When I was in high school, a young feminist and budding songwriter, I came across a tiny text ad at the back of Ms. Magazine. It said (probably in its entirety) “study songwriting with Holly Near” and gave an address in West Virginia. This was before the internet, so I dutifully mailed a query to the address and received in the mail a catalog for the Augusta Heritage Arts Workshop – a summer long series of one-week music and folk arts camps for adults. I’m not even sure how I persuaded either the organization or my parents to permit me to enroll for Vocal Week, which was the week at which Holly Near was teaching. But I managed to make my way to Elkins, West Virginia, where I had my first experience with music camp. The songwriting class with Holly wasn’t even the most amazing thing about that week. I met John McCutcheon and Paul Reisler (and maybe Si Kahn) and another camper then twice my age who I’m still periodically in touch with many decades later. I was immersed in music for a week with many other people for whom there was no better way to spend a week of summer vacation. The next summer John and Si (and maybe Holly too?) were teaching at a similar camp at the Omega institute in upstate NY, and I figured out how to get myself there. (That, I believe, was the summer in which Pat Humphries wrote the iconic song “Keep on Walking Forward” in a Si Kahn workshop.). I went to the Omega folk week two different summers. Those were transformative weeks, but I didn’t think about music camp again until what must have been 2002 or 2003, when I somehow came across WUMB’s Summer Acoustic Music Week (SAMW) and signed up for it, not knowing a single person who was going. (How I’d managed to listen to WUMB for years and not be usefully aware of its music camp is a mystery to me, but in the early years I couldn’t have afforded it, and that was during the period when I only played music for myself in my own home.) SAMW was a revelation. I brought a mandolin and started learning to play. I was too intimidated to take Bob Franke’s songwriting class, but I learned about it (so when I was less intimated later that year I could take a 2-day version of it in Cambridge). I lived and breathed music for a week, again. And made a bunch of friends, many of who have remained friends. And part of what happened at SAMW was that, in your camp info folder, was a form for signing up for the end-of-week student showcase. Performance? I used to do that, but hadn’t done it in a decade. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was part of music camp. But, being the dutiful student I was, I signed up. And decided to drag out a song I’d written for John McCutcheon in one of those first years of music camp when I was still in high school. I remember, at Omega I think, he taught a clogging workshop. There were other musicians to play the music for the clogging, and he’d exclaimed with delight “This is great! I usually have to play the music at dances; I rarely get to dance!” So I wrote the song Fiddle Player (which is on my 2nd CD) about a fiddle player who calls dances, who the song narrator is asking to dance. I played it at SAMW that first year, backed by John Kirk, a fiddle player who sometimes calls dances. That was my first entry this stage of my life, performing my own music in public. Without SAMW I doubt I would have re-started songwriting or performing. It was also there that I got to know Pete and Maura Kennedy, who gave my performance career (and my confidence) a huge boost when they heard my song No Toll In Canaan. They backed me in the student concert playing that song that year, and then invited me, during their performances at the Strawberry Park Folk Festival and the Boston Folk Festival that fall, to join them on the mainstage and play it, while backing me. I spent a number of years since going to SAMW, but I haven’t been back for the last couple years. There are a variety of reasons, some of which relate to timing and other obligations or opportunities. But it’s also true that my music goals are less aligned with SAMW at this point in time; I want to be pushed musically during my time at camp. SAMW did that for me for a number of years, but I’ve learned a lot of what I needed to learn there. So this year (tomorrow!) I’m heading to Rocky Mountain Song School. I know people who have gone before and who sing its praises. Its focus is songwriting – although there are other electives as well, it is filled with people who are songwriters and pretty serious about it. I’m ready for a new music camp. It may not be quite as big a plunge as when I crossed four states (at age 16 or 17) for my very first music camp, but it still feels like a pretty big deal to fly across the country for a new adventure. Updates to come, I’m sure.