OYAN Summer Workshop 2020: Reflecting

On June 8, 2020, I got on my computer, pulled up the page I wanted, and joined the first ever online summer camp I had ever been to.

It was the yearly One Year Adventure Novel Summer Workshop, which had been moved online due to COVID-19 forcing the campus it was going to be held on (Mid-American Nazarine University in Kansas) to remain closed longer than SW could be postponed for.

When I logged onto that call, I was nervous, but also excited, for I had heard a lot of good things about the Summer Workshop from past attendees and I was really glad that it was happening in any way.

When that first session ended, it was off to critique groups with other students. Seeing the faces of my friends from the OYAN student forum for the first time on a Zoom call while going over each other's writing excerpts through Google Docs was one of the best things that has ever happened to me. Also, the inside jokes made by the critique group (Mont-St-Michel) that I was in were wonderful. ("crispy shorts" -- it's a long story)

The speakers at the workshop: John Otte, Stephanie Morrill, Paul McCusker, and Jill Williamson, and the host of OYAN, Daniel "Mr. S." Schwabauer, were all spectacular. I feel like I learned a lot about how to be a better writer, and I loved my mentor session with Jill.

Because the Workshop had to be moved online, the admin of OYAN decided to do what they could to try and make up for the fact that we couldn't all meet in-person, so they bought a Minecraft server for the summer (the workshop theme was "Mind Craft") and built a model of the Bell Center where we would have met for workshop, then made it available to their students even though they didn't have to do so. (See why I love everyone on OYAN so much?)

When the last day of SW came, everyone who could gathered in the Minecraft Bell Center. A student had posted how to install a special resource pack, so that night, everyone got to be "together" on Minecraft as Summer Workshop ended with the traditional singing of Phillip Phillip's song, "Home"

Everyone had thought they were going to have to miss this tradition because workshop was online and singing on Zoom without sounding like bunch of cats with laryngitis is next to impossible, but teamwork made it possible and people were posting in the Minecraft chat that they were actually crying. (I came pretty close to crying myself.)

The day after Summer Workshop ended, the day I wrote this post on, I was really missing my peeps and missing the fun and help of critique groups and hearing the speakers talk about their own writing experences. I came close to crying a second time while re-listening to a song that a fellow OYANer (who is also an amature singer/songwriter) had composed specially for Open Mic Night during the workshop.

When I became an OYANer, I became a member of a bubbly, happy, encouraging group of people who have become my extended family, and given the chance to re-live my life, I would totally do everything OYAN again. I am already planning to try and attend Summer Workshop 2021 in-person when the world settles down to some semblance of normality again so I can hug everyone!

Sincerely,

A very happy Brooke Johnson