We asked our wonderful summer intern from Smith College, Sara Aboulafia, to give us her take on the third annual Young Writers' Camp held in early August. Here's what she had to say:
I Don’t Want To Grow Up
Young Writers’ Camp 2008
Sara Aboulafia
In nine months I am going to graduate from college, and while I do fear the onset of debt anxiety and career panic, I have no nostalgic longing to return to childhood, especially adolescence. Catty fights with girlfriends, worrying about your outfit’s cool factor, awkward boys breathing down your neck—no, thank you (though, I’ll admit, some of this still manages to stick around). But, that said, I still love being around kids, especially the sort that came to this year’s Young Writers’ Camp 2008.
While I was backstage for most of the Young Writers’ Camp, drilling away at organizing the kids’ writing for their literary Chapbooks—their tours de force of poems, stories, and ruminations—I still got a little glimmer of the spirit of the week. I remembered, suddenly, that kids, though still developing, are full-fledged personalities—ranging from the shy to the quirky and outspoken.
Much of the difference between the kids was a matter of age, and walking around the house, I saw myself
as a child at each stage. The nine- and ten-year-olds were hyper, imaginative, and playful, immediately setting to the task of building a “Writer’s Lounge” in the attic—no teenagers or “Evil Beings” allowed—where they hung pictures, arranged chairs, and set-up a stand to sell the snacks we gave them at lunch. The 12- to 13-year olds, mostly girls, couldn’t be bothered with playhouses, but were just as hyper. They couldn’t take a breath between over-eager Valley-Girl exclamations, and communicated to each other in tight circles at lunch-break downstairs, their laughter bubbling up through the house.
The older boys and girls were painfully shy around each other for the first couple of days—I would walk in the room to deliver granola bars for lunch and I could sense an awkward silence filtering through the room, with one lone, brave teenager beginning a story to break the silence. I recognized this age pattern well, and flinched a little around the kids, remembering my own adolescence which was not so long ago. I could relate—and though I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with the older kids, I did get the chance to bond.
Our welcome night and pizza party for Youth Camp was full of parents and kids alike, and, being 21, I wasn’t sure to whom I should be speaking. In general, I waver strangely between totally outgoing and completely shy (hiding in my room at a party, for instance, until I get the courage to greet guests), and in this case, my tendencies were totally split between the parents – where was my comfort zone? Or rather, where was my true allegiance? With the parents, who mingled with fizzy juice drinks, or with the kids, who scarfed down pizza and wandered around the Ferril House looking for hiding places?
My anxiety was thankfully pacified when I spotted Henry, a 15-year-old writer with a ponytail who brought along his banjo. Coincidentally, I had my guitar in the car since I would be heading from the Ferril House to a friend’s to play music. I brought the acoustic in, and after the bulk of the crowd left, Henry and I ended up jamming on a couple of John Prine songs, and one of my favorites—Jolene, by Dolly Parton. Music has always been one of the ways I’m able to connect and let go—and I was really thankful I wasn’t the only one.
But while my desire to bond was satisfied, my desire to teach kids wasn’t met until the end of Youth Camp just before the kids gave their student reading at the Tattered Cover. I took the littler ones – along with another teacher and a mom - around downtown Denver with their notebooks and writing tools in hand, bringing a writing exercise I made up based on a poem by one of my favorite poet’s, Frank O’Hara, called “A Step Away From Them.” I interrupted our walk at various points to shout “stop,” and the kids would grab their pens and start scribbling about the sights—the red, neon heart buttoned to the side of the new contemporary art museum, or the mural of animals on our way to the Platte River. In between stops things got a little existential—as sometimes happens on walks, I suppose—with one of the kids. Arden was the smallest one of all, coming up only to my stomach, with a mouth full of braces and a floppy hat, and as she spoke to me I had to lean down to hear her small voice as we trotted down the path: “Do you think that when people die, they just lay there, waiting underground?”
I had to admit I didn’t know the answer to her question, and her little sprite-like face seemed seriously concerned. I tried to explain about Purgatory, but realized I better lay off the idea a little. Then again, it wasn’t just little Arden who had thoughts like these, but all of these kids – their little cherubic faces belying some of the more adult concerns they had.
When we returned to Tattered Cover, the kids’ parents joined us in the author event room for the culminating Young Writers’ Camp reading. I heard sweet stories, stories about bears and boys and such, but also sad ones and some that were morbidly funny. There were fragments about loneliness and death, and stories about explosions, and demons, acts of murder and birth—imagined by the author to be something like a fast-moving truck heading headlong for a pregnant woman (“Boom! A baby!”). The parents laughed, with some discomfort—how wonderfully ridiculous to see a child whose head barely reaches the podium thinking up such things! But I remember the dark corners of childhood, and our often twisted topics of conversation.
Even as young as seven years of age, my friends and I would gossip about what Barney was really up to underneath that smiling, purple head. We heard he “abused” a girl on the show, maybe even murdered someone. It’s easy for adults to forget that kids are more than they seem, that their imaginations are extensive and complicated and yes, sometimes dark. But Young Writers’ Camp gave the kids the chance to explore these regions of their imagination without being struck down by them—it was all demons and death-metaphors one second, playtime the next, without any apparent bipolar side-effects. Though I have no real desire to rewind the clock a few years, I definitely think I could learn from these young writers—especially when I’m entering the shaky job market, and things look especially scary. Perhaps, when I’m living in a small box-like home in some city next year, fraught with terror and hopelessness, I’ll be inspired to rearrange my yellowed, secondhand pillows to create a sort of Writers’ Lounge, and simply daydream the day away.
