Dispatches from Summer Camp: Literacies of Suds and Scam

Cori Brewster

An analysis of letters written by campers and counselors from summers 2009 to 2012, this article focuses on one quirky, camp-specific practice that has changed the way I think about the multiple literacies students eventually bring to college classrooms, and about the importance of creating even the most artificial opportunities for developing writers and rhetors to play with power and convention.

When I stepped in as program director for my old summer camp five years ago, I inherited a number of moderately disturbing if dearly beloved new "traditions." Reflecting the coercive model of power favored by counselors and camp leaders past, these freshly institutionalized practices ran the gamut from the more benign to the less so: making children sing "I’m a Little Teapot" in front of the whole camp at meal times to "earn back" lost items, keeping campers from sneaking out at night by convincing them camp buildings were haunted, giving favorite campers special privileges (the ability to leave campus to fetch milkshakes for staff members, for example), and so on. In effect, it had become a culture of shaming, sucking up, and scaring into compliance, and I was now its leader.

One of the less distressing new camp routines was the cabin cleanup competition waged daily between cabins, judged mid-morning by the camp director (now me), and announced—following a palm-pounding, whole camp drumroll—every day at lunch. It at least served a purpose. But when the letters started showing up during cabin inspection, duct-taped to girls’ bunk beds, ringed in candy and pinecones and Books of Common Prayer at the entrance to the boys’ cabin, I couldn’t help but be a little bit creeped out. "To our esteemed camp leader," began the first one. "Dear the Almighty Dr. Brewster," began the next. Written by campers and counselors hoping to sway the outcome of the cleaning competition, these quasi-persuasive, increasingly servile letters soon became "tradition" too, encouraged in no small part by my decision to read them publicly at lunch.¹

As any former camper-turned-composition teacher can attest, summer camp is a complex, condensed, time-bound and time-bending rhetorical situation, and one that suggests all our dictums about creating authentic contexts for writing are no doubt entirely correct. From letters home, to group travelogues, to poetry anthologies and horror movie scripts, camps of all kinds host a wide range of literacy practices, many of them highly cherished and repeated one summer to the next. ²

Quirky and camp-specific as they may be, these "extracurricular" uses of literacy deserve more attention (Gere). As Abigail Van Slyck notes, "Among social institutions, only public schools have touched the lives of more youngsters" in the United States than summer camps (xix). The self- and camp-sponsored texts produced there have much to tell us about how and why millions of students read and write outside of school, what they transfer from site to site, what kinds of writing they find meaningful, how they perceive their own agency as rhetors in different social and ideological contexts, and how we might better serve and engage them in schools (see also Purcell-Gates; Fleischer and Schaafsma; and Lewis, Enciso, and Moje).

Here I want to focus on just one small, mildly embarrassing selection of my own camp’s rhetorical practice: the dozens of pandering cabin cleanup letters I came to collect over my four summers back at camp. Fine reading in themselves, I think they have something to say as well about the movement of youth literacies across domains and contexts, about the value of small-time agoras, and about the kinds of critical rhetorical space well worth supporting and continuing to explore.³

Dear the Almighty Doctor Brewster

Our Humble Camp Home

Aside from cobwebs and their own dirty clothes, the biggest housekeeping challenge campers face is the grass they track in from the lawn. The shrieking, dust-blowing fleet of vacuums have all been donated, and the cabin that gets the one with the most suck has a clear advantage—though having sequestered enough of the camp’s precious duct tape can easily make up for that.

Far from the rustic lakeside getaways pictured in television and film, the camp these letters come from sits on 100 acres at the edge of a small Northwest town. Earwig-ridden as it may be, it’s not wilderness, nor is it particularly well funded or well equipped. There are no horses or tennis courts, no ropes course or climbing wall; the darkroom is too expensive to restock, and archery is available only if a counselor happens to have been certified previously somewhere else. On occasion, a loose cow breaks up a tag game or a neighborhood dog runs through the dining hall, but there’s no fear of bears and no need for any real outdoor skills.

Still, it is beautiful and much beloved. Campers spend most of their time socializing their way through inventive, inexpensive small and large-group activities—arts and crafts, talent shows, movie-making, Capture the (rubber) Chicken, dressing up and following along with 1980s Richard Simmons workout tapes—cultivating their own weirdities in between planning chapel and doing service projects related to the summer’s theme.

Like many aging Christian overnight camps, the camp mainly serves children and teens from the middle and lower ends of the economic spectrum, providing full or partial scholarships to nearly all who attend. Most campers are rural and white, generally reflecting the demographics of nearby counties and the mainline churches that fund the camp. Many campers are the children and grandchildren of former campers; others have been referred through church, friends, foster care associations, programs for military families, and social workers. For some, it is one of many recreational activities that will fill their summer months. For others, it is their sole reprieve from work or taking care of siblings and older relatives. There are 80-year-old 10-year-olds, raised by grandparents on rural ranches; kids who translate for family members, parent alcoholic adults, and pay household bills; and indolent middle-class teenagers, children of doctors and priests and civil servants, for whom cleaning toilets is a novelty performed at camp once a year.

Thirty to fifty campers attend each one-week session, with many high school campers returning later in the summer to serve as volunteer counselors-in-training for younger camps. Generally, all campers know each other by the end of the week, and most older campers claim their camp friends as their closest, having returned to reconnect with one another year after year. Campers and counselors live 15 to 20 per cabin in A-frame style buildings constructed in the late 1960s, with electricity, indoor plumbing, wall-to-wall carpeting, and wireless internet—though camper phones and computers must be checked in upon arrival at camp. Despite explicit rules against graffiti, generations of names and dates are scrawled behind doors and rafters all over camp. As at many summer camps, there is an overwhelming sense of history, ownership, and belonging; there is also a strong belief among older campers, fueled by that same sense of ownership, that the rules don’t matter if nobody gets hurt and you don’t get caught.

#1 in Cleanest, and #1 in Your Heart

Cabin cleanup has always been part of the daily routine, as far as I know, though it was done with little ceremony when I was a camper, as a matter of course. Showers were dirty and needed to be mopped. Done. Toilet paper needed to be restocked. Done. The heap of clothes on the floor was becoming impossible to walk through. Folded, put away, done.⁴

Cabin cleanup is still done for practical reasons today, of course, satisfying the county health inspector not least among them. But it has also become sport, a rhetorical exigence, the public reading of cabin cleanup letters providing a highly anticipated opportunity for grandstanding, literary performance, and servile display. Like most things at camp, it is taken simultaneously very seriously and not, a game played for the sake of the win, cabin solidarity, and an end-of-week root beer float party, not to mention the pleasure of hearing one’s cabin’s superiority with mop and pen affirmed in front of the whole camp over lunch.

Most days, the difference in scoring comes down to an empty paper towel dispenser or a stray sock beneath a bed. Campers of all ages do a pretty good job. When they don’t, it’s generally because they choose to do nothing—their cabin is losing, so what’s the point?—or because they’ve tried to Febreeze away the stink rather than mopping the bathroom floor. The letters they write do not factor into who wins and who doesn’t, nor do the “gifts” that often accompany them. Instead, the letters serve mainly to fan the flames and antagonize the opposition. To be sure, the letters aren’t really to or about me.

As the letters above demonstrate, sucking up is perhaps the most common rhetorical move. Which cabin has stooped to which new low is a regular topic, as is the deferential acknowledgment that my judgment would never be clouded by flattery or bribes, even as flattery and bribes are continuously offered in both writing and conversation.

In perverse fealty to the Episcopal mission of the camp, writers and speakers also often attempt to cast their cabin’s cleaning efforts in relation to the day’s scripture or to the broader camp curriculum, which has centered over the past several years on the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. This is always done at least half-mockingly, however, and the versions of what camp is about and what I value reflected back in camper and counselor letters generally fall somewhere between the absurd, the ostensibly blasphemous, and the appalling. To my knowledge, there has never been a whit of Bible study in the cabins, for example, though religious texts are routinely mentioned, quoted, or used as props in elaborate displays accompanying the letters.⁵ Nor have I ever encouraged the girls to gender themselves “princesses,” but a focus on appearance (mine and theirs) pervades many of the letters I receive.

The following sections provide further context and analysis, beginning with a brief description of how these kowtowing epistles are made.

The Composing Processes of Camp Counselors

Most of the letters included here were written by camp counselors and signed by campers, though there are several composed by individual campers as well. The process and amount of time given to writing them vary widely depending on the age of the campers and the preferred styles and levels of investment of individual counselors. Two of my college-age male staff confessed that they actually compose their cabin’s daily letter on a laptop and then write it out by hand to make it look "more real." 

Their typical process goes something like this:

1. Discuss possible themes with fellow counselors and campers, considering available props, cabin clean up topoi, and the camp director’s response to letters past.
2. Draft and revise the letter on a laptop, either individually or in consultation with other counselors, while campers do the actual chores.
3. Use spellcheck.
4. Copy corrected letter by hand onto a piece of neatly de-fringed notebook paper.
5. Attach to clipboard.
6. Circulate around cabin for camper signatures.
7. Chase down campers who have left the cabin without signing the letter and acquire requisite signatures.
8. Attend to presentation and delivery of the letter (typically, placing the letter in the center of a larger display surrounded, for example, by pinecones, playing cards, sticks of gum, My Little Ponies, or Books of Common Prayer).
9. Choose theme-appropriate music and put on loop, ensuring that it continues playing throughout cabin inspection. Alternately, guess what the camp director’s favorite band or genre might be and just play that.
10. Wait for verdict and public reading of letter at lunch.
11. Listen carefully to other cabins’ letters, assessing their strategy and rhetorical ploys.
12. Discuss the next day’s strategy with campers during the nightly cabin meeting.
13. Get up the next morning and repeat.

Though not all counselors take the competition quite this seriously, the elementary and middle school-age campers overwhelmingly do, and this fawning camp genre is one they become incredibly and disturbingly well-versed in even if they do not write their cabins’ letters themselves.  "Have you checked the cabins?" ... "Did you like our letter?" ... "Did you find our gift?" ... "Did we do better than the girls?"

I can’t help but be reminded here of Jay Robinson and Patti Stock’s admonition that "No one becomes literate who does not see some opening, however small, toward active participation in a literate world that is part of the reality in which he or she lives" (qtd. in Fleischer and Schaafsma xxii). However fleeting the cause may be, however ultimately ridiculous the reality constructed, participating in the production and public delivery of cabin cleanup letters provides developing writers a memorable and thus meaningful opportunity to "see themselves, even for a moment, as actors in/creators of their worlds" (Fleischer and Schaafsma xxii).

Power Addressed, Power Invoked

Trivial as these camp compositions might seem, then, I think they provide a useful window into youth literacy development and practice, and an important if idiosyncratic reminder that literacies, identities, and contexts are not just fluid but mutually constitutive, as Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Jay Robinson, and many others have pointed out.

As Orellana explains, much literacy research over the past thirty years has focused on ways in which literacy is valued and practiced in particular domains (home, school, church, and so on), and on how people navigate divergent, sometimes conflicting norms and expectations between them. But "the ways in which sociocultural researchers tackle this question may perhaps reinforce a problematic notion of contexts," she argues (126):

That is, when we focus on the movement that people do between social spheres..., we may inadvertently suggest that such spheres are clearly delineable, fixed, and largely immutable. This approach treats contexts as neatly separable, and in turn separated from the individuals who shape them and give them meaning....

These are ideas that keep us from seeing how the worlds, and the boundaries between them, are themselves forged by the people that move within, across, and between them... I am arguing that individuals are inseparable from their contexts, that contexts and people are mutually constituted, and that when people move between discourse communities they bring their contexts with them, fundamentally altering the nature of the new spaces into which they move. (126)

Summer camp is an identifiable literacy "domain," to be sure, and one that can be examined, as I have to this point, through the lens of literacy events and practices carried out there (see for example Barton). But like all domains, it is also an accretion of participants’ past experiences, education, and rhetorical performances, and one that is constantly being reenacted, reread, and remade.

More than most social locations available to young people in the U.S. today, camp provides a space to play dress up with the strange trousseau of tropes and conventions each new group of language users inherits from rhetors and contexts past. It’s difficult not to notice, for example, the traces of medieval ars dictaminis in campers’ pious salutations, or the play with power, authority, and role-relationships this mock-feudalistic genre affords (see Lanham; Perelman).

References to scripture in camper and counselor letters, likewise, both recall and remake literate conventions recalled and remade across multiple times, places, and institutions. As one letter from the girls’ cabin attests:

Another letter, from a middle school boy, injects scripture similarly to support his argument that the boys’ cabin still has a chance to win by the end of camp: "This week we read the Genisis in bible study to show this is just the begining. Please read this to every one for every one should know it is just the beginning" [again, all spelling original]. His use of scripture is hardly distinguishable from (and certainly no clumsier than) biblical references made in speech after speech at the 2012 Republican and Democratic National Conventions, or in many other contemporary sites of public address.

At the same time that they invoke rhetorical conventions past, in other words, letter writers also actively appropriate devices and identities associated with the shifting domains they are party to, and often simply subject to, outside of camp. Composers bring what they know about language together with what they know about church and the presumed expectations of priests and parishioners, about school and the presumed expectations of college professors, about persuasive strategy and methods of playing to an audience, and about humor and its presumed limits when attempting simultaneously to poke fun at and suck up to adults in power.

Unlike so much of the institutionally-sponsored writing they do at church or at school, however, successful composition at camp is based not on pliant imitation of convention but on the ability to mess with it, to parade knowledge of other domains’ rhetorical devices out before an audience who can appreciate the ability to manipulate these devices to one’s own ends. It’s a sophisticated game, in sum, and one that draws value in my book as much for keeping adolescents engaged in writing as for providing developing rhetors practice using language to push boundaries, play with power, and re-fashion the contexts in which they live.

A little embarrassing, yes. Fleeting and juvenile and solecistic, absolutely. But as small, soft-soaping steps on the road to socially invested, context-shifting, critically literate practice—I’ll inspect another toilet for that.⁶