All I ever needed to know, I learned at nerd camp. Four glorious summers spent at Duke Young Writers' Camp taught me the fine art of friendship bracelet-making, what to avoid at a cafeteria, the fact that my hands can't handle West African drumming, and a thing or two about diction from a rapping Quaker poet. I can't narrow down what exactly made nerd camp so fantastic that I returned three times, but as one of my poetry professors there would say, "Reasoning shit out won't keep you warm at night. Just spill out those fuzzy feelings on paper."
There were a few obvious ground rules (no guns, drugs or nerd sex) and an official handbook, but the right-brained individuals in charge decided a video starring sock puppets and bread would reinforce the rules a little better. My initial thought was that these facilitators would prove to be relatively strange in comparison to us campers, but the term "diversity" took on an entirely different meaning at writing camp.
Within the first few hours of arriving on Duke's East Campus, I was always faced with the same decision. Did I want to befriend the angst-ridden, brooding girl in ballet slippers with safety pins dangling from her earlobes? Did I want to sit next to the kid who never stopped tattooing himself with sharpies? And what about the girl who declared she refused to write anything but rhyming haikus on the color pink? Year after year, the answer was yes. The more I got to know my fellow campers, the more I saw their personal idiosyncrasies in their work, which always made their writing richer in my eyes.
The perfect place to strike up a conversation with anyone and the high point of the day was Reader's Forum, a communal sharing of writing. Here, I learned I was a better listener than speaker; that I should never wear shoes I was likely to trip in when everyone's eyes were on me; and that a screeching monkey toy hurled at my face was the signal I was over my two-minute time limit at the podium. Over the course of the camp, separate Reader's Forums were held, allowing the older campers a little more leeway in content. For some, this was just an excuse to over-use the word "fuck." For others, it was a challenge to make everyone in the room laugh, cry and wonder if psychiatric care should follow writing camp, or to harness all the attention at hand for a few shining moments and really be heard.
Educational summer camp was nowhere near my Tampa friends' ideas of fun, but I couldn't resist signing up every year. The subjects changed yearly, and by the fourth year I had taken classes in writing college entrance essays using Mad Libs; poems from ripped, thrift store book pages; feminist manifestos inspired by body silhouettes; and sonnets to vagabonds. Even better were the professors. Out of camp, I longed to work with these brilliant people — Howard, whose waist-length dreadlocks disappeared one day "due to aliens," Monica, the quintessential outspoken feminist with a heart the size of Texas, or the camp director, Chip, who was pushing 60 but dressed like a 12-year-old boy. These people opened my eyes and showed me more than a decade of private school education could ever reveal.
In retrospect, writing camp served me just as any other summer camp would — as luxurious entertainment and a temporary departure from all things related to home. Yet all laughable things considered, nerd camp transcended its brochures and left me a little more articulate, a little less shy, and infinitely more passionate about what can be done with 26 letters and a blank page.
Diana Ruiz is a senior at Tampa Preparatory School. She is interning with Creative Loafing this month and will be entering Duke University in the fall.
This article appears in May 20-26, 2009.