An article about my “While I Was Away at Camp . . . ” series appeared in he local Sun-Times! Kinda fun to be in the paper.
“Highland Park mother Susan Shulman has found a novel way to keep her summer-camp letters intriguing for her two sons.
She puts on her fiction-writing hat and lets her imagination — and familiar household characters and objects — run wild. Each day’s installment brings a new twist to the tale that unfolds over the course of the camp stay.
Shulman stumbled on the camp-letter medium by accident when her eldest son Eli went away to camp for the first time six years ago.
“I sat down to write that first letter by email,” recalled Shulman. “‘Dear Eli, Hope your stay is going great. Hope you are making new friends.’
“It wasn’t all that interesting,” said Shulman, who wondered how she’d keep her updates from the homefront from becoming yawners.
Then she recalled her father’s letters when she went away to camp.
“They would start off newsy, and then he would talk about my dog, Smoocher,” said Shulman, noting he created an over-achieving dog who outperformed her in every way, while an imaginary sister who came to stay for the summer would get into a heap of trouble.”