Feeling the Love: A Post Wally Camp Dispatch

I got home from Wally Camp on Saturday with the worst lower back pain I’ve experienced in some time. I mean, up until this morning I could barely put on my own damn socks. Partly the result of sleeping in the dorm at Macalester College on a mattress that felt like it had rocks inside of it, but also sitting for longer periods of time than I am used to in classes, three meals a day, during readings, and half way naked in front of a box fan I had on my desk in the dorm, a quick respite from 95 degree days and what seemed like 95% humidity. I mean, there was time to exercise: I walked from building to building from event to event, I walked into the business district close by on the outskirts of St. Paul to get a few things at Whole Foods or the liquor store, and even though I shouldn’t have, because my back was starting to really bug me, on the last night of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers Alumni Conference, I danced like a fiend. The plane ride home was torturous, and after my wife picked me up from the airport and got me home, I could barely get out of the car.

Despite the pain (which has decreased significantly, thanks for asking), the afterglow of the conference was strong in this one. I have in my life a few happy places: doing an activity I love, drumming, writing and recording music, writing fiction and poetry; being with friends on social occasions; years of participating in and facilitating Courage and Renewal work; magical moments as a teacher in the classroom; but almost NOTHING rivals the feeling I have at Wally Camp, an annual alumni conference for poets and fiction writers and memoirists who all graduated from the same MFA writing program some time within the last 50 years. I have attended this conference almost every year since I heard about its existence, about five or six years after I graduated from the program, somewhere in the early 2000s. I missed a few after my son was born and I missed maybe one virtual conference during the pandemic, but that’s it. It’s possible (I’ve lost track) that I have attended about twenty of these babies.

I won’t try to describe the experience for folks who are not “Wallies” outside of a few very broad strokes: over the course of a full week, we teach each other classes, we hold workshops to get thoughtful insights and feedback on our own work, we write together, we listen to each other read from our fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, we eat meals together, we hang out evenings on “the porch,” and we dance.

Even on the few occasions when I have coordinated the conference, which is some amount of work, I have difficulties thinking about a single moment in all of those years of experience when I have not felt deeply, exceedingly, almost stupidly happy, and lucky to be a part of this community. And there’s the crux of the biscuit: this word community. I have felt a strong sense of community in a few different places, sometimes in a school, among a small group of close friends, in tight-knit musical groups, in Courage and Renewal work (among virtual strangers), but NOWHERE do I feel it as keenly as I do with my Warren Wilson MFA alumni and particularly at Wally Camp. There is a mutual interest, care, encouragement, support, openness, intellectual and spiritual camaraderie, and, dare I say it, love, which exists for me in no other large community. There is a secret, magical sauce that defies explanation. Our emcee for this year’s readings, Miss Terri Ford, Glory of the Continent, spoke about it in her introductions to poets and fiction writers and memoirists alike, this feeling of falling or being in love with our fellow campers, not in a creepy way, but in a deep, abiding, platonic way (mostly). It’s hard to get over. I’m still feeling it, will continue to feel it and will long for its return next summer.

I’m not sure why, but when I got home, I was inspired, even with the back pain (which is worse moving from a sitting to a standing position, and tolerable when I remain upright or bending over carefully), to organize my most prized possessions: my record collection and my books. Adding two more storage boxes to my stereo room enabled me to totally reconfigure my records, and moving a ton of inherited family photo albums into storage (into the scary room), allowed me space on the shelves to alphabetize and integrate straggling books into the collection. While I was at it, I spent special and careful attention to books written by Wallies, graduates of the Warren Wilson MFA program, most if not all of whom have attended conferences. I lovingly dedicated a series of shelves just for them, made sure they were in the right alphabetical order, and flagged ones I wanted to read but hadn’t gotten to yet. What an enormous pleasure it is to place a hundred books back on the shelves written by human beings that I identify as friends. I couldn’t do the same with musicians. I couldn’t. It speaks volumes to the unique quality and intimacy of this group of writers, from a broad age group, geographically all over the country and some outside, some of whom were in the program together, most of whom were not. There may be hundreds if not thousands of writers in my own home town who could potentially make a community–but that has never occurred for me. This one, this community of Warren Wilson MFA graduates, has been the most consistent, faithful, and sustaining one that I have ever known. All year and until next summer, I’ll still be feeling the love.