Guest post written by author Julia Lynn Rubin
Julia Lynn Rubin received her MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults from The New School in 2017. A lover of film, psychology, and literature, Julia has been writing creatively since first grade, and her short stories have appeared in publications such as the North American Review. She currently lives in Brooklyn, where she is currently freelancing while working on her next book. Julia is the author of Burro Hills, Trouble Girls and most recently Primal Animals.
Time moves differently in the summer, especially as a kid.
It’s strange…
Growing up in the muggy heat of Maryland, I spent a lot of my summers without much structure, lulled to sleep each night by the symphony of crickets and cicadas. The flying insects were louder in the ‘90s, before the steady decline of their habitats which was worsened to what it is today. When I re-watch old home movies of my sister and me, enjoying popsicles in the waning dusk, I listen carefully for the buzzing with a kind of bittersweet nostalgia. A deep longing. Sure, these insects still exist, but I’m convinced they will never sound quite the same.
For many years, my sister and I attended an all-girls sleepaway camp in the mountains of West Virginia where we played archery, competed in dance-offs, and rode horses in the ring and through the river. For two to three weeks at a time, we would be sequestered into separate units, left to our own devices to handle the occasional bumps and bruises, bouts of homesickness, and mean girls on our own. There were no parents there to guide or console us, just college-aged counselors who were more or less our peers. We weren’t allowed to bring our CD players or iPods to camp, and back in the early ‘00s, none of us had phones yet, anyway. All we could do was exist in the present moment. It was a formative time of growth for me, especially as a young queer girl.
I always considered summertime as a kid to be a kind of liminal space, or transitory period, like an empty movie theater after-hours or a long lonely highway at midnight. Summer moments feel similarly both fleeting and sacred. There is no shuffling through the daily motions of school, no hassle of teachers or usual familiar faces of classmates. A lot can happen in these in-between spaces where days are full of newfound freedom and possibility.
A lot can happen in just two to three weeks at a time.
Summer camp was where I first tried and failed to use a tampon, me and my bunkmates giggling with shared confusion as we shared amateur advice. It was where I showered in an outdoor stall with horrifyingly huge moths in the sink nearly scaring me away from brushing my teeth. It was, one summer, where a cabin full of girls bullied me so mercilessly that I sobbed by myself by the clotheslines outside, desperately missing my mom. Camp was also where I had my first kiss with a girl, my cheeks flushed that whole night, something new in me ignited.
That same summer that I was bullied, the bullies targeted two other girls who liked to play fight in the swimming pool. The word on their lips was used like a slur as they snickered it: lesbians. I remember hearing it and feeling my stomach sink, but I kept quiet, not wanting to draw more attention to myself. I knew that I wasn’t a lesbian, but I didn’t have a word for what I maybe was, either. How I felt. When the counselors of the victims got wind of the bullying, they herded our entire cabin into a meeting with the victims and berated my bunkmates and me, the bullies and bystanders alike for daring to use that word…and on their campers, no less. The bullies denied they’d said anything, of course, playing innocent as the victims sat there, silent and utterly humiliated.
I remember the rage I felt, climbing through me, along with my own humiliation and confusion. What if these girls were lesbians? I wondered. What if they were only curious? What if none of it mattered? Would they ever feel safe playing together again in a pool? Or exploring physical touch in public, platonic or otherwise? I wanted so badly to say something during that meeting, to defend both myself and these girls, to scream that “lesbian” is and never was an insult, no matter the intentions of the people using the word. At the time, however, I was wracked with anxiety and self-consciousness, weighted down by my own heavy shame.
Much of Primal Animals is based on summer camp experiences and memories such as these, though I chose not to include any overt homophobia in the book, as I wanted to envision a world without that one terrible thing. In many ways, this novel is not only an ode to summers spent away from teachers and parents out in the woods, but to the bittersweet liminality of summertime, and the freedom and exploration it leads to.
At camp, cliques form just like in school and kids get bullied, but there’s far less oversight to behavior, as adults are less often around. Girls at my camp formed incredible bonds, but they could also be mercilessly. Impossibly cruel.
Essentially, I thought, what an excellent setting for a horror novel.
By the way, if you love the setting, themes and characters in the following books, movies and TV shows, you’ll likely enjoy Primal Animals:
- Yellowjackets
- Twin Peaks
- The Wicker Man
- The Wilds
- The Fear Street Trilogy
- Pretty Little Liars
- One of Us Is Lying
- Midsommar
