Finding Waywords

Official blog of the Wayfinder Experience, a fantasy adventure summer camp for kids and teens based in Upstate New York. We run day and overnight LARPing camps throughout the summer, and weekend events during the school year. If you have questions or content for the blog, drop us a line!

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A Day In The Life

Staff Week

This summer the blog is featuring a new series called A Day In The Life, with stories and pictures of all the fun things going on at camp. There may even be character drawings and stories from our participants! We’ve got camp running until the end of August, so there’s a lot to look forward to as we go through the summer.

This last week we ran our annual Staff Week, a time for us to reconnect as a staff pool, fostering the communal spirit that is so key to what we do at camp day to day. We do this through a good deal of the same exercises that we run at camp. For Staff Week this year our focus was on the intentional creation of communal space, the staff and their own enjoyment of our programming (trying to reignite the feeling that we all clung to as campers), and as always ensuring that our staff is fully trained and ready to go into the summer’s programming. We ran an advanced version of the programming that we run at our regular camps, featuring everything from trust to capture the flag. Camp wouldn’t be camp without an Adventure Game. This year we played a Game written by the illustrious Chase Spearance. The Game centered around a fairy tale world with staff taking on the roles of woodland creatures trying to reconcile their relationship with a fairy queen after they had accidentally killed a member of the royal family. As with any camp, Staff Week both filled us with joy and left us ready for the next experience, excited for the coming opportunities to share our programming with the community at large. 

Coming up next week we’ve got camps at the Woodstock Day School and the Unison Arts Center. Check back here for updates on the games we play and the incredible things our participants are getting up to in them.

Written by Judson Easten Packard 

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Seeing the World with Kyle Perler

This week’s entry into the Where Are They Now series is centered on Kyle Perler. While Kyle is another creative type who came through Wayfinder, he works in a field where the connection to the work we do may seem a little less direct. Kyle runs his own photography business. While his introduction to the world of photography came through his family, Kyle still credits Wayfinder (or Adventure Game Theatre where Kyle, much like Wayfinder, started his experience with LARP) with a lot of skills he uses on a day to day basis. “I have a career where I am often standing in front of dozens of strangers who want to be doing other things, and I have to make them do what I tell them to by loudly, clearly, and confidently asserting myself. That is something that I never would have been able to do had I not been given the preparation and courage, and also the ability to focus on the role I’m in. I wouldn’t have been able to do that without Wayfinder.” The career Kyle is talking about is the photography business he runs where he works for the city of Boston, the state of Massachusetts, and fortune 500 companies. He has also published two books. As has been clear in every one of these features, Wayfinder gives people the confidence they need to succeed in their respective fields. It can provide more than confidence though.

In his time working at Wayfinder Kyle only worked in production departments. “I just really enjoyed that sort of spatial layout and giving people a thing to work with while they were in these different worlds and universes.” This work is integral to what we do at camp. We couldn’t have our adventures without our production departments. Much like Kyle said, they provide us with the immersion that is required to allow us to create that other world and space we play in. You certainly can roleplay without that kind of backdrop but doing so on such a large scale requires adding some degree of uniformity to the experience. Kyle has found another use for that skill. “I will walk into situations, and I have to find the best backdrop, the best this, or the best that, and it’s about bringing items together, and creating scenes in just a minute or two. Doing all of the scene work, all of the sets and props stuff at Wayfinder really helped me.” Often the work we do at Wayfinder can seem a little disconnected from the rest of our lives. Kyle was really able to highlight the ways in which we directly impact the lives of our staff members going forward professionally as well as personally.

That is not to say that Kyle wasn’t impacted personally or tried to claim that he wasn’t. Quite the contrary. Kyle started coming to camp at 15 because his dad was living on the property Adventure Game Theatre was running camps on. “I was introduced to AGT as being a theatre camp where you stood on stage all day and did improv stuff in front of a lot of people and there was a guy named Shaggy, and I was told I had to go. So being a very, very shy 15 year old I did everything possible to get out of it. My mom told me that I didn’t have a choice. She had to shoot 50 weddings that summer, and I had to go to theatre camp. I immediately realized that it was explained to me in the worst possible way and I fell in love with all of it.” As evidenced here Wayfinder can be hard to describe to people who haven’t seen it or its effects firsthand. I have heard us described as a theatre camp, a theatre gaming camp, live action Dungeons and Dragons, and (my personal favorite) dressing up like a fairy and running around in the woods. And much like with Kyle, our staff often were reluctant to attend something explained in that fashion, but never disappointed by their experience at camp. Past his introduction to camp, Kyle had nothing short of incredible things to say about Wayfinder. He said the following in comparing his other summer camp experiences with his experiences at LARP camp. “The other camp was fun and sort of like a very pretty, serene spot that had everything from horseback riding to crafts, but it did not have any impact or take away, whereas I couldn’t imagine the person I would be without Wayfinder. I would probably not be in the same career. I would not be living in the city or the state or the town that I’m living in. I would not know the people I know. The impact level is really just night and day as to which helped mold me.” Thanks, Kyle. We’re honored to have been a part of that process and look forward to whatever projects are coming next for you. Also we’d love to have you “running around as a wizard” if you can find the time to get away.

Closing Remarks:

The Wayfinder/AGT experience was just totally life changing. It really has not only crafted me into the adult I am today as far as how I know the world, how confident I am, how willing I am to approach new situations and say yes to things even if I’m afraid to do it, or even if it’s not going to go the way I want it to. Being ready to approach a new situation is something that is ingrained in who I am, and it is that way because of this camp. Not only that, but I am still so close to the community because of the bond that it builds with people. I have one friend from that previous camp, and I wouldn’t have reconnected with her if we hadn’t gone to the same school together. So far this year I have interacted with, spent time with, and seen about ten people that I went to AGT with because it really is a community. Because of the bonds that are created, and the environment that it’s in, and the people that it attracts, they really are people that stick with you and become part of your life, and they don’t just fade out when summer ends.

Written by Judson Easton Packard from an interview with Kyle in 2016

Published 6/27/17

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The Hero Fund

        At Wayfinder we believe in the work that we do. Giving children and teenagers a safe, playful place to explore their identity is important, and we’ve dedicated a lot of years to making sure we’re able to provide that. Every teenager needs a space outside of school and their family to explore who they are and who they’re becoming. Not every teenager comes from a family or situation that can afford to send them to summer camp to provide that kind of experience. That’s where the Hero Fund comes in. Often Hero Fund applicants come from economically disadvantaged families, families where one or more parents are undergoing serious medical treatment, or has recently lost a job. Wayfinder is the place where these young people feel most comfortable and open; particularly in moments of familial unrest like these need that space. Wayfinder has always strived to help people in need of financial assistance since it’s inception, however for the past three years we’ve been asking our community to help us with that goal.

         In 2014 Wayfinder started the Hero Fund, our scholarship program. The Hero Fund is funded through donations, and money made from our Frontier Adventures that we run throughout the off-season, and in the end (being a company based around community) Wayfinder often operates at a loss to help get everyone we can to camp. Donations generally come from community members who feel that camp is an important space to them, and extended community members, such as parents, who have seen the benefits of our programs. One of the largest donating demographics are our staff pool, with 16 different staff members having personally donated to the fund, making the work we do at Wayfinder a priority for them. Staff have donated paychecks at the end of events, donated after they were no longer able to be involved in camp, or just donated when they could afford to (the best present that I got when I graduated from college was a Hero Fund donation).

          While the money coming in from people who are already involved is important, Wayfinder is currently at a need for donations. Over the past three years we are proud to say that the Hero Fund has been able to give over $15,000 in assistance to participants in need. We are so thankful to the community for having provided this much for our members who need that extra help. For this coming summer, we have requests for almost $8,000 in Hero Fund funds. Money is allocated based upon the amount that our participants are able to pay to be at camp and the amount of money we’ve had donated and raised throughout the year. We do everything we can with the donation money to provide a space for as many people as possible. We also take the privacy of our applicants very seriously, and never share even the fact that someone has asked for assistance with the community at large.

         We’re calling on our community to help us raise this money with the summer fast approaching. The Hero Fund supplies campers with access to a space that meets a certain kind of need in their lives, one that can be particularly hard to meet. Wayfinder as a community and an organization offers people acceptance. At the age at which people start coming to camp this may be something they have never experienced before. Countless participants  have talked to me about the ways in which Wayfinder has saved their lives (and a couple of weeks ago I wrote about how it had done that for me on this very blog). So often kids come to camp shy or nervous, only the leave by the end of the week glowing. I could never possibly list the number of parents who have told me that Wayfinder was the time they’re child was happiest. This summer we’d like to offer that to as many participants as possible, some of them need a little help to get there. Please help us be the difference in those children’s lives.

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Living Through Stories with Nick Marini

        For this week’s Where Are They Now we had the chance to sit down with Wayfinder alumnus Nick Marini who is now living in Los Angeles and working as actor (and a tutor “in order to survive”). Nick has been in a number of independent films, some plays, and was featured on the NBC show Chicago Med. The connection between acting and roleplaying is a fairly clear in a lot of regards, “the obvious one, we did a lot of improv exercises, a lot of status exercises which are literally exercises I’ve done in acting classes that we are just doing as part of our fun LARP camp.” He also found some connections between the work that went a little bit deeper. “The best thing that Wayfinder gave me is the confidence to be another character. I think one of the problems that many actors have is that they’re trying to act. They’re trying to pretend to be someone else, and when we played a Game I wasn’t Nick Marini pretending to be Jace the warlock. I was Jace the warlock, and I believed it, and I got to explore characters in far more totality than you do when you’re acting because then you’re only playing them in their most dynamic moments, but what’s so fun about Wayfinder is the times when you’re still Jace the warlock but you’re just waiting for someone in the woods.” Having that ability to take on a person completely is a pretty clear advantage in the world of acting.

        While Nick talked a lot about the ways in which Wayfinder has helped him in regards to playing characters he has been cast as, he also went into the ways it has helped him in landing those roles. “There’s an absolute silliness in like running around being a merman. I had an audition where I had to play someone who was glitching, and I wasn’t afraid to do something that seemed silly or seemed totally random.”  That kind of playful spirit is something that Wayfinder encourages (and something that Nick has always embodied with ease). The intersection between play and work (particularly work in a creative field) is something that we think about a lot at Wayfinder, and it’s something that Nick clearly picked up on. “What I learned about at Wayfinder was just that it’s ok, there’s no shame in playing, and there’s no shame in getting to explore a character as fully as you can, and also because you’re playing all these Games you get really good at improv, you also get an understanding of story. We played a lot of kind of archetypal Games and so I feel like having been parts of stories, it helps you tell them and see what really affects people.” The lessons that we teach (and learn) in Game and throughout the week are such a big part of the work that we do.

Summer 2008, Color Shock      

         Really important to that work and the educational aspects of camp are the ways that it is always immersed in play. “There’s a beauty to learning things when you don’t think you’re being taught, and I learned so much at Wayfinder without ever feeling like I was being taught something. You’re learning great life lessons in the guise of just running around with foam swords, and I love that.” Almost every game we play at camp, from the Adventure Game to games we play in the morning as warm ups, has at least one lesson embedded in it. Nick has some experience on both sides of that coin as his entire tenure within the Wayfinder staff pool was as a play teacher (despite repeatedly applying to work in a production department). For the people who come to our camp they are given a kind of experience you can’t get anywhere else. For Nick, his big game moment came in a Game in Philadelphia. “The coolest thing to do is to be a knight fighting dragons, and then there’s a dragon across the field, and I was a knight. It was a childhood dream coming true in front of my eyes.” The fact that during that kind of wish fulfillment there were also lessons about how to build confidence, about how to interact, and about the way a story functions speaks to the kind of work that Wayfinder does.

        “I think the thing that unifies kind of everything I love is storytelling and to get to be part of the story, whether it’s a story about role-playing or fighting, was so thrilling to me, and then the community, I think it was really the community for me. Once I found this group of people I was like ‘Yes, these are my people.’” With the idea of being a part of the story you are telling it’s not hard to see how Nick made the move from Wayfinder and role-playing to acting. He brings a kind of play and hard work that we were lucky to have and dearly miss. Thanks so much, Nick, for being a part of our blog series.

 Summer 2011, Nick as play staff running CTF

Closing remarks:

“The most interesting thing about Wayfinder, to me at least, was the difference between kids in an out of Game because you’d have kids who out of Game are shy and don’t understand social constructs, not that all social constructs are great, but they’d just have trouble navigating social situations. In life you're told to you listen to your teachers and you don’t talk back, there’s no real reason, you’re kind of just told to, but in an Adventure Game if you talk back to the king, you’re going to be killed. There’s just more defined things that are said out loud, so it’s interesting when you watch these kids who were kind of shy and didn’t know how to express themselves suddenly find this new power, and because they are not themselves and these situations are not situations they’re used to, suddenly this whole world opens up for them. You see them just being more confident, not shying away from certain things, and being more eloquent. It’s just amazing. It’s like a placebo. It was amazing to watch some of these kids grow in confidence and become comfortable with who they are, knowing that it’s enough. That’s what I love about Wayfinder, it was such a diverse community, and I appreciated that there was very little meanness, mostly support and that really allowed people to flourish.”

Written by Judson Easton Packard I from an interview with Nick in 2016. 

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Transformation

         While there has been a lot of discussion of “creating space” on this blog (and generally is at any Wayfinder event), little focus has been given to what kind of space Wayfinder is to begin with. It may seem kind of strange to try and diagnose a space which has no connection to a specific location (our office and storage facility notwithstanding, there is no one place which contains the Wayfinder Experience), but for the purpose of discussion space refers to whatever space we occupy together as a community and not the land itself. Wayfinder exists as a transformational space. The nature of this movement, combined with the variable make up of community members (both staff and participants) at any event, and the type of personal, introspective work we do allows transformations from community members to go unquestioned.

        Transformational spaces are necessary and often produced accidentally. Wayfinder has something special in that we conscientiously produce this space. The transformation aspect of camp would be present whether or not Wayfinder was a LARP space. Bringing together people of the ages of our participants (8-16) and staff pool (16+) is guaranteed to include transformation. At those ages people are spending time crafting who they will be as adults, with different levels of awareness. Wayfinder gives a space to try on different personalities and social roles, both through everyday interaction and creating characters with which we play out pieces of ourselves we may not get a chance to any other time. People come to Wayfinder as they are forming personalities, choosing the directions they want to take their lives, and needing space to process things they cannot in their everyday lives. We offer a space that can contain all of these types of transformations.

      I would remiss to write about transformation and not give some time over in the discussion to the LARP aspect of our camp. Each week participants are offered at least one roleplay experience in which they can be essentially whoever and whatever they want to be. There are some constraints put on the characters (players may be told they’re from a specific place or given some other game world conditions) but within those players can explore whatever aspects of themselves that they wish. If you want to play a character who is fearful or talkative or anything in between it’s entirely up to you. Exploring these roles gives us a chance  to see ways we could be in our everyday lives, if we chose to do so. A couple weeks ago Max Friedlich talked about going into some business situations and just treating them as if they were roleplay events. I know I have applied some of the rules of status or improv that we teach and applied them to social situations. You get to be whoever you want to be in life. Wayfinder simply offers you a place to craft that personality and reflect on it.

        Constructing an identity is a difficult and endless process. You will never stop changing, no matter how old you get, so we must all be aware of the pieces of ourselves that are new and different at any particular time. Through being at Wayfinder, roleplaying and doing trust work, we can see a lot about who we are. While the work that we do gives a chance for you to explore every facet of self and personality, that is not all that is required in the process of forming a self. The reflection that we give space for is maybe more important. Space is made each week for discussion of self, something that you do not often find places to do. Within the community there are people you can trust both to hear about your struggles and offer feedback should you be looking for it. Knowing that other people in that space are going through that same process is one of the ways you know you can trust them with yours.

        That kind of shared transformation is so often the basis of our relationships. People become friends as they start new jobs, at new schools, or in new places. Having some new shared discomfort allows for people to be on an even playing ground. No matter how long you’ve been at Wayfinder you are given a chance for this kind of shared transformation every week. We turn the land into whatever world we will be playing in for that week, and we turn ourselves into whatever characters we have constructed throughout the week. Any space that we create only exists for a week at a time, but the transformations we undergo can last a lifetime.

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Saviors

         For this week’s blog, I want to get a little more personal than I feel I have in previous entries. Obviously, anything about camp is something highly personal to me, but I’ve made an effort not to focus on myself or my experiences in these posts. Something Tigre said in his interview struck a chord in me though. I asked him about what he had taken from camp in his personal life, outside of professional skills he’d honed, and he said that Wayfinder had saved his life. I think you’ll find a lot of long term community members who think this, myself included. I’d say that Wayfinder has saved me on no less than two occasions, that I would not be here today if I had not had camp. Even if I had survived adolescence and the hardships I’ve had since (which I highly doubt I would have) the person I’d be would be unrecognizable from the person I am.

           The first time camp saved my life was right when I started attending. I was 13. Wayfinder was recommended to my mother by my therapist. Some friends who were also clients of his had been going and had given it rave reviews. He figured it might be good for me. I was struggling in school (because I wasn’t trying). I didn’t have very many friends. At least once a year I got into a fight that always came with an in-school suspension. I had, for some time, loudly been proclaiming that I wished I was dead. Naturally my parents were at a loss for what to do. My parents split when I was young, and they both worked, so some kind of summer supervision was a necessity. Wayfinder was the latest in a string of summer camps. That first summer was a turning point in my life. I went to two weeks of camp, three weeks apart from each other, and I fell in love. That fall I started attending Woodstock Day School (switching from Rondout Valley) and got the chance to reinvent myself in my daily life, which I jumped on. I don’t think the school change would have mattered much had I not started coming to camp. Wayfinder showed me a place where I wouldn’t be forced to pretend to be someone else and people would be excited to see me. Camp showed me it was all right to be me. If I’d never been shown that, it wouldn’t have been much longer until I believed the people who followed me around in classrooms heiling Hitler, spent recesses circled around me saying whatever it took to get me angry, or just jumping right into hitting me. The first time I was saved was when Wayfinder showed me that there was more to the world than the people who haunted my daily life.

          The second time I was saved was in 2016. Being a staff member for so long has been incredibly important to me. I’ve had the chance to create space for kids and give back the pieces of my childhood that I treasured so much. In the process I shifted my thinking about camp. It no longer seemed like a place which could contain my struggles. I thought that as a staff member the only thing it had to offer me was the satisfaction of giving that space to our participants. I couldn’t have been more wrong. When I was 16 years old I was sexually assaulted by a good friend. I didn’t start processing it until I was 25 (in 2015). My path back to emotional stability has been long and will probably never be over, but Wayfinder gave me an opportunity to take a step forward in a way I didn’t believe was possible. The summer of 2015 was lonely. I told maybe two or three people at camp about my assault. I didn’t want it to become the focus of anything we were doing. I was minimizing the space that it took up. The effect was that I felt isolated and uncomfortable in one of the few spaces I had ever felt at home. At the last event I worked at our final staff meeting I told everyone that I was an assault survivor, the first time I ever made that kind of a public admission. Last year I set my summer up around being at staff week turning down a position at the Kansas State Young Writer’s Workshop (a program I had been involved in for 2 years). I couldn’t stand to feel that distant from everyone at camp for another summer. Staff Week’s trust workshop was planned almost entirely around creating a space for sharing trauma and hardship. The love that I received in that circle reminded me of the feeling Wayfinder had given me the first time around. That it’s all right to be me, even if that means being hurt.

          Wayfinder provides opportunities for acceptance, healing, and self-exploration. Very few places are able to offer all three, we manage to do so while focusing on building an adventure together. It’s a community of people who are all invested in the process for each other. Ask almost anyone why they come and I’d bet they tell you for the community. I know that I was built into the person I am today by having that space available to me. Wayfinder saved my life, twice. Thank you for the chance (and help along the way) to remake myself.

Written by Judson Packard 

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Transcending Reality with Tigre Bailando

           The path from Wayfinder to the work our alumni do in their respective creative fields can often be an easy one to see. The connections between the work we do at camp and the work someone does writing, acting, or making art are all fairly clear. What is not always clear, but is incredibly important to remember, is that that path is not always an easy one to walk. Camp hopefully helps to prepare you for the difficulties you’ll find as you push forward, but just keeping in mind that you are worth it and have to keep pushing forward is something Tigre stressed heavily and wanted to make sure was in view with his story. He moved out to Oakland from Philadelphia six years ago. “I was teaching, and I was working as a barista, and I was in Philly kind of doing art, being creative but not really finding a flow and kind of stumbling through stuff. Then I moved out to California, and big part of moving was ‘I want to focus my life around making art, and I want to really do this and I don’t know how it’s going to go.’” After a number of years of struggle, having “different hustles” ranging from selling jewelry on the side of the street to working in cafés, Tigre has been able to find some success as a sculptor creating installations for festivals all over the world (enough success that he’s been able to leave behind the other hustles). “It was like this seems to be happening, and when I was doing other stuff it felt like I was wasting my time. When I was in the café washing dishes I was like ‘what am I doing, like I was just on the other side of the world making this huge art piece and seeing people respond to it really powerfully’, and eventually I was like ‘I’m just going to make art and live off that and see what happens and the first year was really tenuous and hard.’”

          None of this is intended to frighten any aspiring artists or to lessen Tigre’s successes (like constructing one of the main stages for the Envision festival four times now!) but as previously stated, he wanted to make sure it was included in the image we presented of him. That he has gotten to a place through a mix of talent, hard work, and a willingness to give his life over to his craft. “We create stories, right? That’s what human beings do. We take the complicated messiness of the world, and we shape it into a story with whatever we want to talk about. We simplify it in however we are focusing in that moment. So it’s common to have this mythology that if you have a lot of talent and passion eventually you’ll just get it, and actually it’s really hard, it’s really scary, and it involves a lot of trust.” The work that Tigre has put in really shows through. He’s always been an incredibly talented artist. We were lucky enough to have him in our sets and props and costuming departments (and workshop; anyone who ever got to be in a workshop run by Tigre was in for a treat) and some of the things he created are still marveled at today. Maybe even looked at with a little bit of jealousy or envy, something natural when encountering talent in your own field. “For myself that’s something I really struggle with. I see somebody else, and they’re so successful and so talented, and  I’m like ‘if I can’t get there that must be a flaw of my own.’ The system is so set up against us to succeed in any really soulful, meaningful way. It’s possible, but it’s hard, and I think it’s helpful to know that everybody goes through that stuff. It’s a long, treacherous adventure, you know?”

        Currently Tigre is working on an installation for Burning Man called the Solacii. “Conceptually it’s somewhere between ghosts, like ancestral ghosts, aliens, and angels. They are the other, but there’s also this connection. They are of us, but they are not of us. For whatever reasons they have watched us, observed us, and are deeply empathetic to our condition so they feel all of it. The entire breadth of human experience is something they connect to.” The idea of this kind of other comes from Tigre’s personal mythology, having an approach to spirituality that he partially credits to the ability to explore the ideas of religion and mythology in adventure games. The installation will be a 21’ tall being “jutting out of a barren landscape.” The goals are twofold. First to give people a feeling of hope and perspective contained in the idea that there is something out there watching all of us and staying with us no matter how dark things get. Second to hold space for people to feel all of the insanity of the world. The being itself will contain a space which people can enter into and have a moment out of the desert. The project is currently being funded through a crowdfunding campaign on hatchfund, a link to which can be found below. The project requires donations that go past financial, if that’s not something people are currently able to provide. The being will be wrapped in a garment that Tigre is making out of donated clothing. “Everything is witness to our stories, the shirt that you wear, the spaces that contain us. The objects that surround us or we surround ourselves with, they carry those stories. So for me to have this garment made of all these garments of other humans is like carrying those stories. By the nature of it bearing witness it is a holder of all those stories, so it’s wrapping itself in that and welcoming you.” The information on where to send items of clothing can be found on the hatchfund page as well.

       The work that Tigre is doing now has me as much in awe as the work I watched him do when I was a child. He freely admits that it is all closely related, “I used to build sets in the woods out of fabric and sticks, and now I build sets in the woods out of fabric and sticks.” While that may describe the work itself, Tigre is fully aware of what he is really doing in both instances, and that’s creating worlds for people to explore and escape into. “When you have these moments where everyone has agreed to share these imaginary constructs, and you have moments where that becomes real, where we really are teleporting elves that are stopping demons, that is a transcendental experience. We have transcended the normal shared imaginary construct to go into this other shared imaginary construct, and that is in essence the goal of what I do now.”

        Tigre, thank you so much for everything you did for Wayfinder as a whole, and for me while I was growing up. Good luck with the Solacii project, and whatever you decide to do next. Whenever you find a time when you are able to come back to camp, know that you’ll be more than welcome.

Closing Remarks:

“I wouldn’t say it was the only thing but camp was a significant component in saving my life. I was a suicidal teenager and the community that I developed there- even it’s impact in the first summer. I went to two camps, two sessions my first summer. One was in the beginning, and then I couldn’t go because I had summer school, and then I went to an advanced camp at the end of the summer, but the way that changed my life and my perspective on what I could be absolutely saved my life. It has left an indelible mark on my life.”

https://www.hatchfund.org/project/the_solacii http://thesolacii.com/

Written by Judson Easton 

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Finding Confidence With Max Friedlich

         For this week’s entry into our Where Are They Now series I had the opportunity to talk with Max Friedlich, yet another creative type who credits Wayfinder as the place for the majority of his development. Max is a playwright, after his play Sleepover was put on at the Fringe Festival, in NYC, he signed with United Talent Agency and has had his work produced at various colleges (including Northwestern and Ithaca), and by some theater companies. He is graduating from Wesleyan and headed out west to pursue a career writing for television. For Max a lot of the help that Wayfinder has given him in his career and life is less about the specific skills of playwriting and more about the way he carries himself into situations, particularly because he often finds himself as the youngest one in the room. “I went to Wayfinder like a supremely not confident person and left there with a lot of confidence, and I think I just that ability to make the decision that I’m going to present, I’m going to roleplay someone who has it together.” That kind of confidence carries a lot of weight in the world, and is something we all struggle with so to hear from Max (both a close friend and former SIT of mine) that we were able to give him a space to develop that was a moment of pride.

          The difference in Max’s development at camp being restricted to more development of self than development of skills may have to do with the timing of Max’s departure from camp. He stopped coming when he was 17 years old, right when he started to find success in the world of playwriting. He worked in our workshop departments as a staff in training, and while he may not have hung around long enough to run his own department (something he would have crushed) he still points to this as being a “big thing in life,” going on to say “the experience of becoming an SIT and going from a time where staff were these godly celebrity figures to being friends with them kind of taught me that people aren’t scary. All these crazy, macho dudes with tattoos and piercings are just dorky sweethearts. It helps me navigate to this day.” Being able to remember this about the people he’d looked up to as a kid has helped Max in professional settings, being able to see anyone sitting on the other side of the table as their person and not their job title helps to pull some of the intimidation factor which they may hold.

        As with so many other alumni of Wayfinder, camp holds a special place in his heart. “For whatever it’s worth any time I have a project I thank Wayfinder. Even though I’m five or six years removed every time I think about things that have been formative to me and things that I have been incredible indebted to I always think about Wayfinder. It’s really stuck with me.” Camp is built around that kind of shared experience and exploration of self. Roleplaying is nothing if not an introspective act, having a space to do all of that together is something that most people never get so it makes sense that it holds that space for so many of us, but still thanks, Max. It’s always good to be reminded of the effect we have on the people who occupy space within this community.

         As for other growth that came about because of camp, while it may fall into the same type of growth that has served him professionally, the recognition of people for who they are combined with the expansion of personal confidence is something Max returned to often throughout our interview. “Someone actually said this at a closing circle, ‘you can just decide to be brave, it’s that easy.’ Deciding to be brave and pretending to be brave, there’s such a thin line because at Wayfinder you’re in character and ostensibly pretending, but you’re also making that decision.” The ability to recognize that in yourself and turn it on is an incredibly useful thing to have command over, in an unending number of situations. To learn that as a teenager is huge because you face down so many new situations every day which are much easier if you have the confidence and knowledge to “decide to be brave.”

       Max had some very heartwarming things to say about Wayfinder. “It always felt like it really did feel like a community or a tribe just in that people had different statuses, but I could become you or be friends with you. You know, I had relationships with staff and SITs, that’s not every other camp. I remember being acutely aware from a young age that you guys did not make good money and that it was more than a job. It was so cool, working with people who were my heroes.” Having been in that group of heroes (I’m not assuming here, he told me) I can say that I’m honored to have had the chance to be a part of helping Max grow up and have treasured the chance to be his friend. Thanks so much for being a part of our community, Max, come home any time you like.

Closing remarks:

There was a summer when my grandma was dying, and I hadn’t seen my parents in a long time,  I was signed up for consecutive weeks of camp. So I would just keep going to camp, and I don’t think I was really processing what was going on. Shelby was my wife in a game. [The Game] had something to do with angels and selling your soul, I found out that demons had Shelby, had my wife, and then a bunch of bad guys showed up. I ended up being chased [by one of my the bad guys] to the top field, and there was something just so crazy and spiritual. It was just two of us. It’s always weird, I think, at Wayfinder when you find yourself in the woods, and it’s just one person you kind of know having those interactions which are some of the craziest ones. So we’re just both running, and he kills me, and I was lying in the field, and he walks away, and I just started hysterically crying. In my head I was thinking about Shelby as my wife, I was so in it, but it was a real kind of cathartic release, and it was the first time I was able to really cry about losing my grandma, and that’s pretty wild to have a place that gives teenage boys the avenue to express their emotion by being upset that a demon has taken their wife. You know what I mean? It was just such a circuitous route to what I needed but it really was therapeutic.

Written by Judson Easton Packard from an interview with Max from Summer 2016. 

[wayfinderexperience]

Where are They Now?  Molly Ostertag

Molly was a joy to interview. She moved from upstate New York to LA just over a year ago, where she is a full time cartoonist and an animator for Disney. She draws a bi-weekly web comic called Strong Female Protagonist (http://strongfemaleprotagonist.com, Book 2 Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1009893331/strong-female-protagonist-book-two) with another Wayfinder alum (Brennan Lee Mulligan), has a book deal with Scholastic (look for ‘The Witch Boy’ Oct. 31st 2017), and graduated from SVA as valedictorian. At camp Molly worked in many departments, most notably Sets & Props, wrote a number of awesome Adventure Games and was an all around rock-star.

WFE: “How old were you when you first attended?”

M: “I was 14, but I had heard about it before then. It sounded like the most amazing thing. A place where you got to act out fantasy stories. I pictured it taking place in a castle. I thought it was too cool to be real.”

WFE: “What did you enjoy most as a camper; what are some early experiences?”

M: “I was drawn in by the Adventure Games. I went into it a super shy and locked away kid, but by the end of the weekend I was hugging everybody and was so thrilled to have that [part of me] unlocked. What I grew to love was the community and making friends with the people I was roleplaying with. The Games became an expression of this loving community, rather than the reason I was there.”

WFE: “What was a challenge for you at camp, but no longer is?”

M: “It was challenging at times being around so many people. I'm very happy to have had boundaries pushed [at camp] in terms of what I'm conformable with because it made me a more adaptable person, and am able to talk to many types of different people. I would be more shy without camp.”

WFE: When you were working as a staff member, what were your favorite parts?

M: “Making the worlds. Each Adventure Game was an inspiring and artistic challenge. I learned a lot of lessons I still use today. I really liked taking spaces that the campers were in all week and transforming them to an unfamiliar spaces. They [the campers] know they were going into the dining hall but once they entered it wouldn't be the dining hall anymore. When I was a kid my favorite part was to feel like I had left earth, so it was very fun to do that of other people”

WFE: What are some lessons from Wayfinder you use in everyday life; or other ways Wafinder is still with you?  

M: “The book I sold to Scholastic is like a love letter to camp. It's about teens running around in the woods casting magic and discovering themselves.  My artistic choices are informed by camp and Status Workshops really help in my professional life. I learned how to be a more confident person. Learning how to present oneself [is important.] You learn how to don a character who is more confident than you are.”

WFE: Have you ever tried other summer camps?

M: “I went to a classic girls camp, it was fun the first year [less so the next]. But at Wayfinder people go far out of their way to make you feel comfortable. Wayfinder has this tradition of respect that made it a really safe space. Also there is nowhere else I could play the warrior queen. Wayfinder is different than most LARPs. Everyone is focusing on telling a story together with emphasis on immersion. I was surprised how deep [the Game experience] went for me. It was easy to buy into being in the fantasy world. I really felt the feelings [of my character], I felt like someone else.”

WFE: Any final thoughts you'd like to share?

M: “The whole camp was like a trust fall. When I started I was a soft, emotion, shy teen who wanted to be stronger and didn't know how. It was important to have a space that was supportive but push me out of comfort zone; but where I knew I would be caught if fell.”

Check out: http://www.mollyostertag.com/

Written by Trine Boode-Petersen from an interview with Molly in summer 2016. 

[wayfinderexperience]

Always Coming Back Home To You

Immersion Camp, 2016. Closing Circle. 

           In all of the Where Are They Now interviews the interviewees (members of our community who have been away from the physical space of camp for some time now) have brought up an important facet of the Wayfinder community. The idea that you can leave camp for any amount of time, and you will always be welcomed back in. The way I have always pictured it is to see camp and our community within that physical space (even though we’re not always at the same location the physical space when the community comes together for an event) as a circle. No matter how long you step away from that circle, we will always have a spot for you to return to. There is no guarantee that you will come back to see the same faces as when you left, and more than likely there will be more new ones than familiar ones. I can promise though that you will be welcomed with the same warmth, the same love that you had when you left.

              It helps this idea (both the circle I picture in my head, and the reality of returning to camp) that we put a lot of practice into doing this. At the start of every camp, and then again each morning, we open with a circle. During this time everyone is invited to share how they are feeling, what new experiences they have had since the last circle they were a part of, whether it has been hours or years since they held that space. An exercise I’ve always loved in our circles is when we take a silent moment, look around the circle person by person, and smile at every face that we see. It doesn’t matter who they are or how well you know them, every face you come across is returning that feeling to you.

  HVSS Day camp, 2016. A game of Human Knot.       

        Due to the setup of our community around a summer camp, there is always going to be some change in the people who are attending. People’s lives move forward. They go to college. They get jobs. They move on to whatever the world holds next for them. Spending summers at camp you get used to the rotating nature of the people around you. Every time someone new comes to camp it’s a chance to bring someone new into the fold. It’s always exciting to see what they bring into the space with them. New games. New ideas. There’s also, almost guaranteed, to be a friend who has been long absent. Someone who wasn’t able to be at camp for whatever reasons, or you two just haven’t been at the same weeks. Every camp is a chance to reenter these friendships. The function of being a summer camp means that the majority of the people at camp will not see each other maybe nine months out of the year. The friendships we have suspend in time, they tie to the space we hold at camp. It’s why it’s so easy for us to come and go in each other’s lives, to maintain relevance, as Marika put it so well a few weeks ago. We have grown use to coming home to each other.

         It can be hard to understand making your home in other people. The idea of home we are always sold probably attaches to a specific structure or town. My home is Wayfinder. It has been since I was 13 years old and came to my first camp. Since then I’ve spent time with Wayfinder at upwards of twenty different lands and locations. No matter where we go, no matter what difficulties that land possesses (everything from giant mosquitos to non-potable water) I know I will be home. Home is the place where you can be yourself, whatever the most honest version of that looks like. Camp is a place where not only are we encouraged to be our real selves, we take time to work on that piece. I talked a couple weeks ago about how characters help us build ourselves so I don’t need to go deeply into it again here, but feeling at home in that space is a big portion of being able to do that work.

Finale Camp 2015, Bardic Circle. 

        I’ve lived in six states and three time zones. I’ve told myself more springs than I’d like to admit that the coming summer would be my last one at camp, that it was time for me to grow up and move on to a new home. In 2014 I didn’t go to camp for the first time since I started in 2003. The year that followed was one of the hardest, most isolated of my life. There were a lot of external strains that led to this throughout the year as well, but I would be lying if I didn’t notice the weight of not getting to come home to camp and be me. Not having the time to put my stress aside and sit in a circle and fall asleep in the grass when I’m probably not supposed to (OK I’m definitely not supposed to and am probably supposed to be running the circle). Camp is my home. Who knows how long we get to call any one particular place home?  If you get the chance to, come back. We miss you.

Written by Judson Easton Packard. 

[wayfinderexperience]

Life Lessons with Brennan Lee Mulligan

Picture of Brennan working at Woodstock Day School, many years ago. 

          This week’s Where Are They Now features another Wayfinder alum who finds themselves immersed in a creative life in the world. We sat down with Brennan Lee Mulligan to discuss the ins and outs of his life, and the ways in which Wayfinder had helped him get where he is. Brennan is making his living in not one, but two creative fields, both of which he gives a portion of the credit for his successes over to the Wayfinder Experience. “I’m doing sort of exactly the things that Wayfinder trained me to do: writing stories about made up fantastical stuff and then doing improv, and playing make believe.” To get more specific his day to day employment comes from the Upright Citizen’s Brigade where he teaches and performs improv and sketch comedy. Then a more long-term personal project of his, he has teamed with Molly Ostertag (a fellow Wayfinder community member) to write Strong Female Protagonist, a webcomic which has one print compendium published to date.

While the connection between improvisational theatre and camp are clear (because we teach improv workshops as a way to prep for game, and all of the interactions that come through the adventure game are improvised) the approach at camp is notably different. Improv as a performance style in the world is largely something that is done as a style of comedy, something Brennan excels at. Camp is a little different. “Where I come from is not doing improv for laughs, but rather the idea of roleplaying for its own sake, which is so healthy. Most of what I do on stage is just LARPing anyway, and it’s really gratifying that basis of years and years spent playing make believe for that being the end in and of itself.” While he may enjoy roleplaying just for roleplaying sake (and there’s no doubt you’d be hardpressed to find someone who throws themselves more into the fantasy of the adventure game than Brennan) it’s no surprise to see that he has gone on to shine in a world of comedy and performance, having always had a talent for the two.

Brennan on set for “Fallen for You.” Link to Web series below.

          He spent a lot of his time as a staff member engaged in teaching and performing improv, but he also was one of our main story writers for a long time, something that he credits very directly as helping him in his writing of SFP. “Just the experience of writing all those games, just getting really good at making up fake worlds, and really taking them seriously is an incredibly valuable skill.” If you haven’t read SFP (https://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/) you really should take some time and do so. Brennan and Molly are a truly talented team, and their worldbuilding experience really shines through. “I don’t know places that really do worldbuilding as thoroughly as Wayfinder does worldbuilding.” Firstly, thanks (blushing over here). But more seriously, we spend a lot of time each week going through the processes of worldbuilding. There is our storywriter who has spent the time and created a world for all of us to play in, but as we go through the steps of character development pieces of that world are going to change or spring into existence. The adventure game is collaborative, and as participants put together their character they are really building small portions of that world. By the time you get old enough to write and run a game of your own, you’ve already lived in countless worlds.

           That experience specifically is the one that Brennan still holds onto as the most important piece of camp for him. “It opens this gateway where you can totally suspend your disbelief, and then you get into that world, and I think it’s really crucial that there’s not an audience. It’s not performance, it’s everybody getting lost in their own character, and you’re looking around and everyone’s in it together. It’s this huge experience that everyone can come, and take part in to tell this incredible story, and just for a few hours really put yourself in someone else’s shoes.” We talk a lot about how Adventure Gaming is an exploration of self, about how it allows you to find pieces of yourself you may not have known existed. While that’s true, Brennan also brings up a hugely important portion of the experience. In searching those pieces of yourself you get the chance to find similarities and understanding with people whose experiences and lives may be completely foreign to you. You are given a space to look at what makes a person or a culture or a world the way it is, and with that experience there’s no way not to gain a little bit of understanding.

 Brennan in performance at The UCB Theater in NYC. 

        Brennan is someone we were lucky to have at camp as long as we did. He contributed in ways we still benefit from. Him and his brother started Bootleg Adventures, which is still operating, now under the name Living Legends. They were the first branch of Wayfinder to break 100 participants at a single event. He also brought a lot of understanding of what we do at camp. Every staff member has an understanding of the ways that camp helped them to grow. Brennan has that, but also as a very articulate person and a practiced performer and public speaker, he brings an ability to sum things up that you don’t often find in the world. “There’s a lesson there, the lesson you take from that when you start to get older. You not guaranteed opportunities, so when opportunity presents itself in Game and in life you must strike with all you’ve got. It’s much better to find yourself all used up at the end having made a significant difference, rather than to get to the end of the Game and find you never helped.” Thank you, Mr. Mulligan, for your contributions to the community over the years. I can personally say you’ve been an important friend and role model for me in the years I’ve known you. Excited to see what comes next for you.

Closing Remarks:

“If only for a few hours the veil between our world and a completely fantastical world is opened up. I feel the best aspects of humanity come from a completely heightened sense of empathy, exploration, and understanding. We’re at our best when we’re doing those things, and I don’t think anything make you more empathetic than when you get to fall into a created world and truly be somebody else for four hours. I mean the most incredible moments of my life have been at Wayfinder when I was someone else and forgot myself for a moment, and when that happens I think it makes you a better person. And I mean that in every sense. It makes you a better more understanding person on a moral level, and it also makes you faster, and stronger, and smarter, and more interesting. It’s good morally, and it’s also just good holistically for you as a person.” 

Fallen for You: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP6Yy61OvLU

Written from an interview with Brennan by Judson Easton Packard 

[wayfinderexperience]

Trust in Adventure Gaming

Photo by Matthew Wright. With Jay from Immersion Camp 2015. 

         Obviously deep, intensely emotional, trusting relationships exist outside of LARP communities. The point here isn’t to claim that Wayfinder has some unique ability to provide participants with trust or friends or anything like that. The idea is more this: trust, like the realest kinds of trust, are formed through having intense experiences together. Through the Adventure Game we get the chance to simulate a lot of those intense experiences. I have lived one thousand lives in my time at Wayfinder, and the more invested I have been in each one the more I have grown from it. No piece of any character comes from anywhere but inside ourselves. This is something that comes up time and again. It takes an incredible amount of trust in a person, a group of people, or even a whole community to go deep into that, to explore those pieces of ourselves that we normally keep hidden or ignore altogether.

         A couple weeks ago I promised to do a series of posts based exploring different types of trust that are directly relevant to Wayfinder and then promptly got sidetracked. I’m returning for the second of that series now. This week’s focus is trust and how it intersects with the Adventure game. It’s a complex relationship. There are a lot of factors of trust required just in setting up the Game. You have the most basic elements, for example trusting that people will play by the rules (reacting to swords and magic) and trusting that people will respect you as a player (building scenes with you and reacting to/building off your offers). There are also some much more complex trust relationships that go into the Game. There is A LOT of physical trust required in playing with a group of people. You are trusting people to chase you/fight with you (often in the dark or in the woods) in a safe and fun way. This kind of trust can be a challenge, but it’s something we work at all week long. The more contact based elements are things that trust workshops are specifically geared towards building to; whereas the elements based upon the rules are a trust that we work at in our game systems based workshops throughout the week (and here you thought CTF was just for fun).

Photo by Matthew Wright. Finale 2015. 

          There’s another important element to the relationship between trust and Game that is something we don’t go into quite as much. That is the fact that despite how much we put into building those relationships with each other before Game, like the actual interpersonal ones between our real selves, there is nothing that brings us together quite like an Adventure Game. Once you’ve stood next to someone on a battlefield, cried over their corpse, or literally died to save them there is a different kind of closeness between you. The trust established through having an intense in Game experience together is one that I have never found in any other setting. It’s hard to approach. You both (or all if there were more people involved in the scene/situation) know that something very real happened between you in the Game. Immediately after a Game that has one of those moments there is always a need to find each other, to talk about what happened, share the other side of the experience, or how that moment effected the rest of each player’s Game. But it doesn’t stop there. There are friends of mine I’ve had for years who we still think back to some of those moments as our most intimate, when our friendships moved from close to unbreakable.

 Photo by Matthew Wright, with Judson and Corinne. Immersion Camp 2016.             

           During a Winter Game at the Ashokan Field Campus (a Game that I wasn’t particularly emotionally invested in prior to this moment) where my friend (and in Game mother) cried over my dead body until someone brought me back to life. From that moment the two of us held each other and cried in a room full of people who were holding us prisoner (don’t feel too bad, up until then we’d been some of the main bad guys). I’ve never been much of a public crier. It’ll happen, a tear here and there at an intense community circle or trust workshop, but this was loud, ugly crying. Sobbing on a hardwood floor in a room full of people who I was legally responsible for. It’s a moment I remember whenever I’m having a hard time processing my emotions, particularly in reference to other people. I was able to lean on the community in a way that I wouldn’t normally, to allow for an emotionally intense in Game moment because I trusted them to contain it within the Game understanding that my emotion was a function of character not mental state, and also to lower my guard and enter that place of trust because of the way that an Adventure Game is set up. The closeness that is brought about in those kinds of scenes, even if it is an unspoken kind, is one of the most important factors in binding ourselves together.

Written by Judson Easton Packard. 

[wayfinderexperience]

Finding a Home with Jenna Bergstraesser

Being structured around an adventure game Wayfinder naturally provides skills that lend themselves to a wide variety of creative pursuits. In the last Where Are They Now feature we looked at Marika McCoola who had taken her experience and become a writer, and spoke very eloquently about how her time at Wayfinder helped form her as an author. Our focus this week is Jenna Bergstraesser, another very successful creative type who we have been lucky enough to have as a participant, staff member, and community member. These days Jenna works for Disney at Disneyland as a Design Illustrator in their costume department. While some of the connections may seem immediately clear to anyone who has been around the Wayfinder Experience (it’s the costumes for anyone who hasn’t), Jenna highlighted some connections that were a little less so.

In addressing the obvious connection, just in describing her day to day job Jenna reached immediately for it. “I feel like Wayfinder all my life was preparing me for specifically the Disney job because every day we’re working on princesses and pirates and superheroes. It’s like Advanced Camp every day work. What other company has all those things? You switch into all these different creative worlds.” The work even seemed so reminiscent of working for Wayfinder that she went on to describe it as “the official corporate version.” We’re still a far cry from being able to field the types of productions that Disneyland is putting on, but we’re happy to know that we were able to help prepare Jenna for those aspects of her work. (Also anyone she ever costumed at camp can say they have the same costumer as Disney princesses so that’s definitely a perk).

In the realm of slightly less obvious connections she pointed to the process of getting the job itself, which involved first working an internship in their costuming department, and then pitching herself to a room of Disney Parks and Resorts executives. “It’s all theater. Communication skills are so easy because you can just drop into that persona of ‘I am in charge’ at any time.” The communication skills and persona she credits her advantages in that meeting and her fast-paced work environment to are things she points to her experience as staff as having taught her, “having to talk to large groups of people about yourself, or something that is important to you, or even conveying a message to people, that alone has really helped.” While those are definitely things that any staff member is going to have to do in the course of their daily job, they are also things that it is impossible for a participant to avoid. So much of our workshops revolve around participants as performers in front of the whole group or just for each other. Anyone who has spent time around camp would happily extol the virtues of improv as a method for public speaking and interviewing.

She also pointed to some more personal growth at camp throughout the years. Calling it one of her “two moral backbones” (the other being Harry Potter) and asking a question I’ve heard posed by any number of our community members throughout the years, myself included. “What would I even be without Wayfinder?” While she didn’t have an answer for that question she had some pretty good ideas on exactly how camp had helped her get to where she is as a person. “You have this internal knowledge that the community follows you wherever you are so that even if you’re not in it anymore, you know that you were able to be all those people, and I feel that you understand other people more.” Playing with characters in any kind of theater setting is a good way to discover things about yourself. Getting the chance to do it in that kind of special communal setting that we have at Wayfinder, where everyone else is going through those same transformative motions and is going to process it together, gives a chance for some very active reflection on what we’re doing and who we are. “I have always had this knowledge that I am who I am, and Wayfinder is definitely something that helped me manifest that.” There’s really no higher praise that we could ask for. We were lucky to have Jenna at camp for the years that we did so knowing that she still holds us in high regard and at least partially responsible for her becoming the person she has is something we are beyond thankful to hear.

Also having some distance from the community and camp itself Jenna offered some perspective on the ability to come and go as needed that’s been discussed so much at camp (and some on this blog). “Even if there were different people there or if it was a different location it felt like the same sacred space. So it was always really cool to come back because you always had that same sense of community. You knew you’d always be welcome back in.” That’s a theme echoed by our participants, staff, and community at large. Thanks for gracing us with your presence Jenna. We can’t wait to welcome you back in again next time you’re able to come by, even if it’s just for a visit.

Closing Remarks:

“As much as camp is an emotional time, and I feel like a lot of people when they finish are like ‘oh no, what am I going to do without it?’ it does prepare you for real life. You kind of have this talisman, and throughout camp you’re kind of building the talisman can creating your emotional connection to it, and when you’re leaving you get a little protective and paranoid but then eventually you realize it is always going to be there, and whether you need to come back to camp to charge it, or just have it always be there with you, you realize it always is.”

Check out Jenna’s Art. 

Written by Judson Easton Packard from an interview with Jenna. 

[wayfinderexperience]

The Benefits of Friendship

Photo by Matthew Wright, Summer 2016. 

Community is a funny thing. We talk about the Wayfinder community as if it was a living entity when really it’s a web of interpersonal relationships and a kind of commitment you make to people you have not met yet, but who have occupied space in that same circle that you do. We talk a lot about how that circle functions. How it welcomes new people with arms open. How it manages to hold the same type of space though never being made up of the exact same group of people. How your spot in it is always there for you, no matter how long you step away from it. Something else we talk about a little less often, is how our circle stretches out into the world past camp. The friendship that we form at camp, those individual strands of the community, are some of the strongest you will ever find in life.

Marika touched on something important about those relationships in her interview. She talked about how for people from camp out in the world “our lives still have relevance to each other.” This is not an easy type of relationship to find. With most of the people you meet in the world, once your shared experience or location is over with it goes the closer portions of your friendship. Obviously this isn’t always the case, and I’m not trying to say you can’t form lasting friendships outside of camp. I’m looking to highlight the amazing ability Wayfinder has built over the years to create generation of generation of real lasting friendships. We so often refer to ourselves as a tribe, and this is exactly what that has always meant to me. So many of the people who I grew up loving and trusting from camp are out in the world now, without time or ability to come back to Wayfinder. That doesn’t change the fact that tomorrow I could drop in on just about any of them and pick up our friendship right where we left off.

Photo by Matthew Wright, Summer 2016. 

While it’s not the only thing we work on, or even the focus of much of what we do, the relationships built between Wayfinder’s participants are a crucial part of every single workshop we go through at camp. (Maybe the point is the friends we made along the way?) Game is a huge piece of this. After a game where you spend a lot of time playing with someone you don’t know that well, there is going to be a kind of closeness between you that wasn’t there before. That special kind of closeness that comes from shared experience. (If you can face down literal demons with someone friendship can’t be much harder, right?) The only feeling I have found similar to it is in people I have worked with, but those relationships are usually missing the other pieces we do at camp. The active work on trust and mindfulness in relationships.

Sitting in trust workshops together goes further than we realize in doing this interpersonal work for us. It establishes a baseline of trust that you just don’t get to have with people in very many situations. Often in trust we share some of our most personal discomforts, whether those be in the form of forging physical trust through touch or emotional trust by sharing a hardship we have been through. Being able to look at someone you intend to build a friendship with and see someone who already knows these things about you, who already seen some of the bits of yourself you try to keep from the world, and knowing that they want to become better friends with you regardless of (sometimes even because of) these pieces is a kind of relationship it is almost impossible to find, and certainly rare to find such a safe space to do it in.

With these rare elements added into our friendships from the start it seems only natural that the friendships we build hold relevance. The work we do at camp is to define ourselves as people. Playing in adventure games gives you the chance to explore different sides of yourself, to try on different personalities and ways of being and decide which you like best. Doing trust workshops gives you a chance to find that you can share the things that you have been through and find people who love you and hold no judgment of those things. Improv gives you a chance to have fun and embrace that ridiculous joyful kind of funny that comes when you just go for it. These are the things that people search desperately for in relationships throughout their lives. They are also things that people at Wayfinder give themselves over to with ease. Treasure the friendships you have been given, nurture that relevance, and keep as many of those people in your life as long as you can.

Photo by Matt Wright, Summer 2016. 

--Written by Judson Easton Packard. 

[wayfinderexperience]

Building Worlds with Marika McCoola

Picture from Marika’s website. Self Portrait: digitally altered photograph of clay, wire, paint, embroidery thread, and ink on paper.  ©2014 Marika McCoola

Wayfinder has always lived in the written words of its community members. Any world we create and explore starts with someone hunched over a computer, furiously typing histories into existence. It seems natural then that Wayfinder have so many community members with a literary streak to them. We had the chance to sit down with Marika McCoola, whose book Baba Yaga’s Assistant was a New York Times bestseller and Eisner award nominee, and talk about the experiences she had at Wayfinder and the ways those have helped to form her as a teacher, a writer, an illustrator, and most importantly a person.

Camp offers a diverse field of experiences, all of which have creative elements attached to them. To explore a fantastical world we have to do everything from write the background of that world to actually building the physical aspects of it, not to mention teaching everyone to create and live in full characters for the duration of the adventure game. Marika was one of our rare staff members who has the talents and the knowledge to work in any of our departments. “Working with people to create a story is what I do. It’s interesting I ended up going into graphic novels because you describe the scenery and what’s going on, which is the production part, and then the game systems part which is figuring out what your world looks like, because I write contemporary fantasy pretty much exclusively, and doing all that building. Then in terms of characters I use all of that improv. You’re writing in different character’s voices so how do you take on each character and write them?” Having grown up at Adventure Game Theater, the camp that eventually spawned the Wayfinder experience which Marika was also a very active member of, all of these skills were at that point second nature to her.

Marika and Innis working on the stain, Finale Camp 2006. 

Being around for years and years of camp and adventure games it can be hard to pin point favorite moments or games out of all of them. One of the things that stood out most for Marika was a prop she designed and built. A stained glass window, which we still use in games today. “When everybody saw that for the first time all lit up at night, that totally made it. You can still kind of separate yourself as a creator and as the character you’re playing, and to see people react to that, and to make it magical for them was really exciting, which I suppose makes total sense because I’m a writer now, and I make worlds for other people to inhabit.” That magic she talked about, the look of wonder you see on players’ faces, is something she has truly been able to capture into her writing. The worlds which she builds are fantastical, and it is clear there is an understanding of what magic looks like in the real world behind the work that goes into to creating those written worlds. She clearly points to experiences at Wayfinder as putting up the scaffolding for a lot of that work, and we were lucky to have her building that kind of magic for us. Like I said that stained glass window is still in use, and never fails to produce a look of awe and wonder from players seeing it for the first time.

While she isn’t participating in any LARPs anymore she is very aware of the effect that it has had on her life. “It was an extremely important phase. That’s what Molly Ostertag and I talk about a lot, she’s also a cartoonist and writer. What we do is so much influenced by that so it’s a very special piece that we don’t want to write about because it’s this preserved lovely thing.” So while you might not see Wayfinder directly showing up in either Marika or Molly’s books, both of them published authors of graphic novels, it is very clear that having camp and the space to explore themselves and other worlds was hugely influential on their lives and their work. Camp is, underneath everything else, a creative space. You get a chance to be surrounded by people who, even if they don’t produce any other creative works in their lives, are engaged in the process of creating a world, creating a storyline. “We were able to create space and it helped us realize things about ourselves at this very difficult age when you are all over the place. It allows you to explore different facets of yourself and that’s really really important.” That work never stops, neither does the joy or graciousness it produces. Like with every community member you could ask about camp, Marika’s face lit up to talk about Wayfinder and the time she spent there. There is nothing better than knowing we are providing space, and have provided space, to people who go out and do good work in the world, and remember Wayfinder as a piece of what brought them to that work. We were blessed to have Marika at camp as long as we did, and still blessed to have her as a member of the community.

Stained-glass right before being set up for game.  

Closing Remarks:

“How we lead up to the game is important in how camp does it versus other LARPs in that it’s really about the opportunity to explore a facet of yourself in a character that you don’t get to explore in regular life. So there’s the freedom to do that in a safe space in a way that you can then reflect upon and learn something from, and I think that’s really nice to be given that space to do that. There’s also something really nice about having a community and having a camp that’s truly about community, cooperative play, and creating together rather than having battles against each other (though we do that as well), but it’s all about creating an experience for everybody and I think that’s extremely important, and it results in long lasting friendships.”

Make sure to check out Marika’s website: http://www.marikamccoola.com/

--Written by Judson Easton Packard I from an interview with Marika McCoola. 

*This post is part of our "where are they now?" series where we talk to staff and campers who are up to awesome things out in the world.  

[wayfinderexperience]

Communal Trust

There are a lot of words that get thrown around (both at camp and outside of it) until they become so called buzzwords and lose any semblance of meaning. Some of them particularly pertain to Wayfinder. Community. Trust. Fairy Realm. OK, that last one still means a whole lot, but the other two can be a little hazy. In the weeks where we’re not looking at what members of our community are up to nowadays, and how they’ve taken the lessons of camp and put some of those to work for them in their daily lives, this space will be used (among other things) to talk about some of the deeper ideals that might not always get the in depth attention they deserve. I’m going to start with trust. It’s going to take me more than one entry to fully unpack trust, what it is, and what it means to camp, particularly because the word can be used in so many ways to mean so many things, but for the purposes of this post, I’m going to be talking about communal trust, the kind of trust that stretches past any one relationship in a group and is given over to the everyone who occupies that space. It’s a kind of trust that we’re always building, even when we may not be aware of it.

Communal trust is a little different than the trust we are used to talking about. Usually we talk about trust as it exists on a person to person basis. Communal trust is something much bigger, something we’re much less likely to deal with in our everyday lives, primarily because you need to be rooted in a community in order to build is. Wayfinder is exactly that. To be clear I have a pretty exact idea of what my community looks like. When I imagine Wayfinder community I think of the faces of people I started meeting when I was 13 years old. The people who taught me how to live in that space, who I put so much work into forming myself after. It also includes the faces of 7 year olds whose parents snuck them into one of our day camps, changing a birthday on their form to make sure they can get into “that cool camp with the swords.” And every single face that I picture is someone that I trust. Not necessarily here are the keys to my car trust, but definitely I am comfortable being me in front of you and going to a fantastical world with you trust. It’s not that common of a thing to have an amorphous group of people (it’s hard to say who will be at any event seeing as that is reliant upon both hiring and the schedule of our dear participants) who you trust completely with yourself. Given that amorphous nature the collection of faces around the circle at any two camps is never going to be the same.

Even so we have groups of people who come sit in these circles, with people they might have just met, people they may never see again, and share their realest selves with no hesitation. Even if we don’t talk about it as much, or dedicate workshops to it, that kind of trust is still carefully crafted. It’s the basis on which we build pretty much everything else. A lot of different pieces of what we do go into building that but the frame of each day is a good place to start examining it. We open every day (whether at day camps or overnights) with a circle. Everyone sits down together and gets a chance to share about how they are feeling, to ask questions, to bring up concerns. People own up to mistakes and make apologies. They hand out appreciations. At the beginning and end of every week we have a circle where people get the chance to talk about what the experience means to them, to take a second to appreciate exactly what we do together at camp. It also comes in the form of the adventure game. Every time you play a game you end up playing roles with people you don’t expect to, having intensely emotional experiences in character with people you may have never had those with in real life. The fact is that no matter who you end up playing with you know that everyone will be playing their hardest. Everyone will go to those places with you. Wayfinder brings a place where you can show up and know that no matter who is at camp that particular week, you’re going to get people who are there bringing openness and acceptance. You’re going to get people there who come prepared to play, who are ready to match your intensity at every turn. If nothing else, you’re going to find people there who you can trust. Every. Last. One of them.

Written by Judson Easton Packard I. 

[wayfinderexperience]

Paying Attention to the Women Behind the Curtain

--Picture 2016, Woman in Business Honoree photo shoot with Michael Polito.

When you think Wayfinder a specific image probably comes to mind. Something involving a group of children dressed in tunics carrying foam weapons and sporting names like “Shadow” or “Everheart.” (Everheart being the name of my next character.) If you’ve been to our camp, or if you’ve talked to (or more likely raised) one of our participants you probably also associate a certain look for joy with the whole atmosphere. Sit in on any circle and you’re guaranteed to find that look. Easy smile. Shining eyes. Relaxed posture. Those moments are a big part of what keeps everyone coming back to the camp, regardless of their role in it. The kids come because they love it, because there’s nowhere else that offers the mix of fantasy adventures and friendship that Wayfinder has brought to the Hudson Valley. The staff come because they’ve been doing it forever, because the people there are their community, and they want to give back that experience to the next generation of participants. What keeps our overlords (Read the company’s Directors Corinne McDonald and Trine Boode-Petersen) in that place of joy?

They’re very clear on why they took things over from the original owners of the company, a group of 30 odd friends who started it back in 2001. There was a call for someone to step up and run things, Corrie and Trine rose to the occasion, if they had not the camp would have stopped running in 2012.  The two of them offered similar sentiments on what drove their decision. “Trine and I have been working camp consistently for so many years the idea of not going to Woodstock Day School and running camp with the kids, and seeing eight year olds get in the first time when they’ve been waiting for years to play, and not having overnight, where our participants have a chance to be unashamed in their power and be completely themselves and really seen, was just heartbreaking.” The work of building both a space for that kind of play and that kind of empowerment are central to the joy that permeates the community. While Corrie had provided a view on why they did what they initially did, Trine was able to voice what pushed them moving forward. “We knew campers who needed that safe space, and we didn’t know where else they’d find it. It was a responsibility to our community to keep that available to them.” The calling was clear, and they have risen to that task.

--Picture form Nov. 2012, the meeting where Trine & Corrie knew they had to step up. 

Moving forward the challenges they have been presented with are some that often plague the small business owner, but with a particularly poignant twist. The balance of business and personal in a passionate workplace can be a hard one to maintain. For a company like Wayfinder, where the business is strictly personal, it is nigh on impossible to avoid those kinds of struggles. In Trine’s words: “This is fifty percent business and fifty percent community, and we’re always trying to balance what’s good for the community and what’s good for the business.” Both were certain on what ends up winning that struggle. When I asked, the resounding answer was community. While the struggle continues on in everyday business decisions, Trine shed some light on how they have found a way to mitigate some of the difficulty. “The more we envision what our end goal is, the easier it is to make business and community decisions line up. The more we work to one common end goal of good, the easier that is.” And Wayfinder has that end goal. While looking to maintain the communal air and quality of programming, Wayfinder is searching for a permanent home in the form of land. Land where we can build permanent installations and both house our equipment and run our programming.

Another challenge they have faced is the shifting of roles. Going from being someone on site, particularly in the camp director role which both Trine and Corrie often found themselves in, to someone in more of an administrative role comes with some hardships. For one you are removed from that kind of hands on time with the kids and staff, and two,  moved to a drier (often literally), more bland environment. The work itself also loses some of the sense of urgency. On site work at camp is a lot of putting out fires and dealing with concerns within time constraints. The work in front of our overlords now is stretched over a significantly longer span. Moving into that kind of role can make someone feel out of place when they return to camp time. While they both say they’ve found comfort in the role, Corrie said it was difficult in the first year or so. “I found myself looking around for an adult, and you realize that you are that adult, so you look around for a more adult adult, somebody who is adulting better, and that just didn’t exist.” Personally there is no one other than Corrie and Trine I would rather have as the most adult adults around.

Closing Remarks:

Corinne McDonald:

Running Wayfinder has never been just about this community, and making sure this community maintains itself, or making a successful business. It has been about a change that will transform the world. It’s not just a summer camp, and it’s not just this community, the goal is to make incredibly empowered and conscientious people who will go out and change the world in a positive way, and that I think is why we’re doing it. It’s that that keeps me sane in the current climate, knowing that I am creating generations of passionate people who are working for a better world makes it worth it for me.

--Picture 2016, Corrie LARPing at camp this passed summer. 

Trine  Boode-Petersen:

Having [Wayfinder] be a thing that transforms people into better people who are more compassionate, better community members, and people who advocate for what’s right. That’s what’s in my heart. I think the whole world will just be better if people take more time to play. Playing doesn’t mean you aren’t a serious person that takes things seriously, it means you are able to relax, enjoy the moment, enjoy the world you’re in, have fun with what you’re doing, and approach things in a creative and playful manner while still doing something new. I think a lot of the things people create in the world would be improved if they had a playful outlook on it.

--Picture of Trine LARPing at Wayfinder summer camp in 2012.

Post written by Judson Easton Packard I.