A weekend for writers at Camp Wapomeo

By Glen Hancock



All of our counties bask in the beauty of autumn and none flaunts its splendours more than in Yarmouth County.

Richly studded with lakes (curiously, not disarranged by hydro development as in Kings and Hants counties because the water has no hills to run down) and currently sporting its autumnal carpet of colour in which wildlife roams abundantly.

Geographical names, like Kemptville, Brazil Lake, Ohio, Brooklyn, Tusket and Deerfield appear on road signs as one drives through the environs of Yarmouth. They are names that most Nova Scotians have heard of only once or twice.

It was my good fortune recently to be invited to attend a workshop for writers at the YMCA camp - Camp Wapomeo - on Lake Fanning. It is located just beyond Hebron and Caledonia.

Though maintained in the typical Camp Grenada style, it has an international clientele; young people from far away places coming to summer sessions and organizations renting the facilities from time to time for conferences and seminars.

Lake Fanning is about the size of spring-fed Sunken Lake, atop the south mountain in Kings County. But it does not have the clutter of cottages around the shoreline. Sizable small-mouth bass abound in the lake and in the early morning loons glide gracefully on its glassy surface, emitting their spellbinding call.

I was reminded of many happy Boy Scout summer camps at Sunken Lake when I was a boy. There were only two private cottages on the lake at the time, one a log cabin owned by Scoutmaster Brown, on the site of which now stands Ken Long’s palatial log house.

Camp Wapomeo also recalled a similar YMCA camp located at Big Cove in Pictou County, where I was a counsellor in 1939. Lloyd Shaw, the brickman, was camp chief. Among the boys were such as Jack Gray, who would become famous as a marine artist; Ben Prince, a prominent Halifax businessman now retired, and two of the Sobey boys, sons of Frank Sobey, who operated a small grocery store in Stellarton and supplied the camp with vittles.

Although basically spartan, as most summer camps are, Camp Wapomeo has all of the essentials. It is a cluster of cabins, a dining pavilion, a recreation centre with a gargantuan stone fireplace, and a leaders’ lodge. Some of the units are supported on an annual basis by businesses and corporations.

Most of the workshop participants were billeted in the lodge, which accommodated the ladies and me. Understandably, the two washrooms in the facility had door signs reading: “Women!� However, there was an ablution hut not far away for the males, usually young males who didn’t shave, for there wasn’t a mirror in the entire wash-house. I used an old-fashioned razor and in the circumstances my resourcefulness was tested.

Having discovered a mirror embedded in the sun-screen of my car, I drove the vehicle as close as possible to the door of the hut. The sinks had hot and cold running water, but no sink plugs. I have always carried an assortment of sink plugs to meet such occasions, but none of them fit. My procedure was to lather my face and run out to the car for a few strokes against the bristles, then back to the sink to re-lather. By this time the water had drained from the sink, in which the taps were spring controlled and shut off when I removed my hand. But I managed.

Incidentally, the other man in the group, who occupied a cabin, was Fred Vaughan, a Nova Scotian who taught at the University of Guelph and retired to Northwest Cove on the South Shore. He is a relative of the late lamented Charlie Vaughan, the mayor of Halifax who put grass on the Commons. Fred wants to learn how to write a novel.

Most of the participants in workshops of this kind are women. A few of them are professionals, but most show up to learn how to write and sell what they write, to learn how to create characters and dialogue, how to plot stories and develop style, how to create suspense, and how to develop an effective language.

Almost entirely the emphasis is on fiction - short stories, novels and poetry. Few seem to be interested in non-fiction, facts, not imaginings, the hard intellectual core of working literature, designed to inform readers about the rise and fall of civilization.

Again, most have no special interest in becoming professional writers, but they like to hobnob with others who do. Of course, there are always a few who have a novel already in their head - all they have to do is write it!

The presenters on this occasion, people like Gwen Davies, Judy Ferron, Thea Atkinson and Sandra Phinney, a rising star among Nova Scotia writers, were good in what they had to do.

I frequently participate in writing workshops, and in the beginning tell my audience to learn the rules, “then you can break them.� Further, old-timers like myself are glad to know that there are people who like, for whatever reason, to just write well.

We live in an age of communication, where laptops, e-mail and cellphones tie people to an unending flood of announcements, disclosures and amusements. Quality in communication tends to suffer. We have lost the flair.

People used to keep diaries and write down their thoughts and observations in journals. Literature has benefitted from this. Sadly, we don’t write letters anymore. Observers in the future will miss the elegance of the written word, when they come to write down what the people of the 21st Century were thinking.