Lessons from Summer Camp

In Lessons from Summer Camp, Jim Tilley takes a fifty-year retrospective look at a ten-year period during his childhood and adolescence to discover what summer camp was really about. In both a wistful and an appreciative look back on the days of our youth, the poems reminisce on the memorable events of those summers, from fire-lighting contests at Council Ring, to races in war canoes during Tribal Games, learning to swim, and writing letters home—to the inevitable sadness of departing at the end of the summer, saying goodbyes at the station until next year. The poems evoke memories of experiences we’ve all shared and bring perspective to how lessons from summer camp often become apparent only later in life.

Jim Tilley earned a doctorate in physics from Harvard and worked on Wall Street for twenty years. His poetry collections include In Confidence (2011) and Cruising at Sixty to Seventy (2014), both from Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, has appeared as a Ploughshares Solo e-book, an audiobook through Audible.com, and in a Ploughshares print anthology. His poetry has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Poetry Daily and on the PBS News Hour’s art blog, among others, and has won Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Poetry, as well as been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes.