Five years ago, Amanda Stern, then 28, attended Bread Loaf Writers' Conference as a "contributor," which means, essentially, that she--along with a slew of other aspiring writers with no publications to their name--paid for the privilege of attending. There are, however, ways of going to Bread Loaf that don't involve writing a fat check: Emerging writers who are just beginning to publish in literary magazines (or who, perhaps, have recently completed MFAs) can apply for coveted slots as "waiters," as which they'll dish out food and bus tables in exchange for free tuition, room and board; those who have published extensively in magazines, but not yet published a book, may apply to be "scholars," an honor that provides free tuition; and writers with just one book out can aim for spots as "fellows," who serve as teaching assistants to the conference faculty. These four categories -- contributor, waiter, scholar, fellow--constitute a hierarchy of sorts. The latter three tend to socialize exclusively with each other during the conference, and often collectively regard contributors as hobbyists or dabblers not worthy of their attention.

In 1998, Amanda Stern--whose first novel, The Long Haul, arrives in bookstores in October--knew nothing of the Bread Loaf system, much less the peculiarities of the literary world. She did know, though, a thing or two about the entertainment industry.

As a teen, Stern, who grew up in Manhattan, wanted to be an actor and performed with a professional theater company in the city. In college, she wrote screenplays, majored in film theory, and interened each summer at Good Machine, James Schamus's start-up production company. After graduating, Stern kept writing screenplays--one of which garnered a ton of industry buzz and a Miramax-sponsored, celebrity-cast staged reading, but ultimately didn't sell--while working for Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels's entertainment company, Broadway Video. When one of Michaels's producers left Broadway Video to put together a live celebrity comedy show, he took Stern with him to serve as his assistant. The two hired Mark Maron to host the show but had trouble finding a female cohost. Eventually, the producer suggested Stern play the role. Although terrified at first, she agreed. People loved her, and overnight, without much effort, she became a comedian.

When the show's run ended, Michaels offered her a job hosting a new cable channel--a closed-circuit station for college campuses, with MTV-style programming--and she took it. Eventually, she was approached by a big-time agent whose client list included the comedian Chris Rock. The agent wanted to represent her; he laid out her career plan as he saw it-- the Amanda Stern brand, a sitcom, movie roles and so forth. But Stern declined. She realized she had fallen into comedy without much thought. And she realized it was time to do the thing she'd always wanted to do: write fiction and poetry.

When she applied to Bread Loaf, she didn't know exactly what was supposed to happen at a writers conference. She'd participated in just one workshop as an undergraduate, and she didn't have an MFA. "I applied three weeks before the conference started, and I went not knowing what it was," she explains over breakfast at the Pink Pony, a cafe on Manhattan's Lower East Side. "I knew I would learn from these writers I had heard of--though I hadn't read most of them--but that's about it."

Learn she did. But the hierarchical social codes shocked and annoyed her (as they do many), despite the fact that she, through her ample charm and irresistable humor and generally bombastic attitude, befriended a flock of scholars and fellows--as well as Michael Collier, the poet who directs the conference--and spent her evenings sipping cocktails in Treiman, the lounge reserved for their exclusive use. She'd bucked the system, yes, but she still hated it. She couldn't stand the thought that those writers she regarded as her peers--the waiters, scholars, and fellows--might view her as a less-than-serious writer simply because she wasn't attending on scholarship (she hadn't known enough about the conference to apply for a waiter's spot).

In fact, Stern was dead serious about her writing. So serious that after leaving the comedy world she had taken a job scrubbing toilets, among other custodial duties, at Patanjali, her brother's Lower Manhattan yoga studio, to pay the rent on her small East Village apartment and have her days free to write.

Within six months, the decision paid off. A month before going to Bread Loaf, she joined the Writers Room, an affordable work space for writers, after learning about it from an acquaintance at a party, and began writing every day there from 10 to 3, and again in the evening, after she'd finished her work at the yoga studio. Over the next few months, she'd completed four of the stories that would become The Long Haul. Though it's dubbed a novel, the book is actually a series of stories about the same two characters -- a lanky musician known only as "the Alcoholic," and his insecure, unnamed girlfriend, who narrates the tales.

Through other writers she met at the Writers Room, extensive browsing in the literary journals section of the St. Mark's Bookshop, and her stint at Bread Loaf, she learned where to send her work, placing several stories, and a few poems, in small but reputable magazines--Salt Hill, St. Ann's Review, and Spinning Jenny. Even more important, she acquired an agent, Andrew Blauner.

She sent her work to Blauner at the suggestion of her friend Laurie Duchovny, the sister of actor David Duchovny and daughter of writer Amram Ducovny (who removed the h from his last name). When she e-mailed Blauner and asked if he would take a look at the four stories she had completed, he told her to check back with him when she'd finished the collection. But she persuaded him to take a look at what she had, insisting that the rest of the collection would be in the same style. Blauner ended up loving her work, and took her on as a client.

By March of 1999 she decided to apply to Bread Loaf again, but this time as a waiter. "I'd progressed a lot, and I thought, 'Oh, I'll totally get in." She didn't. She chalked it up to bad luck and, perhaps, a lack of experience. She was new to the literary world, after all. "I barely got into college," she quips, referring to the trouble she had finishing her BA. (She attended three colleges in pursuit of the degree: Bennington, The New School and University of Rochester.) "I don't get into things. I don't win awards. I'm not the kind of girl who wins trophies. So when I didn't get in, I took it as confirmation of the fact that I wasn't qualified."

The following March, when the Bread Loaf scholarship deadline rolled around once more, she'd published more stories and poems and completed The Long Haul; Blauner had just started shopping it around. "I qualified!" she says. "I totally qualified." But, again, she was rejected. "At first I was really pissed. I was like, 'Down with Vermont! Down with Michael Collier!' It was like they had to get a restraining order against me." she lets out a deep laugh. "But then I got over it." Once she'd calmed down, she took a look at the list of those who'd made the cut. They all had one thing in common: MFAs.

Since the advent of creative writing graduate programs in the 1970s, writers and critics have debated the merits of the MFA degree. Proponents say that writing programs offer emerging writers valuable instruction in craft: poets learn prosody, novelists master structure and the intricacies of plot. Detractors insist that one either has a natural predilection for language or one does not; they insist that MFA programs, which generally lack fellowship money, serve as cash cows for the universities that house them; or that they exist simply to lend employment to second-rate poets and midlist novelists who don't make enough money from the advances from their books. But perhaps the most serious charge-- though the hardest to substantiate--against MFA programs concerns the alleged homogeneity of the writers who emerge from them. It is not uncommon, when talking to book editors or literary agents or magazine editors, to hear quiet complaints about the blandness and sameness of "workshopped" manuscripts, about piles of stories written in the style of Raymond Carver, the ne plus ultra of the MFA fiction world.

At the same time, many of the works of literary fiction -- and, quite possibly, every book of poetry--that make it to the Barnes & Noble display table seem to include the letters MFA in the author's bio. Regardless of the degree's merits or lack therof, it's become, in the 30 years since its inception, de rigeur for young writers, a necessary rite of passage that often leads to an agent and a contract, as well as, ideally, a network of writer friends who provide needed advice and support.

And while there are certainly plenty of young writers who succeed without an MFA, some find it difficult. This was definitely the case for Sten, whom after her second Bread Loaf rejection, began applying for scholarship positions at other writers conferences--and, again and again, found herself rejected, despite the agent and the growing list of publications. The problem, she says, was more an emotional one than anything else. After all, she was actually succeeding as a writer; she was simply having trouble making a place for herself in the larger literary community. "I was excluded from situations that I wanted to be included in. After awhile, not having an MFA began to make me feel like an imposter."

She began to ponder this MFA business and concluded that an MFA serves as a kind of insurance policy for conference administraters, and, maybe, editors. "MFA graduates have been through a program. They've paid this amount of dollars and learned a specific style of writing. Someone--the professors at the MFA program--had already taken a risk on them. So Bread Loaf, say isn't taking a chance if they let them in. They were unwilling to take a risk on me. I was un-cookie cutter, un-grad school. My writing is edgier, riskier, less conforming."

Bravado aside, Stern's writing is indeed somewhat more outre--less domestic in setting, less academic in tone--then the stereotypical workshop story. Stern's stories are urban, angst-ridden, so anxious and, at times, violent that they can make for a teeth clenching read. The Long Haul, set in upstate New York and Manhattan, dissects a doomed romance between two twenty-somethings. Both are countercultural types--in the early '90s, they would have been "slackers"--who hang around smoky clubs clad in tattered jeans, hair unwashed, heads aching from the previous night's stoned revelry. Over the course of the novel, the narrator has a miscarriage in the bathroom of a dumpy bar, fends off a rapist at a preconcert drugfest, finds an unconscious pregnant woman with a needle sticking out of her belly (also in a bar bathroom), and breaks into a suburban house in order to raid the refrigerator.

Stern's stories are urban, angst-ridden, so anxious and, at times, violent that they can make for a teeth-clenching read.

At 33, the impish Stern--with her mop of auburn curls, her squinty brown eyes, her ripped T-shirts--still looks like the coolest girl on the Bennington campus; so it's not so surprising that she writes about people in their early twenties with a striking mix of deep sympathy and heavy irony, shocking earnestness and subtle satire. She presents her nameless narrator--whom we meet at age 20, leave at age 26--with a bracing honesty, allowing us access to her most uncharitable thoughts, her desperate, superficial strivings, the grave unhappiness that fuels them. "She isn't cool like I am cool," the narrator muses at one point, thinking of her geeky roommate. "Her energy is Junior High: trying to fit in with a crowd that never wants you," she decides about another girl.

"I think my work is bleak, with a twist of dark humor," Stern says. "I like to write spinning-out-of-control narratives." She lists the people who will, she thinks read The Long Haul: "confused college students, hipster musicians, Ani Difranco, smart men and women, age eighteen to thirty-five." Other writers who chronicle the sexual neuroses of the urban young, writers whose fictions take place in dingy tenement apartments and dive bars--like Denis Johnson, Maggie Estep, and Jonathan Ames - have certainly found a significant following among the types Stern catalogues, but not without a bit of a fight, and largely due to word of mouth rather than the massive marketing campaign of a publishing company.

But while those writers began their careers with large publishers, Stern will begin hers with a small one, Soft Skull Press, a Brooklyn-based purveyor with a self-styled punk-rock aesthetic. Soft Skull's origins are legendary in the indie press-zine world. In 1992, Sander Hicks, a twentyish would-be writer, used his job at a Manhattan Kinko's to self-publish his novel Foam. Soon he was publishing poetry by popular indie musicians like Lee Ranaldo (of Sonic Youth) and Todd Colby (of the once-revered band Drunken Boat), art books, and novels by writers other than himself out of his Lower East Side tenement apartment.

In 1996, the company went legit, becoming officially incorporated, broadening its list, and securing distribution from Publishers Group West. Its small-sized, sleekly designed books--imprinted with the company's cartoonish ant logo--began to appear not just in small book and record shops, but in the larger chains. Three years later, Soft Skull made headlines when it bought the rights to Fortunate Son, J.H. Hatfield's explosive biography of George Bush, after it was dropped by St. Martin's Press when the company discovered that Hatfield had been convicted of a felony, among other information that called into question his credibility. The book, with its allegations that Bush had been arrested for cocaine possession, and all the hoopla surrounding Soft Skull's acquisition of it put the fledgling publisher firmly on the map. But it also caused some internal problems for its small staff: Hicks didn't have much experience dealing with the large amounts of money that were coming in from sales of Fortunate Son. Within a year, Soft Skull was in big trouble financially. Hicks assembled a board of directors--people from the indie arts world--to help him rescue the company; but by early 2001, he decided he wanted out.

Richard Eoin Nash, a member of the board, took over as publisher. A veteran of New York City's chronically impoverished downtown experimental theater scene, Nash worked at Oxford University Press selling subsidiary rights, a job that lent him a good knowledge of how a publisher should operate. He began acquiring more and better books--including a lot of fiction--from among the many manuscripts that agents had started sending after Fortunate Son made Soft Skull semifamous. And these books--such as Jenny Davison's Heredity, Eileen Myles's Cool For You, and David Rees's comic book Get Your War On--garnered attention for Soft Skull in the mainstream press, without its losing an iota of its hipster cred.

Meanwhile, Stern's agent, Blauner, was sending The Long Haul around to editors at big publishers. Right from the start, Stern asked Blauner if he was going to send it to Soft Skull. "I'd known about Soft Skull for a long time," she says, "because I was interested in music. I read Eileen Myles's book. And I knew that they would understand me." Blauner knew little about the press and explained to Stern that they would take the manuscript to the major houses first. While many trade-house editors liked the book--some even brought Stern in to meet with them--they were all a little nervous about its being too "edgy." At some point in the process, Blauner decided that they should call the manuscript a novel, rather than a collection, hoping this might make it easier to sell. "It became clear that the narrative was there," Blauner explains. "It felt like a novel, even though it's not told in chronological order."

But even as a novel The Long Haul didn't sell, and Blauner turned to small presses, like San Francisco upstart MacAdam/Cage, which made an offer on the book that Blauner didn't like --the house wanted a share of the film rights, and wouldn't publish until 2004--and turned down. Stern kept bringing up Soft Skull, and Blauner kept putting her off. Then Blauner met Richard Nash at a book party. The two spent half the evening talking before Blauner discovered that Nash headed up the company Stern had been nagging him about. "I have a client who's dying to be published by you," Blauner said. A week or so later, Soft Skull had bought The Long Haul and was cooking up a plan to make Stern into the female Denis Johnson. "I knew instinctively that they would," Stern says.

"I just thought it was a lovely little bit of ferociousness," Nash says in an Irish accent bastardized by his many years in New York City. "It's about these young people who are not what you'd call white trash--because they're Northeastern--but they're these people who live outside of the Northeastern elite culture. They do go to college, but they don't learn very much. And they often experience a kind of emotional impoverishment. They don't have the vocabulary to describe their experiences and, as such, don't have access to those experiences. The inability to express oneself effectively denies oneself the capacity to have the experience. I was very drawn to that."

while many trade-house editors liked the book--some even brought Stern in to meet with them--they were nervous about its being too 'edgy.'

And he suspects--as does Stern herself--that others will be equally drawn to the author's confused young heroine. The Long Haul, he believes, will find an audience generally with "urbane, sophisticated, knowing young people who have a reasonably clear sense of what it is she's trying to accomplish," and specifically with "people like the unnamed protagonist: young women aged sixteen to twenty-five, who will identify."

But Soft Skull is also banking on Stern's personality--and her talent as a reader, which stems from her years of performing as a comic. In late September, she'll set out on a 30-city tour, driving around the country in a donated car (Soft Skull is soliciting sponsorship from "hipster car companies," like Volkwagen), crashing on couches of friends and booksellers, and, she hopes, devastating audiences with her particular mix of gallows humor, elfin charm, dead-on social commentary and bleak existentialism.

On a sultry evening last June, Stern read at the Brooklyn Brewery, in the borough's Williamsburg area, along with Soft Skull poet Todd Colby and headliner Jonathan Ames. The large audience collapsed with laughter as Stern "solicited companionship"" for her tour, reading aloud a questionnaire designed to target the idea road-trip buddy ("Do you have OCD? If so, I'm curious what medicine you take for it."). She then launched into a section of The Long Haul about the narrator's obsession with her free therapist. The laughter continued through the story's first half, then quickly gave way to a rapt silence as the story turned eerie: The narrator begins trailing one of the therapists's other clients, a pretty Goth girl, whom she believes, wrongly, to have only trivial problems. "It's funny," Stern read, her voice slowing on the final line, "how sometimes you want to know something about a girl, but it's not that girl you learn about. Silence. Then explosive applause, with hooting and shouting, sounds not often heard at literary readings.

Is it enough to make a girl forget about past rejections? Yes, Stern says. A dyed-in-the-wool contrarian, she still bristles about being rejected by those conferences--Bread Loaf and the others--in part because she can't stomach the idea of her work being judged by what degree she has or does not have. But over these past five years, as she's forged a reputation for herself as a writer, she's learned that the literary world is larger and more complicated than it seemed at first, that the conference circuit--with its emphasis on academics--is simply one part of a diverse realm, in which writers can make their way in much the way her slender novel does. "It's not," she says, "pretending to be anything other than what it is." And what exactly is it? She smiles. "It's-it's-it's a little bad-ass punk girl walking around with her forty-oh in a brown paper bag. It's a little smart-ass."