For those students who want to pursue writing as a career, and even as a summertime hobby, there are local opportunities to learn from professionals, other than their English teachers.

The Young Writer’s Camp at Sheridan College’s Spear-O-Wigwam Mountain Campus will be held on July 27 to August 2. The camp costs $300 to attend and includes food.

“This camp will be a great opportunity for young writers,” says Christine Fadden, one of the instructors who has had her writing, both fiction and nonfiction, published in several literary print and online magazines.

“I speak from experience, because I attended a writer’s camp when I was in the fifth grade and it gave me a very special kind of validation– it showed me that  creative writing is a worthy and necessary pursuit,” said Fadden, “Some of us burn early on with a desire to express ourselves through the written word, and it helps to find people with a similar way of working their way through the world. Writing is liberating and it tests you in ways you never imagined it could. When you write, you grow– no matter who you are or where you have come from.”

Micah Wyatt, another of the three instructors at this summer’s camp says, “I didn’t find out until I was in my in my mid-twenties that artists and writers need other people like them to hang out with… you need some aspect of your social life to include that.”

All three of this year’s camp instructors have attended in former years of the same camp, and all three enjoyed it thoroughly.

“When I was in high school and going to the Young Writer’s Camp I had that [social ambience] and I didn’t even know it… the camp provides a really close, comfortable, trusting atmosphere for people who maybe don’t even know if they want to write but just want to try [it] out…” says Wyatt. “I was definitely one of the abstract children in high school… I didn’t fit in with any one group,” says Kara Bacon. “Just going to writer’s camp, I was able to find a group of kids that were so much like me but so extremely different at the same time that we meshed really well together… that’s what it’s really about…  being able to hang out with people who are similarly minded but being able to explore yourself as an individual at the same time.”

The group can be contacted by email through the Sheridan College or their Facebook page “Young Writer’s Camp Wyoming.”