This post was originally written in August of 2023 and is reposted here.
Hi, hello, salutations, greetings. Welcome over to substack! Come on in and make yourself comfortable. I’m glad to see you all over here. This letter is so full of joy. I’m excited to dive in.
I spent the first week of August at Gay Camp, aka the Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat. For one week, a hundred queer writers descended on an EXTREMELY Catholic college (like, crucifixes in every classroom) outside Philadelphia and lived out our gay writer summer camp dreams. We roasted marshmallows and drank too much vodka. We walked over to the nun’s graveyard (there was a convent on the grounds) and howled together at the full moon. We did gay trivia and played gay bingo. There was an epically gay karaoke night. We spent our days talking about writing-while-queer with other queer writers and I didn’t know how much my soul needed it until I was there.
Just look at these frikkin beautiful humans from my YA fiction cohort!! Not pictured: Margot the goodest good dog.
One of my favorite things was that every night we gathered all together in a room with a GIANT crucifix on the wall, and proceeded to read our own work out loud to the most supportive, lovely group I can imagine. And whenever it got horny (which was, uh, a lot of the times) the reader would sort of glance up at the cross looming over them like ‘sorry jesus,’ and go back to reading extremely horny EXTREMELY gay scenes.
But the very best thing, the thing that truly made the week special, wasn’t the events or the church jokes, or even the lectures. It was the people.
Post s’mores, pre howling. I also took literally zero photos myself because I was too busy having fun.
I didn’t know what to expect, going in. It’s a prestigious writers retreat. Many writers in other cohorts (Fiction, NonFiction, Poetry, Speculative Fiction, Playwriting, Screenwriting, and mine - YA fiction) had won awards and published work. Some were from writing programs like the Iowa Writers Workshop that foster competitivness and pretention. But every single person I met was amazing and beautiful and generous.
Seriously. I kept waiting for the asshole to reveal themself. There had to be at least one, right? There’s always that asshole who makes everything about themself. But that asshole never appeared. I still find it hard to wrap my head around that.
What is this face I’m making? Who knows.
At any meal, I could sit at any table, whether it was full or had only one person I hadn’t met, and I was welcomed. Small talk wasn’t just small talk, it was an opening. Where are you from? What’s your cohort? How is workshop going? Led to questions about how Poetry or Screenwriting approach workshop differently than my cohort. Led to questions about process, about projects, led to discussions about religion or Star Wars or the first queer movie/show we ever watched. It didn’t matter that we just met. That we came from other countries, sometimes. We were both queer and both writers, and that was all we needed.
In my cohort, we were all writing incredibly different pieces, everything from necromancers to blind princesses, retelling Hawaiian creation myths or examining mental health in Muslim queer girls, exploring HIV in a graphic novel, what family means in verse text, religion or the pandemic in short stories, or rewriting the Bible to be Black centered without any gender or white supremacy. And yet we were all writing for young people, wanting to give them comfort and mirrors we didn’t have. We’re all trying to change the world, just a little bit, the only way we can.
I came away with new writing friends who care as much as I do, work as hard as I do, and help me laugh more than I usually tend to. We sat around - this group of humans from all across the country and Canada - talking about process and worldbuilding and plot and character and it was just so beautiful.
I also took a jaunt over to Philly proper with a new friend to eat delicious gluten-free funnel cake and see the Liberty Bell and ponder the complicated roots of American History. We had no choice but to stop at a used bookstore, obviously, and saw the chillest cat to ever exist, who I refrained from stealing.
It’s hard to explain what it felt like. To be seen so clearly, accepted so completely. It was hard to leave, to go back to the real world. (And not just because I promptly came down with COVID on my return … wah wah.) But we’ve talked about staying in touch and I think, we really might actually do it. I’m already texting with one new friend as we move forward on our respective projects. So I have hope.
I have hope. And hope is a very joyful thing.