The weirdest camp I ever went on

Row row row your boat

I went on a leadership camp once. It was not what I expected.

I was fifteen and didn’t know anyone else going, but I loved the word leadership. It felt like signing up was a way of predicting my future.

It was an all-girls camp, and we met as a group in Albert Park, where we were loaded onto two buses for the trek down to Somers.

The campsite itself was pretty basic: a big hall with a kitchen, cabins that smelled like old socks, and bunk beds you had to bring your own sheets for.

But what I remember most is stepping off the bus and thinking: Oh my God, what the hell is going on?

Because standing there calmly, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world were about forty women waiting to greet us...

And every single one of them was completely naked.

Unrelated: This is one of the first cartoons I ever drew

They were smiling and waving, and sweeping the path, and there was not a stitch of clothing in sight.

One of them told us (as if it were completely normal) that if we felt moved to do so, we too could get naked.

Unsurprisingly, no one did.

The nudity only lasted the first day. Maybe it was a bonding exercise? I don’t know. What I do know is that from then on, they wore clothes but it didn’t get any less strange.

There was a gang of commando-enforcer types who dressed in black and called themselves the Slushies.

The Slushies would wake us up in the middle of the night, banging on the cabin walls and shouting at us to run barefoot along the beach in the dark.

One night, they led us out to the oval and blindfolded us.

Then they leaned in close and whispered an animal into each girl’s ear: ‘You’re a goat… You’re a cow… You’re a horse…’

Blindfolded, we shuffled across the field, making our animal sounds on repeat, searching for someone else doing the same.

‘No peeking!’ the Slushies shouted. ‘We’ll tell you when to stop!’

When you found your match, you held hands and kept going—mooing, bleating, neighing—slowly forming chains of livestock in the dark.

I remember thinking: If they don’t tell me to stop, I’ll just keep doing this. Forever, if needed.

Because the Slushies were kind of scary.

Not traumatising—just unsettling, in a theatrical, WTF-is-this, cult-adjacent kind of way.

They’d already made me sit in an industrial-sized kitchen sink with two other girls and sing Row, Row, Row Your Boat. (YES IT’S HARD TO FATHOM)

Eventually, someone peeked—and realised the Slushies were gone. They’d just... left.

We took off our blindfolds and wandered quietly, tiredly, back to bed.

My cartoon in the Griffith Review

I don’t know what the ‘official’ lesson of that camp was, but I think maybe it was something like this:

Freedom (or leadership, or whatever you want to call it) doesn’t come from following the rules. It comes from realising no one’s really in charge.

Like… they’re not the boss of you.

This is true of life, but it’s especially true of writing.

If you’ve come to writing from a job, uni, or any kind of formal learning, you’re probably used to someone clapping their hands and saying, ‘Nice work! Good job! Here’s your next assignment!’

But once you step outside those structures—into the full, open field of creativity—no one does that anymore.

There’s no curriculum, no clipboard, no one on the sidelines saying, ‘Okay, fine. You’ve probably moo-ed enough.’

Most of the time, you’re just doing the uncertain work of showing up and keeping going.

And sometimes, that doesn’t feel very triumphant. It just feels… long.

Because creative growth is subtle, you can’t always see progress. But somewhere, deep down you know: you’re not in the same place you started.

Maybe you’re still in the dark but you’re not *actually* walking around in circles.

Happy writing,

Katherine

PS — I’m running a very small group coaching program for writers that have a full first draft (or a big chunk of one) and want help with structure, plotting and character. It’s a short-term reset for long-haul projects — more info here.