The Start

For the past 25 years, I've been lucky enough to volunteer with an organization that provides camping experiences to kids with cancer. My life has been forever changed for the better by the friends I've made through that experience. For those that make a commitment to serve communities like ours there is a lot of love, friendship, hope, and courage everywhere you look. But there's also something darker that we don't always like to face. Grief, sorrow, and loss are a part of the camp experience too. Every volunteer deals with the underbelly of camp in their own way. Denial. Intentional ignorance. Drinking. Depression. Pulling away. Getting over involved. Sleeping around. You name it, it's been done. 

The saddest thing I can say about my own experience with camp, is that I've lost count of how many of my campers have died over the last 25 years. There's a shame to the not knowing that I carry with me always. And guilt. Lots of guilt. How dare I move on and not remember precisely how many? How is each of their names not on the tip of my tongue at every moment, ready to be offered up in litany? To that I can only offer up my own defense mechanisms. My own attempts at staying sane in the here and now instead of losing my mind and heart over so much loss. 

Because cancer is a bitch, it has recently struck outside of the "camper" piece of camp life and taken the lives of two of my fellow counselors and friends. When Chris passed away after so many years of remission, I had already been sitting on an idea for a story about the camp experience. All of the above notwithstanding, it truly is a place of enormous love and laughter and I had been thinking of how I could pay tribute to the experiences I've had there while also maybe bringing some of that camp inspiration out to the non-camp world. Chris's death pushed that over the edge of the disbelieving "should I?" into the world of "absolutely yes." 

Over the course of the two plus years since he's passed, I've been on a journey of discovery about writing. With one hand I've been world building, plotting, researching, and character creating while with the other hand I've been googling and searching craft books like a total newb. The cultural anthropologist in me had me interviewing former campers about their experiences, spending hours listening to their stories from their own tongues instead of relying on the assumptions of my memory. The part of me that still has a day job was checking in with work on the sign-offs for approval to work on a novel (because yes, that's a thing). And finally, the volunteer part of me was checking in with the camp itself, both at the organizational level about things like intellectual property and at the personal level with the most important approval of all - the nod of assent from someone in the camp founder's family. 

The wheels were all in motion and work was being done on a weekly basis, but I hadn't started to actually WRITE anything. I will admit that COVID impacted this part of my life as much as any other, as all of my creative endeavors were put on hold to work with a team of people tasked with pivoting the summer camp to a virtual experience. It was tedious, tiring, and sapped all my creative energy. Then, in the days before camp was to start, our friend and fellow counselor MJ passed away after a long battle with cancer. It shook me in a way I never expected. Not because I didn't love her enough to be shook, but because it really tapped into the loss I felt with Chris and the deep desire that had driven me to start the writing project in the first place. I finished camp determined to pick up the project and see it to the finish line. 

Now here we are. As of the writing of this post, I've completed a first draft of Chapter One and am halfway through a character story arc/plot outline that excites me. I've buddied up with an accountabillibuddy to help keep me moving and have been attending some writing sprints that I plan to use as needed. The one drawback to all of this work and output is that it's happening all very much behind the scenes. If there's one thing I learned about the blog I ran when I was conducting fieldwork for my thesis, it's that the experience of the journey is just as rewarding for me to document, and hopefully for others to read, as the end result. And that's where this page will come in. I plan to use it to document the journey I'm on as much as for a platform to post writing prompts and craft exercises when I feel like I need to "put something out there." 

My inspirational friend Hailey, who I'm sure you'll hear more about on this page in the future, recently posted that it takes a lot of courage to suck at something new. For so many reasons this sticks with me. This writing adventure is putting me out of my comfort zone in a lot of ways and I'm sure there will be parts that I suck at, and that's okay. Hailey didn't get to be a Paralympic Silver medalist just by being awesome out of the gate (although she is guys, she is.) You gotta suck to start with. As for courage...well again I look to camp for my inspiration, as I've known the most courageous individuals anyone could meet thanks to camp. For that reason alone the working title of my book is Camp Courage. I hope you'll all be able to read it in the near future. In the meantime, thanks for joining me on the journey.