There we were, cavorting in a creaky old barn as a D.J. played Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.” Some 200 authors raised their arms in unison and shouted, “I’m sick of sittin’ ’round here tryin’ to write this book.”

The party took place at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, in Vermont, where I spent nearly two weeks this August. If you’re not a writer, most of what you know about Bread Loaf might come from an episode of “The Simpsons,” “Moe’N’a Lisa,” in which the series’s mendacious bartender, Moe, winds up at “Word Loaf” along with Lisa Simpson, who has helped him with his poetry. The episode concludes with a cartoon Jonathan Franzen and a cartoon Michael Chabon in a fistfight. (Chabon: “You fight like Anne Rice!”)

It’s worth noting that virtually everything in that episode is wrong, except the hayride. Yes, there’s a hayride.

The conference has changed from its early days, though. No longer are there pitchers of Bloody Marys at lunch, and it has been decades now since John Gardner’s wife hired a crop duster to litter the mountain campus with leaflets accusing him of ducking out on his child support. No longer does Robert Frost somehow light his papers on fire during a reading by Archibald MacLeish, after loudly complaining, “Archie’s poems all have the same tune!” Gone are the luminaries of earlier eras, including Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote, Stanley Elkin, Toni Morrison, Anne Sexton, Richard Yates, Eudora Welty, John Irving and George R.R. Martin.