winners were on the softball field playing Poet Softball.

The first session is held in an off-season ski lodge at the foot of the mountain. Squaw Valley at that time is recovering from the 1960 Winter Olympics. It is very quiet in the summers with a run-down aspect to the buildings and infrastructure. A perfect place to found a writers conference: affordable, quiet, and beautiful. Workshops are held in ski area spaces such as (closed) bars, ski locker-rooms, lobbies or outside under the intense high-altitude sun. As continues today, dinners and readings are held outside under the stars, with breath-taking views of the mountains framing the goings-on.

Nonfiction writer David Perlman in the early 1970s. He would later become the Senior Science Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Perlman, a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, had met Hall and Fuller at Squaw Valley where they shared a ski locker. Both novelists, they ask Perlman, who also writes occasionally for Life and Look magazines, if he would lead a seminar on nonfiction. He agrees. Local writer Walter Ballenger becomes involved and reads the application manuscripts and helps to shape the workshop schedule.

Writer Eddy Starr Ancinas is one of the first participants in Perlman’s nonfiction summer seminars. Her long history with C.W. includes her long history as donor of the Latino Scholarship, service on the Board of Director as Board Members including several years as Board President. (She came to Squaw Valley as a volunteer for the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley,  when she met her husband Osvaldo Ancinas (a downhill racer on the Argentine Ski Team) on a chair lift. He also served on the Board for more than 20 years, and hosts an annual event for the Community.

c 1970: Max Steele and Richard Ford in Workshop.

Novelist Richard Ford attends his first workshop as a participant as an MFA at UC Irvine where Oakley Hall is teaching. He is assigned a workshop led by the Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopard, and later fiction writer, Max Steele.  (Ford later wins the Pulitzer-Prize.) He remembers sleeping in a tent outside the Hall House that first year. He is in a workshop led by the Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopard.Ford still returns from time-to-time to teach and give readings. In 2013, in support of an NEA grant we were after, Richard describes his history with C.W. Read it here.

The best-selling novelist Selden Edwards (author of the New York Times bestseller The Little Book) also attends that very first Community of Writers. Read his memories of those early years here.

Hall’s wife, Barbara Edinger Hall handled the office with her friend and local Joan Klaussen. That first year all those working at the workshop wore name tags that said “Joan Klaussen.”

Oakley Hall’s wife Barbara Hall and her best friend (and local) Joan Klaussen organize the administrative side of things. That first year, Joan is the administrator for the workshop, and she is the person who writes and signs the letters to the participants.  On the first day of the conference, when those writers arrive in Squaw Valley to register, they will have noticed that each of the handful of women helping out that day wear name tags which said:”Joan Klaussen.”

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