Whatever is happening at Writers House, there’s a good chance that food will be involved. “Food is crucial because food simulates family,” says Filreis. Take the temperamentally shy John Ashbery: “If you put him in a room and said, ‘OK, now John, we’ll sit around the living room and have a conversation, he’ll sit there on the couch, unable to speak. Sit him at a table with food and wine and he gets silly and boyish and brilliant, and he can just sit back, red-faced, and listen and laugh … And you can see his poetic mind working.” To break the ice during his three-hour session with the seminar students, they served an “Ashberian snack” that included Baked Alaska and other foods found in his poems.

“For Ian Frazier, who’s also something of a shy person, we ate bugs,” Filreis reports gleefully. “We had barbecued mealworms. They were very good. And Frazier just warmed totally up.”

In honor of Susan Sontag’s visit, Snead strayed from the vegetarian traditions of the house and prepared leg of lamb, having heard that the writer was “quite the carnivore.” Then she remembered that Sontag’s novel In America contains a scene where the characters have sorrel soup at dinner. Snead contacted a chef-friend at the White Dog Café, who supplied her with organic sorrel.

Famous visitors aren’t a requisite for turning on the stove. “Sometimes people just feel like cooking and they will,” Snead says. A few years ago a group of work-study students started the tradition of making elaborate breakfasts for each other on Fridays. “We’ll all come in a little late because we’ve been working late the night before,” Snead explains. “And we’re sitting and talking and maybe people are trying to call the Writers House, but they just have to leave a message on the answering machines and we’ll get back to them later. We’re having breakfast!”

 

“Evil Genius.” “Force of Nature.” “Plutonium.”

The teasing metaphors that people use for Al Filreis may vary, but they all signify a phenomenal energy that powers the Writers House.

“The fact that he expects a lot from you means people feel they have a lot to give,” says Shawn Walker.

“He’s like a nuclear power source,” Sherin Wright says. “When he spies people whom he thinks have potential, he finds ways to bring it out in you.”

“No other university has an Al Filreis,” Snead contends, adding, “Everything I learned about encouraging students and having community come together, I learned from him.”

For the record, Filreis does admit to occasional fatigue. He is also the Kelly Professor of English and the founding director of Penn’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, which brings Writers House together with other writing programs on campus. It helps that he loves what he does, especially working with students. “I’m taking personal responsibility to make sure this thing is always here,” he says.

As the Writers House enters its next 10 years, his goal is to “find supporters who believe in what we’re doing” and endow the program so they don’t have to raise money every year. (About 40 percent of its nearly $400,000 annual operating budget comes from the provost’s office, and this pays for facilities, maintenance, and staff salaries. The rest of the money—for actual events—comes from annual gifts, grants, and interest on the endowment for a few individual programs.)

While a national search takes place for the next Writers House director, the interim role will be filled by Jessica Lowenthal, a poet and critic who came to Penn as a doctoral student in English and has been part of the Writers House community ever since. “So she’s a natural,” Filreis says.

Though popular programs such as Speakeasy, Live at the Writers House, and Writers House Fellows will likely continue, their content will depend on the people involved with the House each year. “There’s probably going to be more non-fiction and journalism in the next couple of years than ever before because we happen to have a lot of strength in that area at the moment,” Filreis says. “But overall I think it’s clear the University is committed to it. And I’m committed to it.”

Filreis now travels around the country, recruiting students to come to Penn and join Writers House as freshmen. “This year we recruited 45 kids, and about 35 got accepted,” he says. “It’s an effective way to build a community that will last.” One of last year’s recruits, Eric Carlin C’09, created a literary magazine, The Green Couch, in his freshman year.

Bob Lucid has witnessed many changes in the local writing scene, and, on the anniversary CD, he observes, “It can’t be a coincidence, or if it is, it’s quite a coincidence, that the development and sophistication of the Writers House in a kind of microcosmic way has paralleled the development and sophistication of the University’s reputation.”

As Writers House gets “more and more on the map,” Snead says, “The hard thing is going to be keeping the mom-and-pop kind of feeling. You know, everybody’s having breakfast and no one’s answering the phone but ‘we’ll get to you in a minute,’ that kind of artsy bohemian feel. But I think that if we continue to build our community one person at a time … to get individual students, alumni, faculty, and staff engaged, we will be able to maintain that balance.”

John Fry, Penn’s former executive vice president, was so impressed with Kelly Writers House that when he left the University in 2002 to become president of Franklin & Marshall, he decided to create a similar program at his new school. That enterprise is now headed by Sherin Wright.

“I feel like we were a big flat fluffy seed that floated out from Philadelphia to Lancaster and landed and started to grow,” she says. It’s not a replica, though. “It’s a smaller community and we do things a little bit differently. We almost always have a class or curricular connection when we bring in a writer ... And students are not aligning themselves with particular aesthetics as much as really just finding out about things.”

Regardless of the focus, “I feel like there should be a Writers House on every corner,” Sherin Wright says. “It’s a way to remind people how much artists who use words reveal the world to us. It would be a more literate and more peaceful and smarter culture if we had more spaces where we acknowledged writing.”

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