Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer at Interlochen?

Living on campus with 5,000 artists–youth and colleagues alike–is pretty incredible. It’s one of the things that keeps me coming back to Interlochen every summer. I walk to my classroom each morning and hear french horns practicing. On my way to lunch, I can hear the high school girls choir warming up (“me me me me me”). During lunch, I sit lakeside and listen to the water slosh, the starlings jostle, the squirrels yack. For an afternoon break between classes (I teach 9-11am, then 2-4pm), I often walk home over to “boys side” as the campers call it, where I live at the end of Faculty Lane. To get there, I pass the Rock ‘n’ Roll “classroom”–a gigantic, old cabin with screens for windows and a fantastic sound system. It’s a pretty great thing to hear a 14-year-old belting it out to Janis Joplin. Later, on my evening walk, I’ll hear lines from Hamlet coming from the Pavillion as the Shakespeare Festival kicks off another season of outdoor theatre. Other times, everything quiets and the only thing that I can think about is the startling palette of the sky over a lake: