By Jun Lowenhar, age 16
As it’s my last year at WriCampia, I of course wanted to add one final year to my annual tradition of writing staff profiles for The Yearly Wricampian. As per usual, I’m excited to help introduce some new faces to the community. One that you might have noticed around camp, wearing a visor, a London accent, and a bright smile, has already been referred to by Camp Director Rebecca Wallace-Segall as a “gem.” Her name is Instructor Vanessa Walters.
Vanessa, like many of us, has been writing since childhood. When she was six years old, she wrote a book of poetry she called The Earth. As she developed as a writer, she discovered that she preferred writing in prose. “Prose is kind of my thing where I feel like I know what I’m doing,” she says.
Much of Vanessa’s writing takes inspiration from her Jamaican heritage. Her parents and grandparents immigrated to the UK during the 1960s, as part of a wave of post-War immigrants known as the Windrush. As a result, Vanessa grew up during a time of significant change in British culture and the role of Britons of colour. The ‘80s, Vanessa’s childhood years, saw, for example, the UK’s first Black Member of Parliament. In 1995, at the age of fifteen, she wrote and published her debut novel, Rude Girls. It was one of the first books in the market about Black girls growing up in London, and many readers contacted Vanessa saying that it helped them see that books could be for them. “I guess that’s my contribution to UK culture,” she joked. Vanessa has also dug deeper into the Black history of the UK in a more recent work, Michael X, a play about the eponymous Trinidadian-British civil rights activist who styled himself after the US’s Malcolm X. “I wrote about Michael X because I felt like we didn’t learn about people like him when I was growing up, and we didn’t learn about the similar civil rights movement that happened [in the UK].”
Though Vanessa has been running writing workshops for adults for about three years, she only started teaching at Writopia’s Brooklyn lab this June. She is working with Upper Campers at WriCampia, and has worked with younger children in Brooklyn, where the difference between young writers and adults really stands out. Vanessa says that while adults usually go into workshops with a specific idea of what they want to accomplish, kids are more open to exploring their potential, and expanding their horizons: “What is the point of writing? They don’t know yet.” But in Vanessa’s opinion, Writopia’s games really help to highlight the most important part of writing, which is having fun. For younger writers, she says, “You want them to experience a bit of wonder and surprise themselves.” She hopes that teen writers will extend the fun and free attitude they learn at Writopia to their writing for school. “When your writing is fun, it will be better.”
Vanessa may be a brand-new face in the Writopia community, but she’s already become a committed Writopian. She’s even brought another writer to join the fun: her son, Middle Camper Kio. You can find her using her playwright experience to advise Page-2-Stage, and she says she’s impressed by the great story that the campers have come up with this year. But her favorite part of camp is workshop, where she feels like she gets to learn from campers just as much as she teaches them. Besides, she says, “Making kids happy is fun for me.”
