Because SBWC will be celebrating its 50th anniversary in June 2023, we’ll be doing a countdown of the years of the amazing literary legacy provided by the vision and verve of Mary and Barnaby Conrad.
The idea for the conference was conceived in the summer of 1972, and the first Santa Barbara Writers Conference was held June 22-29, 1973, at Cate School in Carpinteria.
The history of the first 30 years is contained in the SBWC Scrapbook, compiled and written by Mary Conrad, Y. Armando Nieto, and Matthew Pallamary. Thank you to them for allowing us to quote and use their research for this countdown.
The cost of the first conference was $200, including board and room.
There were 6 workshop leaders and 37 students.
According to Mary Conrad, Ray Bradbury showed up with a sleeping bag and bedded down in the dorm with the students so he could regale them with stories all night long.
“From the first day, SBWC was a place apart from the burning issues of the day, which is not to say that the students and faculty did not have opinions on the war in Vietnam or the collapse of the American auto industry, or any other issue. However, conversations of politics segued into an analysis of the latest re-write of someone’s opening chapter.
“The grand experiment was off to a promising start, if only in the minds of the conference organizers and attendees, but the experience was successful enough to encourage Ray Bradbury and others to return the next year, because unlike most conferences, there was something tangibly different here. When they made their way home from the Cate School Campus, each looked forward to the next year, as if to a beloved family gathering.”
And so it has continued for fifty years.
SBWC Founders Barnaby & Mary Conrad, and long time participant, Ray Bradbury
