Sleepaway

Margaret Atwood tells of a girl swallowed up by the woods and lost forever. Mark Oppenheimer experiences leftist utopia in a Quaker "nature camp." David Sedaris avoids having a bowel movement for a month. Z. Z. Packer introduces us to the Brownies from the A.M.E. Church who have taken a vow to kick the asses of every girl in Troop 909. Dan Zanes tells how communal camp singing changed his life. And Steven Rinehart revisits a camper's worst nightmare in the form of Heitman, the kid who puts ticks on other kids' eyelashes.

Twenty diverse writers, in personal essays and short stories, celebrate and admonish, and remember with nostalgia as well as dread the childhood days of summer camp. It's where a bullied young girl with limp hair and three names will do anything to meet the demands of being popular; it's where Woody Guthrie is no longer a folk icon, but rather a cabin for young nudists; and where, in that lakeside Kumbaya solitude, blasts of homesickness, the first taste of independence, and the need for healthy revenge all stick like s'mores to the heart and soul.