Summer Camp for Adult Writers: an Interview with Sarah McColl on the Pleasures of Unstructured Creative Play
by Writing Workshops Staff
A month ago
Sarah McColl is staging a quiet rebellion in the unforgiving arithmetic of American productivity culture, where writers are often exhorted to produce a thousand words daily and treat their craft like a factory line.
The author of the memoir Joy Enough and creator of the newsletter Lost Art, which excavates the forgotten work of dead women artists, has built her career on a radical proposition: that writing should feel good.
This summer, McColl is launching an eight-week online workshop called Summer Camp for Writers, explicitly designed as an antidote to what she calls the "productivity sprint approach." No word counts, no manuscript deadlines, no grinding it out under fluorescent lights.
Instead, McColl promises a return to the kind of unstructured creative play that most writers abandoned sometime around middle school.
It's a seductive vision, particularly for writers who've spent years flogging themselves toward arbitrary benchmarks, measuring their worth in daily output rather than the deeper currents of imagination. McColl's philosophy emerges from her hard-won understanding that sustainable creativity requires what she calls "wimpy goals"—250 words instead of a thousand, pleasure instead of punishment. Her mother's advice echoes through her teaching: "Sometimes you just have to write a C paper."
But McColl's approach isn't merely therapeutic; it's subversive. In a culture that treats art as commodity and artists as content creators, she insists on writing as "a calling." Her newsletter celebrates women who continued making art "without recognition or financial reward"—a practice she describes as "resistance" and "heroic." Through Summer Camp, she's attempting to create what artist residencies offer the privileged few: time, space, and permission to let the mind "wander off the leash."
The workshop's weekly themes—"Salt," "The seriousness of frivolity," "Sand, splinters, and other irritants"—suggest a curriculum designed less around craft than around reconditioning the writer's relationship to the page itself.
Through fellowships at MacDowell and other prestigious residencies, McColl has learned that creativity flourishes not in pressure cookers but in the kind of spaciousness that most writers never allow themselves.
In our conversation, McColl spoke about dismantling the toxic mythology that surrounds writing in America, the underestimated value of boredom, and why she believes that feeling good about your writing life might be the most radical act of all.
Writing Workshops: Your Summer Camp for Writers explicitly rejects the productivity sprint approach to writing in favor of delighting in the creative act. What experiences in your creative journey led you to develop this counter-cultural philosophy that prioritizes pleasure over productivity?
Sarah McColl: In the U.S. we live in an extractive, capitalistic culture, the language and values for which have infiltrated our creative lives. But these aren’t my values and they’re not values I want my work or life to reflect.
To quote Ariana Reines’s poem, “Eye of Death”:
A powerful idea America hates:
that there’s dignity
In pleasure.
Writing is not a commodity, it’s a calling. Because I intend to write until I die, and because life is short, I’d like to enjoy myself. I’d like my creative life to be a supportive process full of sustainable and nourishing practices that include periods of growth, rest, experimentation, failure, and play. The work itself should be a pleasure. That can and does mean the satisfying pleasure of deep thinking and hard work. If it’s something I enjoy, I’m more likely to do it. For me, it’s all about thinking about the long game.
Writing Workshops: You mention that Summer Camp aims to "recondition our feelings about writing, from something difficult we want to avoid... into a rich, welcoming relationship." What specific patterns of creative self-sabotage do you see most frequently in your students, and how does your summer framework help dismantle them?
Sarah McColl: Our minds are often our greatest obstacles in writing, so I’m in favor of any tricks that will make my mind an easier, kinder place to be.
When my mother would find me wringing my hands the night before a high school paper was due, she’d trot out one of her stock phrases: “Sometimes you just have to write a C paper,” she’d say.
The permission helped me finish. My shoulders dropped, I remembered to breathe, I hit save and went to sleep. (I don’t think I ever got a C.)
Who hasn’t felt defeated before they even begin by their own overambitious goals? 1,000 words a day is a popular goal post for many writers, but I’m a fan of wimpy goals.
I suggest 250 words a day. (I learned this trick from my wonderful writing teacher, Jacob Slichter, drummer for the band Semisonic.) A small goal helps me begin, which is often the hardest part. Once I’m sitting, it’s likely I will write 1,000 words. But 850 or 350 are all better than 0. I can complete my work with a feeling of accomplishment, which will help me return to the page the next day, which creates momentum.
Writing Workshops: The workshop syllabus includes intriguing weekly themes like Salt, The seriousness of frivolity, and Sand, splinters, and other irritants. How do these seemingly playful concepts connect to the deeper challenges writers face, and what transformations have you witnessed when students engage with them?
Sarah McColl: Summer Camp asks participants to reenvision their lives as a series of creative conditions. How can we create the conditions for writing? What makes you want to write? And what’s getting in the way of writing?
Where’s your best reading spot? What app can you delete off your phone? What did you like to read as a child? Last year, a Summer Camper joyfully deleted Instagram (and wrote the first half of a novel). Another reconnected with their love of reading and then discovered a framework for a book they wanted to write. Another played with all the offered prompts and ended up writing more than they had since their MFA, which made them feel creatively alive again.
Writing Workshops: Your newsletter LOST ART explores the creative work of mostly dead women artists. How has excavating these overlooked voices influenced your teaching approach, and what forgotten creative wisdom do you hope to revive through the Summer Camp experience?
Sarah McColl: Whether you make poems, songs, paintings, performances, or clay pots, continuing to create without recognition or financial reward is resistance. It’s a faith-based durational practice, and it’s heroic.
Often students come to workshop with the notion that their work is self-indulgent, inconsequential, or unimportant. Why should they bother? In order to keep going, every artist must take seriously her own creative vision. I have found this enormously instructive. If you don’t, who will?
Writing Workshops: The course description emphasizes community and intense friendship [did I use this phrase? Sounds scary! :)] as central to the writing process. In an era where writing is often portrayed as a solitary pursuit, how does collective experience fundamentally change what participants create and how they relate to their work?
Sarah McColl: A creative community that supports your artistic efforts and is engaged in the same work is vital to an artist’s wellbeing. This is something I learned from arts consultant Beth Pickens. When someone diminishes your “little writing hobby,” or critics excoriate you, or no one pays attention at all, your writing community gets it. Your writing community loves your work and wants the best for you, which is to keep going.
Writing Workshops: You've been supported by prestigious fellowships at Millay Arts, Ucross, Vermont Studio Center, and MacDowell. How have these immersive creative environments shaped your vision of what's possible in an online workshop format, and what elements have you worked hardest to translate into the digital space?
Sarah McColl: An artist’s residency offers the gift of time and space and removes the realities of daily life (carpool, dishes, meal planning, shopping, cooking, cleaning up). Can you even imagine how free your brain would feel in that environment? It’s more time than you know what to do with, so you explore, daydream, watch the clouds, have a long, meandering conversation, write a letter, visit a waterfall.
One of our first efforts in Summer Camp is to clear space. I can’t free writers of their parental responsibilities or laundry pile but I can help them claim a space for their minds to wander off the leash for two hours. Sometimes I think boredom is the most underestimated element of the creative process.
Writing Workshops: Summer Camp promises participants will generate a mass of wild, fresh, urgent writing nourished by sun and salt air. What specific techniques do you employ to help writers break through conventional thinking patterns and access this more embodied, elemental relationship with language?
Sarah McColl: Summer Camp is full of writing prompts as well as activity suggestions. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the poetic value of a walk.
Writing Workshops: The course reading list includes diverse voices, from Emily Dickinson to Susan Sontag. What unifying thread connects these selections, and how do you hope they'll disrupt or expand participants' existing notions about what good writing looks like?
Sarah McColl: Each of the writers included in Summer Camp is someone who has awed me with the beauty of their craft and thinking. I’m trusting my instincts, hoping that these writers will work similar magic on everyone in Summer Camp. I suppose the unifying thread is me. :)
Learn more about Summer Camp for Adult Writers with Sarah McColl, and sign up before her program is full!
Instructor Sarah McColl is the author of the memoir JOY ENOUGH. Since January 2021, she has published LOST ART, a monthly newsletter about the creative work of (mostly) dead women and a 2023 finalist for the Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant. Her essays have appeared in the Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and StoryQuarterly, and her work has been supported with fellowship awards from Millay Arts, Ucross, Vermont Studio Center, and MacDowell. She lives in small town Northern California.
