Nine weeks, 14 teachers, 10 counselors, 64 interns, over 300 young writers, hundreds of pencils and journals, endless ideas, and dozens of new friendships were made over a very busy summer! Thurber Center is now creepily quiet as our young writers head off to school but we would be remiss if we didn’t share some of the highlights from an incredible summer. Our middle school campers were treated to two walking field trips:  the Topiary Park and the Columbus Museum of Art (even as we worked around air quality alerts in June). There were mythical creatures, short form poetry, observation stories, theories about bears knowing how to start fire (yes, you read that right), and lots of other out-of-this-world ideas. Many of them have been with us since they were young so the creativity is endless (as is the camp lore)!

Not to be outdone, our 4th-6th grade campers in July were visited by Nancy Drew and broke out their deductive reasoning and the crime triangle (motive, means, opportunity) to solve The Case of the Missing Music Box! Who knew that the grown up Nancy Drew lives in German Village? They also walked to the art museum, were visited by published authors, wrote suspenseful stories, and laughed a lot at our Town Crier. Our youngest writers were fast and furious as their camp is only a half day so we squeezed in a lot in a short amount of time! We shrank ourselves and went on adventures, created maps for our own stories, testing our tongue twister talents, rhymed away, and more. Every summer, the brightest highlights for me are the return of past campers. We have dozens of interns, counselors, and now teachers and authors who are past Thurber kids who want to return and share their passion with the next generation. This summer we had our first published Thurber camper return and work with our campers! Ellen O’Clover started off as a camper and then Young Docent, teen writer, and is now a full fledged published author. To show our young writers that they too can be published one day, was a tear-jerker moment! While I go into a weird funk after they leave, reliving these memories makes me smile and will carry me through until our next activities. I hope they cherish these memories as much as I do or I’ll juice them! Don’t worry, that’s just camp lore, or is it?