As a first-time camper this year, I had to rely on some old friends to help me fall into the comfortable rhythm of camp life. As I took in all aspects of Camp Danbee, I immediately noticed the outsized role the built campus environment played in the overall ambiance of the camp. On my first day here, my friend Marion W. showed me to a bush bursting with little blackberries. We picked the ripest fruit and walked from there to our writing workshop. These berries are just a taste of the little things that comprise the beautiful and productive workspace called Camp Danbee.
WriCampia is located on the edge of Lake Ashmere, an ideal spot for creative thinking. The simplicity of the environment helps writers channel their attention to their projects. A large portion of our WriCampia community is stolen from big cities, especially from New York, where the Writopia headquarters is located. The calm of Camp Danbee is a completely different environment. I’ve interviewed a couple of other campers and a director for insight into how this setting affects their writing. “I tend to think my writing style is really influenced by the things around me, the things I see,” said Marion W. “Like, I’m actively looking around at the flowers as you’re interviewing me.” Danbee’s campus is a retreat from the hustle and bustle of our regular lives, and it lulls our writers into a peaceful but creative state.
One of this year’s directors, Matthew Jellison, contributed a similar sentiment. “I think that in our day to day lives, we can kind of fall into habits that keep us on autopilot, and so we lose our natural sense of wonder,” he observed. “But when we get the opportunity to reconnect, we find ourselves excited by life again. And to me, that’s the best place to write from.”
As an imaginative community, WriCampians rely on connection with the environment in order to achieve the pinnacle of our creative abilities. Nonconformity is normal here, but in order to weave the magnificent patchwork of individuality that we create, we need a certain sort of placidity that also serves as a setting for fun and joy. Danbee is our loom. Each camper is a handful of threads that effortlessly combine into something worthy of the halls of Olympus. The natural environment of Danbee is the adhesive that ties it all together. “I like how natural [camp] is, because if you’re at a sleepaway camp like this, you want to stay in a place that’s different from where you are at home and more close to nature,” said Lower Camper Tilda S. All three of these interviewees experienced the magic of the Danbee campus in different ways, yet tied together, they produce one message: our beautiful camp is what inspires us not only to be productive, but to bring our artistic selves to everything that we create.
