Summer of camp, lifetime of memories

Sleepaway

Writings on Summer Camp

Edited by Eric Simonoff

Riverhead Books: 314 pp., $14 paper

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Summer camp. Intense friendships. Bittersweet crushes. Those prepubescent kisses. Could anything be sweeter? But wait. There is also heartache and homesickness. Wild-eyed children lay ticks on their campmates’ eyelashes, shatter each other’s most treasured illusions, break each other’s hearts. And beneath it all seethes a sexual tension that overpowers even the scents of bologna and mosquito repellent.

Welcome to “Sleepaway: Writings on Summer Camp,” a collection of stories and essays (plus a poem and comic strip) in which writers replay the wonders, the heartache and the homesickness of idylls past.

In “Apple Pie,” Thisbe Nissen tells the story of a young woman’s sexual awakening through her teenage years and the discovery that she is drawn to other women. Of course, this involves an exchange of lanyard bracelets, then the sharing of Skittles and M&Ms.; And finally: “[Y]ou save seats on your blankets for each other at Campfire Sings. You think you have never been so happy in your entire life.”

Things don’t always turn out so well. But again and again, these stories reveal that camp marks you, changes you. In Margaret Atwood’s bleak tale, “Death by Landscape,” one character has learned to “recognize women who went to these camps, and were good at it. They have a hardness to their handshakes, even now; a way of standing, legs planted firmly and farther apart than usual; a way of sizing you up, to see if you’d be any good in a canoe.”

The traces summer camp leaves differ from writer to writer. “When I was eight years old, my father sent me to a nudist camp,” begins Mark Oppenheimer’s, “At August’s End: Serving Time in Leftist Summer Camps,” an earnest essay detailing goings-on at several of such camps that dot the nation’s Eastern seaboard. Oppenheimer and his fellow campers wore clothes for meals and sports and when it turned cold. “In truth, we were clothed more often than not.... Swimming was the time for nakedness. But so, too, was walking from the lake back to the cabin or from the cabin to the outdoor showers.” Think square dancing in the buff, volleyball games where no one is allowed to keep score and endless rounds of “Kumbaya.” Think lifelong irritation at self-righteous utopianism.

Other stories explore a different kind of rage. “Everyone at Queechy Lake Camp hated Lisa Hope Mermen,” Cynthia Kaplan writes in “Queechy Girls.” “There were no reasons why and there were a million reasons why.” The reader is not surprised, however, when it is revealed that Lisa Hope Merman was one of those girls “whose bathing suit, with its built-in brassiere, remained dry on the front following the backstroke race at swim meets.”

Cruelty comes in many forms in these stories. As does kindness. And ultimately, so does self-awareness. “People say that going to camp is about growing up and learning who you are,” notes Lev Grossman in “Cello, Goodbye,” his account of failing to measure up at music camp. “I never learned who I was at Greenmeadow, but I learned something almost as valuable, which is who I was not: a genius.”

Some of these coming-of-age stories are powerful literary works. Others don’t quite mesmerize. Many were previously published in collections or magazines (among the authors are such luminaries as David Sedaris and Ursula K. Le Guin). But in total, this volume, edited by Eric Simonoff, so vividly evokes camp’s humid, cricket-chirping, mosquito-buzzing nights and bright athletic days that even those whose parents kept them home summers will feel nostalgic by book’s end.

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Jessica Garrison is a reporter for The Times’ California section.