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WORK TITLE: How to Survive a Summer
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.thenickwhite.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://english.osu.edu/people/white.1615 * https://english.osu.edu/sites/english.osu.edu/files/Nick%20White%27s%20CV.pdf
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2017019319
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PS3623.H578726
Personal name heading:
White, Nick, 1985-
Variant(s): White, Nicholas, 1985-
Birth date: 1985-04-30
Found in: How to survive a summer, 2017: CIP t.p. (Nick White)
Amazon online search 2017-04-04: ("Nick White, How to
survive a summer; About the author: Nick White is an
Assistant Professor of English at Ohio State University.
A native of Mississippi, he earned a Ph.D. in English
from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His short
stories have been published in a variety of places,
including The Kenyon Review, Guernica, Indiana Review,
Day One, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere")
2017-04-05 e-mail fr. R.Reisert, Blue Rider Press :
(registered copyright as Nicholas White; his birthdate
is 4-30-1985)
================================================================================
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PERSONAL
Born 1985, in MS.
EDUCATION:Delta State University, B.S.E. (English), 2007; Mississippi State University, M.A. (English), 2009; Ohio State University, M.F.A. (creative writing), 2013; University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Ph.D. (English), 2016.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet and fiction writer, and teacher. Mississippi State University, lecturer, 2009-10; Ohio State University, graduate teaching associate, 2010-13, assistant professor of English, 2016—; University of Nebraska-Lincoln, graduate teaching assistant, 2013—. Editor. Delta State University, editor, The Confidante, 2006-07; Mississippi State University, associate editor, Jabberwock Review, 2009; Ohio State University, fiction editor, The Journal, 2012-13; University of Nebraska-Lincoln, associate editor, Brighthorse Press, 2013—, assistant editor, Prairie Schooner, 2013—.
AWARDS:Ohio State University Creative Writing Program, Tara Kroger Award for Best Short Story, 2013; Kenyon College, Peter Taylor Fellow, 2016.
WRITINGS
Contributor of fiction to literary journals, including Kenyon Review, Guernica, Indiana Review, Day One, Hopkins Review, Literary Review, and Lit Hub. Contributor of poetry to periodicals, including Pinch, Permafrost, and Arsenic Lobster.
SIDELIGHTS
Mississippi native Nick White writes short fiction that he has published in various literary journals, such as Kenyon Review, Guernica, Indiana Review, Day One, Hopkins Review, and Indiana Review. He is assistant professor of English at Ohio State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. He holds an undergraduate degree in creative writing from Ohio State University and a Ph.D. in English from University of Nebraska-Lincoln. White’s collection of short stories, Sweet and Low, gathers stories of idyllic Southern landscapes and the everyday lives of students, wives, boyfriends, and sons. Imbuing honesty into his Southern fiction, he portrays flawed yet provocative characters—like academics, podcasters, assassins, and lawnmower enthusiasts—on unusual quests.
In 2017 White published his debut novel, How to Survive a Summer, named one of Book Riot’s Best Queer Books of 2017. Set in Mississippi, fifteen-year-old Will Dillard was sent one summer to Camp Levi, an Evangelical conversion camp to “cure” him of his homosexuality. Now a graduate student, Will has lived with the memories of his “rehabilitation” and a traumatic event that happened there. He learns that a fellow student has created a slasher film called Proud Flesh; it concerns a conversion camp that dredges up old memories of the torture Will and the other boys endured in the form of fear tactics, solitary confinement, and sadistic games. The release of the film and its cult popularity has spurred Will to return to Mississippi to visit the location of the camp, which is in disrepair. His aunt, Mother Maude, and her sexual predator husband, Father Drake, are soliciting funds to reopen the camp. On his return home, Will is also confronting his estranged, homophobic father. With White’s life drawing parallels with Will, Jayson Morrison noted in Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide: “The advantage is White’s ability to produce a convincing depiction of Dillard’s trauma, the camp, and its leaders.”
In an interview with Meghan Chou online at Midwestern Gothic, White talked about the setting of the book: “The South is home to many evangelical churches, particularly the Baptist Church, which played a huge role in my growth and development.” On Will’s father, Reverend Dillard, and his belief in the sin of homosexuality, White said: “I wanted to show him to be a thoughtful and conflicted man. He was very naïve about the depth and breadth of racism in his community, just as he was about his son’s sexuality.” Noting how gay discrimination and the evils of conversion therapy are still a political issue, Helena Fitzgerald observed at Rolling Stone Online, “What makes White’s novel feel so urgent and so fresh, is the startling compassion he evinces for the place on which it centers, the effort that is made to give breadth and humanity to a part of the world both he and his book’s narrator are from.”
Several critics thought the message of the book resonated, but the structure was confusing. In Booklist, Michael Cart commented that although the book proceeds by fits and starts with confusing flashbacks within flashbacks, “The narrative takes a melodramatic turn when it dramatizes the tragic event that ended the camp experience.” A writer in Publishers Weekly admitted the story took too long to get where it was going, yet noted: “These threads are clear and moving, revealing White’s talent in evoking the complexities of the rural South.” According to a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “The writing, for the most part, is perfunctory, so plot is the pull here, but the pace is too slow to be satisfying. A fascinating subject rendered in disappointing prose.”
In describing the horror of the backwards conversion camp, Nathan Scott McNamara reported in Los Angeles Review of Books: “White’s debut, in the spirit of the lush and multitiered storytelling of a writer like Alice Munro, and the Southern decay of William Faulkner, also has all the schlock of a B-horror movie. … Like many places, Mississippi has an unsettling past and present, but here the awareness of that doesn’t help the enlightened do much better.” Funny and anxious, Will is a likable character, and the portrayal of the LGBTQ community is free of stereotypes, noted Tyler Hixson in School Library Journal, who added that White’s “stark but beautiful debut is about rebuilding one’s past and having the strength to accept oneself.”
Ellen Birkett Morris commented online at Ploughshares: “White’s telling of this tale is unique in that it is free of condemnation. He clearly loves this region with all its faults and draws nuanced portraits of its flawed inhabitants as they try to make sense of the world. … In the second half of the book, White deftly alternates between Will’s memories of camp and his present day experiences in chapters that evoke the conversion experience.” Writing in the Washington Post, Tim Murphy observed: “‘How to Survive a Summer’ is simply too packed with story and drama not to be consistently compelling. The novel often has the feel of an autobiographical story, brimming over as it does with vivid details of poor, rural Southern life.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2017, Michael Cart, review of How to Survive a Summer, p. 57.
Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, November-December 2017, Jayson Morrison, review of How to Survive a Summer, p. 37.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2017, review of How to Survive a Summer.
Publishers Weekly, April 17, 2017, review of How to Survive a Summer, p. 39.
School Library Journal, November 2017, Tyler Hixson, review of How to Survive a Summer, p. 96.
Washington Post, May 15, 2017, Tim Murphy, review of How to Survive a Summer.
ONLINE
Los Angeles Review of Books Blog, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/ (June 19, 2017), Nathan Scott McNamara, review of How to Survive a Summer.
Midwestern Gothic, http://midwestgothic.com/ (January 29, 2018), Meghan Chou, author interview.
Nick White Website, http://www.thenickwhite.com (January 29, 2018), author profile.
Ploughshares Online, http://blog.pshares.org/ (November 24, 2017), Ellen Birkett Morris, review of How to Survive a Summer.
Rolling Stone Online, https://www.rollingstone.com/ (June 14, 2017), Helena Fitzgerald, review of How to Survive a Summer.
A native of Mississippi, Nick White is the author of the novel How to Survive a Summer (Blue Rider/Penguin, 2017). He is an Assistant Professor of English at The Ohio State University's MFA Program in Creative Writing. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in a variety of places, including The Kenyon Review, Guernica, The Hopkins Review, Indiana Review,The Literary Review, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. His short story collection, Sweet & Low, will be published on June 5, 2018 (Blue Rider/Penguin).
Interview: Nick White
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Nick White author headshotMidwestern Gothic staffer Meghan Chou talked with author Nick White about his book How to Survive a Summer, exploring nontraditional queer spaces, outsmarting the hurdles to keep writing, and more.
**
MC: What’s your connection to the Midwest?
Nick White: I’ve called the Midwest home for most of my twenties. I moved to Ohio when I was twenty-three because I had been accepted into Ohio State’s MFA program. After I graduated, I went on to the University of Nebraska to earn a Ph.D.—technically, Nebraska is considered the Great Plains, but I always thought of it as further adventures in “the Middle West.” During my last year, I was offered the teaching job back at Ohio State, which I gladly accepted. The Midwest has become my home.
MC: Will Dillard, the main character in How to Survive a Summer, is a graduate student from the Midwest who reflects on his traumatic memories at a teenage gay-to-straight conversion camp in Mississippi. Between the South and the Midwest, what regional differences did you explore in How to Survive a Summer with regards to the attitude towards queer youth?
NW: I wanted to set the book in the Midwest and in the South—primarily because both spaces have been home to me, a gay man of a particular age, and because both seem to be unpopular locales to set queer dramas. I think there was this assumption—which is slowly being chipped away at—that if you are gay and from a small town or rural area, then your best bet for a happy life is to get thee to a metropolis. While this migration to urban centers can certainly be beneficial to many of us in the queer community, there are others, myself included, that love living in a small town, or in what people refer to as “flyover country.” I find it exciting to explore queerness in places and spaces that have traditionally been seen as not having room for it.
As far as attitudes toward queerness, the Midwest and the South have some differences. Living in Nebraska, Ohio, and Mississippi, I have spent most of my life in red states. But I never came out while I was in Mississippi—I am not sure if that is because of the place, itself, or because of my proximity to my family, who are very religious and conservative. Either way, I felt safer in Columbus—safe enough, at least, to start facing up to questions I had long since tried to ignore.
How to Survive a Summer book cover by Nick White
MC: Many gay-to-straight conversion camps follow the misguided notion that one can “pray away the gay.” In addition to this aspect, what role does religion play in the telling of Will Dillard’s story and in understanding the cultural differences between the Deep South and Midwest?
NW: The South is home to many evangelical churches, particularly the Baptist Church, which played a huge role in my growth and development. In the book, Will’s journey to Camp Levi, the conversion camp, is one that both he and his father see as a necessary step for him. They are both true believers, as I once was. They believe they know the Gospel and want to do what is “right.” Will is not sent to Camp Levi because his father doesn’t love him; on the contrary, Rev. Dillard loves his son a great deal and feels he is doing his best for him, and that’s what, in my mind, makes the decision to send one’s child to conversion therapy so complicated and fraught. When Mother Maude and Father Drake appear in town, asking for money to help jumpstart their camp, both father and son see this as nothing less than a sign from God. Mother Maude and Father Drake offer what both men have been seeking: deliverance.
MC: The release of a horror movie, called Proud Flesh, triggers Dillard’s search for closure. Proud Flesh draws inspiration from events that transpired at the Mississippi conversion camp, Camp Levi. The gay serial killer central to the movie wears a princess mask, which the gay community around the country begins to wear with pride. Why did you choose a princess mask as the symbol of terror and solidarity?
NW: I think I wanted to illustrate, in some way, the resiliency of queer culture, how many in our community can take something that is deemed offensive (such as this princess mask, or even the word “queer”) and reclaim and repurpose it.
MC: Why did people react to Proud Flesh with pride and not offense? In other words, what about the horror movie brought about feelings of solidarity?
NW: Well, at first, the movie caused much offense, and I don’t know that Bevy ever bought the reinterpretation. I’m not sure that many people reacted with pride, either. When Will and the others see the movie in Memphis, the audience boos at the end. I think the movie becomes, at best, a mild curiosity—something to see with people and cheer and jeer. There’s a campiness to it that many find appealing, a kind of “it’s so bad that it’s good” response.
I tried to be very careful that the book didn’t come down one way or another on it. I wanted the movie to be one of those enduring mysteries that the reader will still ponder about once she has finished reading.
MC: Will’s family appears progressive in some ways—his father is forward-thinking on the topic of race, his mother lived in an all-female woodland community—yet neither can accept their son’s sexuality. How does the portrayal of Will’s parents shed light on the homophobia towards and mistreatment of queer youth?
NW: I didn’t want the parents, particularly the father, to be two-dimensional, flat. I wanted to show him to be a thoughtful and conflicted man. He was very naïve about the depth and breadth of racism in his community, just as he was about his son’s sexuality. I wanted to show that, as the years passed, the father had the capacity to grow and, what’s perhaps the hardest thing for people to do, change his mind. He may never be comfortable with his son’s queerness, but he is determined to stay in his life, no matter what.
MC: What is one piece of advice you give your students at Ohio State University about writing?
NW: Respect the work. What I mean by this is, I think, make sure you remember that the putting of the words onto paper, then revising the hell out of it, is all that matters. There’s so much in our world that wants to keep us from writing, and half the battle, I think, is finding out ways to outsmart the hurdles and get back to the desk. Do it. Do it as much as you can, for as long as you can. Then, once you’re finished with that project, move along to the next one. Don’t look back.
MC: What’s next for you?
NW: I am finishing up a story collection with should be out soon with Penguin, and dabbling with a new novel.
**
A native of Mississippi, Nick White currently teaches creative writing at the Ohio State University. His fiction can be found in The Kenyon Review, Guernica, The Literary Review, Indiana Review, Day One, and elsewhere. His debut novel, How to Survive a Summer, was published by Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin-Random House.
Nick White
Assistant Professor
Faculty
Nick White’s fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Hopkins Review, Guernica and elsewhere. He earned a PhD in English and creative writing at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His novel, How to Survive a Summer, was released in June 2017, and his short story collection is forthcoming—both with Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin/Random House.
Nick White
Assistant Professor
Faculty
Nick White’s fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Hopkins Review, Guernica and elsewhere. He earned a PhD in English and creative writing at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His novel, How to Survive a Summer, was released in June 2017, and his short story collection is forthcoming—both with Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin/Random House.
Areas of Expertise
Creative writing (fiction)
Education
PhD, English and creative writing, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Nick White white.1 615 @ osu.edu thenickwhite.com Education Ph.D., English and Creative Wr iting, May 2016 The University of Nebraska -Lincoln Dissertation: Sweet and Low , a collection of stories Dissertation Committee: Jonis Agee (Dir.), Timothy Schaffert, Stacey Waite, Amelia Montes M.F .A., Crea tive Writing (Fiction), June 2013 The Ohio State University Thesis: The Exaggerations , a novel in stories Thesis Committee : Mich elle Herman (Dir.), Lee Martin M.A ., English, May 2009 Mississippi State University Thesis: Blood Knot , a collection of poems Thesis Committee: Richard Lyons (Dir.), Catherine Pierce, Michael Kardos B.S .E., English, Summa cum Laude , May 2007 Delta State University Publications Books How to Survive a Summer , a novel to be published on June 6, 2017, with Penguin/Random House under the Blue Rider Press Imprint. Sweet and Low: Stories, forthcoming with Penguin/Random House under the Blue Rider Press Imprint. Short Stories “The Lovers.” The Literary Review . Fall 2015. Print. “The Last of His Kind .” Guernica . Fall . 2015. Online. “The Curator.” Day One. August 2014. Online. “Sweet and Low.” The Hopkins Review . 7.3 (Summer 2014): 369-92. Print. “Heavenly Bodies.” Indiana Review . 35.2 (Winter 2013): 91-109. Print. “The Exaggerations.” The Kenyon Review . 35.3 (Summer 2013): 22-35. Print. “ Cottonmouth, Trapjaw, Water Moccasin.” Third Coast (Spring 2011): 102-04. Print. “East of West, and West of Weir.” Hayden’s Ferry Review 47 (2010): 141-54. Print. Poetry “The Uncollected Letters of Willa Cather. The Pinch 29.2 (2009): 48-49. “Birthday Dinner.” Permafrost 31 (2009): 58-59. “On Skydiving.” Arsenic Lobster 20 (Summer 2009).
How to Survive a Summer
Michael Cart
113.17 (May 1, 2017): p57.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
How to Survive a Summer. By Nick White. June 2017. 352p. Penguin/Blue Rider, $26 (9780399573682).
Twenty-five-year-old Will is conflicted when a sensational movie is released based in part on his teenage experience of a conversion-therapy camp designed to "cure" him of his homosexuality. So traumatic was his month-long experience in the camp that Will is reluctant to see the movie, which is attracting a cult audience. Will's trauma was exacerbated by the camp's location in a wooded area called the Neck, which his late mother had rendered eerily fabulous through her stories. The book proceeds by fits and starts with sometimes confusing flashbacks within flashbacks to the camp and Will's earlier life. In the present, he is on a road trip to visit his father, a former minister from whom he is estranged. Will is a sometimes unsympathetic character, self-dramatizing and plagued by cowardice, who tells his story in an often-stilted voice. The narrative takes a melodramatic turn when it dramatizes the tragic event that ended the camp experience. Despite its flaws, however, the story has enough inherent interest to hold readers' attention to its somewhat ambiguous end.--Michael Cart
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cart, Michael. "How to Survive a Summer." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 57. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495035063/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a2c9ae41. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495035063
How To Survive a Summer
264.16 (Apr. 17, 2017): p39.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
How To Survive a Summer
Nick White. Blue Rider, $26 (352p) ISBN 9780-399-57368-2
Will, a likeable, awkward academic plodding through life and his dissertation, was forced to attend an evangelical gay-conversion summer camp in Mississippi during his adolescence. When a fellow camper's memoir based on the experience is turned into a kitschy, possibly homophobic horror film, Will takes an emergency leave from his unfulfilling adult life to confront his past. While it's evident that something tragic happened at the camp, the specifics are not revealed until the end of the book. The result is writing that's largely diffuse and slow rather than suspenseful. By contrast, the strongest passages are those set during Will's early childhood with his preacher father, whose shock at seeing his son shimmy in the church choir creates a tension between them from which neither will recover. Captivating, too, is the fact that Will's aunt, the mystifying Mother Maude, ran the conversion camp with her deranged, abusive husband, but that her intentions stemmed from a more personal reason than just wanting the boys to avoid an "abomination." Though the story takes too long to get where it's going, these threads are clear and moving, revealing White's talent in evoking the complexities of the rural South. Agent: Noah Ballard, Curtis Brown. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"How To Survive a Summer." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 39. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490820752/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ed8713ce. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490820752
White, Nick: HOW TO SURVIVE A SUMMER
(Apr. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
White, Nick HOW TO SURVIVE A SUMMER Blue Rider Press (Adult Fiction) $26.00 6, 6 ISBN: 978-0-399-57368-2
An attempt to "pray away the gay" has tragic consequences.Will Dillard has a secret. It's not that he's gay; that's no secret at all, not anymore. It's that he spent one summer at Camp Levi, an institution devoted to "curing" teenage boys of their homosexuality. The program was a combination of Scripture and abuse, and Will's time there came to an abrupt and horrifying end when a camper disappeared. Having left home for college--and, later, graduate school--he's still haunted by his past, but it's a past he has no intention of sharing with anyone. Then that terrible summer at Camp Levi becomes the basis for a slasher movie, and Will learns that he'll never escape. An email from one of the former counselors involved in the making of the film sends him back to Mississippi looking for answers and a sense of closure. First-time novelist White has the makings of a great book, but his work shows some of the weaknesses common to debuts. There are episodes that are simply impossible to believe, such as the one in which Will climbs under his desk during a panic attack and neither of his fellow teaching assistants, with whom he shares a cramped office, notices. There are also problems of structure and style. It makes perfect psychological sense that Will would want to keep the details of an traumatic adolescent experience from the lovers and friends he's met since leaving home, but, as a narrative device, his reticence is frustrating. There's a lack of definition; it feels like White hasn't quite decided which story he's going to tell. The whole novel is, of course, Will's story, but it's Camp Levi that makes his story singular, and the author takes his time getting there. Much of the novel is taken up with Will's road trip and with scenes from his life just before he begins conversion therapy. The writing, for the most part, is perfunctory, so plot is the pull here, but the pace is too slow to be satisfying. A fascinating subject rendered in disappointing prose.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"White, Nick: HOW TO SURVIVE A SUMMER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A489268642/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4786f71d. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A489268642
WHITE, Nick. How To Survive a Summer
Tyler Hixson
63.11 (Nov. 2017): p96.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
* WHITE, Nick. How To Survive a Summer. 352p. Penguin/Blue Rider. Jun. 2017. Tr $26. ISBN 9780399573682.
Will Dillard is working on his film theory dissertation when he learns about Proud Flesh, a slasher movie about a group of straight teens who try to rebuild a dilapidated gay conversion therapy camp only to be stalked and killed by a former attendee. Will is transported to his adolescence, when he was sent to Camp Levi, the inspiration for the film's setting. There, he and four other boys were subjected to a month of torture. Meanwhile, the movie is causing rifts in the LGBTQ community yet also garnering a following. White's stark but beautiful debut is about rebuilding one's past and having the strength to accept oneself. Will's journey, told through flashbacks from when he first discovered that he was gay up through his days at Camp Levi, is searing. Funny and anxious, Will is likable, and the portrayal of the LGBTQ community is free of stereotypes. VERDICT For those looking for a cathartic novel or an exploration of the obstacles that many gay teens face.--Tyler Hixson, Brooklyn Public Library
KEY: * Excellent in relation to other titles on the same subject or in the same genre | Tr Hardcover trade binding | lib. ed. Publisher's library binding | Board Board book | pap. Paperback | e eBook original | BL Bilingual | POP Popular Picks
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hixson, Tyler. "WHITE, Nick. How To Survive a Summer." School Library Journal, Nov. 2017, p. 96. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A513759699/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4475ec3c. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A513759699
How to Survive a Summer: A Novel
Jayson Morrison
24.6 (November-December 2017): p37.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide
http://glreview.com
How to Survive a Summer: A Novel
by Nick White
Blue Rider Press. 348 pages, $26.
Inspired by a film he has seen, narrator Will Dillard decides to take an interstate trip to revisit the camp where he endured four weeks of gay conversion therapy some years ago. Hoping to find closure and relief from the trauma he still endures, he also grudgingly meets his estranged father and two of the five campers he met at age fifteen. Of course, all were indelibly affected by that summer in central Mississippi. Dillard weaves this journey with his own recollections of that summer and earlier teen years when he failed to fulfill his Baptist preacher father's expectations of masculinity. Strong parallels exist between White and Dillard's lives, and the novel often reads more like a memoir due to White's closeness to the main character. The advantage is White's ability to produce a convincing depiction of Dillard's trauma, the camp, and its leaders. Fear tactics, solitary confinement, and sadistic games were all part of the camp's approach. Camp leaders clearly had their own unfinished battles with same-sex desire. This book serves as a reminder that this form of "therapy" is still practiced in the U.S., offering the false promise, still appealing to some teenagers and parents, that these ad hoc tortures can turn a gay person straight. Jayson Morrison
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Morrison, Jayson. "How to Survive a Summer: A Novel." The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, vol. 24, no. 6, 2017, p. 37. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A513760595/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f1344365. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A513760595
Book World: How to survive a summer at gay conversion camp
Tim Murphy
(May 15, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Byline: Tim Murphy
How to Survive a Summer
By Nick White
Blue Rider. 341 pp. $26
---
Dave Holmes' hilarious memoir will delight pop culture junkies
Among the many indelible images in "How to Survive a Summer," the debut novel by Nick White, is a creepy princess mask. It's worn by a gay serial killer in "Proud Flesh," a teen slasher flick based on a memoir by a survivor of a gay conversion camp. In White's telling, the movie is dreadful, yet rather than offending gays, it becomes a cult classic, inspiring viewing parties in gay bars nationwide in which everyone dons a princess mask.
Does that sound twisted and meta enough for you? That's exactly the kind of novel "How to Survive a Summer" is. White uses the painful controversy of so-called "conversion" camps, which aim to help queer youth "pray the gay away," as a springboard for a traumatized loner's story that's both moving and melodramatic. The dissonance can be jarring, but it's never boring.
"In the summer of 1999, when I was fifteen years old, I spent almost four weeks at a camp that was supposed to cure me of my homosexuality," says Will "Rooster" Dillard. He's a grudgingly self-accepting gay student at a Midwestern university who seems to have repressed some of the worst things that happened in that long-ago summer. But as the novel opens, the release of "Proud Flesh," with its tawdry mix of real-life and made-up details about the camp in Will's Mississippi homeland, has triggered in him a slow breakdown. "I learned the past is not (BEG ITAL)the past,(END ITAL)" he says, "a lump of time you can quarantine and forget about, but a reel of film in your brain that keeps on rolling, spooling and unspooling itself regardless of whether or not you are watching it."
His emotional shutdown worries both Bevy, his bossy lesbian friend, and Zeus, a Latino transgender student with whom Will has embarked on an uneasy courtship. Among the pleasures of the novel is its broad pageant of contemporary LGBT types, all against the background of the Midwest or the Deep South.
Choking under the pressure of recovered memory, Will jumps in his old car and embarks on a going-back-to-face-my-past road trip to end all road trips. What ensues is a plunge into ever deeper, darker layers of Will's personal history, with the slow revelation of cruelties and perversions.
Much of this leaping back into the past concerns Will's family: his racially progressive yet deeply homophobic traveling-preacher dad; his free-spirited mother, who at one point joined a female community in the forest; and his Anita Bryant-like aunt, Mother Maude, an evangelical choir diva whose flamboyant wigs and caftans are matched only by her fervor for saving little boys from the dangers of the homosexual lifestyle (so they won't die of AIDS in the fleshpot of New York, as did her beloved brother). And then there is Maude's husband, who could be ripped from the reels of a 1970s gay S&M porn flick.
All that grits-and-Jesus local color undermines some of the genuine trauma of the gay conversion experience, which in real life has been denounced, discredited and, in some locales, outlawed. But therein lies the novel's savvy: It adheres to a gay aesthetic tradition in which the even the darkest subject matter isn't too dark to be played for camp. A clear tone signal is provided in the first pages when we learn that Will has abandoned a dissertation on the melodramatic films of Douglas Sirk. And Will's recounting of the "Proud Flesh" scenes are rendered with a gleefully observant eye for the stock conventions of horror movies.
But in keeping with another gay literary tradition, there is an abiding sorrow, a ruefulness, underneath the histrionics. We learn that Will has been abandoned by a previous boyfriend seeking "someone more open to something more real." Will tells us, "I knew what he had meant. I'd heard it all before from the men who found themselves in my bed for longer than a night. ... They spotted the trouble and sooner or later they were gone." He is still too injured by his past experience to give of himself completely.
Some of the most affecting scenes are those in which Will and his old campmates reunite in Memphis, all now openly gay yet still damaged by their shared experience, often in subtly observed ways. As the survivors share snow cones and beers and engage awkwardly in both small talk and group sex, they conjure a poignant, humdrum believability that contrasts sharply with the outrageous, "Carrie"-like goings-on in the camp flashback scenes.
"How to Survive a Summer" is simply too packed with story and drama not to be consistently compelling. The novel often has the feel of an autobiographical story, brimming over as it does with vivid details of poor, rural Southern life. If Tennessee Williams' "Suddenly Last Summer" could be transposed to the 21st-century South, where queer liberation co-exists alongside the stubborn remains of fire and brimstone, it might read something like this juicy, moving hot mess of a novel.
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Murphy is the author, most recently, of "Christodora."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Murphy, Tim. "Book World: How to survive a summer at gay conversion camp." Washington Post, 15 May 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491755287/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9f07d461. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491755287
CAMP HOMOPHOBIA; A former camper tries his best to forget a harrowing stay in How to Survive a Summer, a debut novel by Nick White
Colette Bancroft
(June 25, 2017): News: p6.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Times Publishing Company
http://www.tampabay.com/
Byline: COLETTE BANCROFT; TIMES BOOK EDITOR
Will Dillard's summer camp experience is a real horror movie.
As Nick White's debut novel, How to Survive a Summer, opens, Will is trying to avoid seeing a buzzed-about new slasher flick called Proud Flesh. His best friend describes it this way: "Think Friday the 13th meets Sleepaway Camp meets I don't know what."
Will knows what. Proud Flesh is based on a memoir written by a former counselor at Camp Levi, where Will was a camper in 1999, for its one and only summer. Forget s'mores and sing-alongs; Camp Levi's purpose was "gay conversion" - brainwashing and torturing gay teenage boys in a futile and traumatizing attempt to alter their sexuality.
The movie gives that story the usual puddle-deep, formulaic Hollywood treatment, but it also wakens memories Will has long tried to deny. He's in his 30s now, a graduate student in film studies, but the novel takes him and the reader back into the past.
Will grew up in a tiny town in the Mississippi Delta, the only child of a devout but not very successful Baptist preacher and a doting, charming mother. His father first becomes concerned about his sexuality when Will is 7 and begins dancing while singing with the choir at Second Baptist Church. Something about the way he dances makes his father angry. "You, sir, need to grow out of this curiousness," his father tells him sternly.
He doesn't, although at that point he's at a loss to understand what his father means. After Will's mother dies a few years later, his relationship with his father grows more tense.
When Will is in his mid teens and becoming clearer about his own "curiousness," Mother Maude and Father Frank show up. Maude is the younger, long-estranged sister of Will's mom. They grew up - along with a brother named Johnny, whom Maude adored - in a remote, rural part of Mississippi known as the Neck. Will's mom told him fascinating stories about the place as a refuge for women escaping bad marriages (also for bootleggers).
She had inherited the family property there, and now Maude wants Will's father to let her use it to create Camp Levi. A former briefly successful gospel singer turned freelance preacher, Maude wants to help boys like Johnny, who died of AIDS, by "converting" them to heterosexuality.
Will is signed up as one of the first five campers. They will be lectured about their sinful natures, shown photos of dead AIDS victims, assigned to write in "sin journals," forced to swim in a heavily polluted lake that leaves them with sores and rashes all over their bodies, forbidden to bathe or change their clothes, urged to turn and tattle on each other. If they err, they get locked up, one by one, in the Sweat Shack, a windowless, coffinlike "bump of a building," for hours under the broiling sun.
And then something really bad happens.
In the aftermath, someone disappears, someone goes to jail and Camp Levi is no more, but as an adult, Will's memories of those events are blurred. The movie spurs him to set off on a road trip home to Mississippi to try to recover them.
White, 32, is a Mississippi native himself, and How to Survive a Summer echoes both Southern Gothic fiction and the wry, tender humor of writers such as Eudora Welty and Allan Gurganus. It's refreshing, too, to find so many fictional Southerners who are complex characters rather than stereotypes. The novel builds suspense around not only Will's dive into the past but his reunions with people he hasn't seen for years, particularly his father.
How to Survive a Summer takes a sometimes harrowing look at the extremes of homophobia, but ultimately it's a book that arcs toward hope.
Contact Colette Bancroft at cbancroft@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8435. Follow @colettemb.
* * *
How to Survive a Summer
By Nick White
Blue Rider Press, 341 pages, $26
CAPTION(S):
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COLETTE BANCROFT; TIMES BOOK EDITOR
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bancroft, Colette. "CAMP HOMOPHOBIA; A former camper tries his best to forget a harrowing stay in How to Survive a Summer, a debut novel by Nick White." Tampa Bay Times [St. Petersburg, FL], 25 June 2017, p. 6. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496957908/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d840b436. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496957908
Gay Conversion Therapy Novel Explores Controversial Practice
"I think it's something you can never truly leave behind," says Nick White, author of "How to Survive a Summer"
Nick White's 'How to Survive a Summer' is about a young man who spent a summer at an ex-gay ministry conversion camp. Zefrog/Alamy
By Helena Fitzgerald
June 14, 2017
In 2013, Nick White worried the novel he'd started working on about one young man's time in conversion therapy – a controversial theory and practice based on the idea you can change a person's sexual orientation – and how echoes of that experience follow him into adulthood, would seem exaggerated, too violent, too hyperbolically nightmare-ish. It felt like things were getting better; America seemed to be moving forward, surging up toward some greater equality. In the summer of 2015, gay marriage passed for all 50 states, and when proposals for discriminatory laws came up, they routinely got knocked back down to nothing. "I look back on when I wrote the book," White says, "and it's not that these problems didn't exist before the election, but rather it's like I was seeing the world through rose-colored glasses back then. I thought at the time that readers are might think, 'oh this is a problem we've moved beyond, this isn't really relevant anymore.' And then the election happened. And now you hear about conversion therapy every time the Vice President is in the news."
How To Survive a Summer, White's debut novel, follows a young gay man named Will who has left his Mississippi Delta roots behind and is working in academia. Will is out but not entirely comfortable with it, and still treats his evangelical upbringing as a secret in his new, supposedly liberated life. When a trailer for a slasher movie calls up memories of the summer he spent at an ex-gay ministry conversion camp, he is jolted back to the things he has been trying repress, unable to escape through avoidance. This struggle sends him on a journey back toward his own origin, in which he ultimately attempts to make peace with these formative experiences, returning home to confront the community in which he was raised.
Gay conversion camp, best new novels, Nick White author, LGBT novels, Mike Pence conversion therapy, Gay conversion,
Camps like the one Will attends in the book, as well as ongoing religious practices that treat homosexuality as a sin to be cleansed from the sinner, are more common than most people realized until recently. These practices are intended to turn young men and women who demonstrate or are seen to demonstrate homosexual tendencies straight, bringing them back to the Lord. While many Christian communities have been made great strides in becoming more accepting and welcoming to people of all kinds, the practice still thrives in certain sectors of the Christian community.
Due to the current administration and Vice President Mike Pence's alleged support of the practice in particular, many more people know about conversion therapy now. It's come in some ways to represent the repressive, backward views that seem lately to be gaining hold. White's book looks squarely at these movements and these communities ruled by ignorance and fear, and approaches them with a level of nuance often missing from work by writers or pundits who either have never lived in such communities, or who escaped them at the first chance they were given. Yet what makes White's novel feel so urgent and so fresh, is the startling compassion he evinces for the place on which it centers, the effort that is made to give breadth and humanity to a part of the world both he and his book’s narrator are from, and by which both of them were unavoidably shaped.
Like his protagonist, White grew up in an evangelical community in the Mississippi Delta, and struggled to come to terms with his sexuality. He didn't admit to himself that he was gay until well into adulthood, after he had left Mississippi and his community to pursue an academic career, first in Ohio and then in Nebraska. He talks about his effort to make his identity cohere with his connection to where he is from, and how he has tried to negotiate a bridge between self-acceptance and compassionate understanding of his family and childhood.
But the book is not a work of autobiography. Rather, he describes his novel as "an alternative history for myself. It was a way of thinking about what my life would have been like had I been outed or come out at an an early age. Something it took me a long time to grapple with was that if I had been outed at that age, or if I had confessed some of my feelings to my parents, the reaction would have been 'ok this is a problem, let's see about fixing it,' and my reaction would have been, 'yes! I'm down, let's do this!' That's so scary to me, and also heartbreaking. In the book, [protagonist] Will, wants to go to conversion therapy, he is just as much in support of that choice. I wanted to show how often that's the case because I think people don’t realize that."
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But he also stresses the difference between himself and his narrator, and that the book is a work of fiction in the tradition of coming of age novels, LGBTQ literature and literature of the South. "It started from a place of autobiography," he explains, "but then when I started writing the characters had a life and history totally different from mine and Will became this very different person." White's parents are still alive, and he's still deeply connected to the part of the South in which he was raised, a community that he says has been surprisingly accepting of his identity and choices.
White left Mississippi for graduate school, first attending Ohio State, where he received his MFA, and where he first came out and found a supportive queer community. He then attended the University of Nebraska, where he received a PhD in English and Creative Writing, and in which program of study he began the project that would become this novel. "I've always really loved school," he explains, talking how his development as a writer and his journey to accept his sexuality were in many ways one and the same. "It's always been an escape for me. As a closeted person the notion of the life of the mind appealed to me because it allowed me to just be a mind and not think about my body. I’m always braver on the page than I am in real life, so I started exploring queer possibilities and then as I was able to find my voice as a writer, I was able to find my voice as a gay person."
White cites queer literary influences such as John Rechy, Garth Greenwell and Garrard Conley, as well as Southern literary influences including Eudora Welty. "There's such a rich tradition in gay literature and in Southern literature once you start reading that, you start to see what stories have been told and what stories you want to tell in response to those stories." Another tradition into which his book clearly fits, is that How to Survive a Summer is a novel about returning home, rather than leaving it behind, a novel that moves inward to reiteration rather than outward to escape. "Being a queer person from Mississippi not only informs my love of pickled eggs and Juice Newton, but it also affects the kinds of stories I want to write," White says, explaining that he wrote a "a return and a reconciliation novel. There’s this trope in literature, where if you’re from a small town or a rural area, you need to leave or if you don’t leave you run the risk of your life being a an object of pity or the butt of a joke. I want to resist both these things in my work - I find it really exciting to see how queerness manifests itself in spaces where you don’t traditionally think of it as existing."
Nick White
Josh Kertzer
By making the choice to send his protagonist back to the community that raised him, White hopes to raise awareness of the LGBTQ lives, narratives and communities in places like the one where he grew up, in the parts of country outside of liberal coastal bubbles. "People say things like, 'Oh you're from Mississippi, I bet you're glad you got out of there.' And I think, 'you know, there are a lot of people who are hurting in Mississippi. There are people who are just trying to live their lives. The idea that, if you’re queer you're supposed to leave assumes so much privilege. I was lucky to be given opportunities through academia, but a lot of my queer friends in Mississippi just want to live day-to-day lives and go to their jobs and be respected."
In researching his novel, White dove deep into a disturbing world. Despite the greater nuance and acceptance he has found in the South, and which he hopes to portray in his work, he acknowledges that "Mississippi is still a very repressive place," and that his research uncovered a part of reality where the depths keep getting deeper as one examines it further. Mentioning an organization called Freed Hearts, which helps teach parents of LGBTQ youth how to talk to and support their children, White says he learned that "for every conversion camp or ex-gay ministry we uncover, there are maybe twenty we don’t know about." He heard stories of alleged abuse with cattle prods, isolation and beatings.
At the same time, he wanted to understand the kind of fear and ignorance that drives these beliefs, to confront it head-on. "I wanted to get into the head of what a minister who would head up one of these is thinking, so I did a lot of searching out and reading sermons on it." The sermons were what brought him to the historical threads that run through the book. In ex-gay ministries, there's a prevalent idea that your sin is not yours alone, but rather that these homosexual urges are the accumulation of your family's sin, manifested through you. "That’s why there's so much history in the book," explains White, "because [Will] is trying to look at his history and see how his desires have manifested as this abominable flowering of sin." This approach to religion is rigorous and unforgiving, and here White brings his own religious upbringing to bear on the story he tells. "In an evangelical household, what was always taught to us that when you're asking God for forgiveness - just like when you're writing an essay or a story - you need to be specific. It's not good enough to say "I had lust in my heart." You have to say 'I lusted after x y and z, in w x and y ways.'"
How to Survive a Summer is an exploration of how deeply this kind of upbringing influences a person even into adulthood, and how difficult it is to ever fully break free of these influences, even when living beyond them. Returning home to confront these influences is necessary in the novel because one never truly escapes them, no matter how much distance one covers. The effects still linger. The impulse White recognized in himself as adolescent that would have caused him to volunteer for conversion therapy and his fight against the internalized homophobia that that represents are in many ways the driving forces of the book's narrative. The struggle against these impulses is a daily one. "I still have flare-ups," White admits, "and I think it’s something you can never truly leave behind. That's why things like gay pride are so important. I think a lot of us in the community need a constant reminder, even if it's something as simple as a nice yearly parade, to tell us "no, here's nothing wrong with you, in fact being gay is a gift and worth celebrating."
Review: HOW TO SURVIVE A SUMMER by Nick White
Author: Guest Reviewer | Posted in Book Reviews, Fiction
How to Survive a Summer
Nick White
Blue Rider Press, June 2017
352 pp; $26
Reviewed by Ellen Birkett Morris
One might be tempted to call Nick White’s novel How to Survive a Summer a gay coming of age story, but it’s so much more than that. White’s book explores the intersection of southern culture where sexuality identity clashes with religious ideals. The novel takes on our desire to fit in and the dangerous complicity that can result.
The story opens with Will Dillard, a graduate student in Ohio, overhearing the familiar voice of Mother Maude on a trailer for the film Proud Flesh, “her voice infecting the air.” Dillard’s visceral reaction comes from the fact that Mother Maude, his aunt, ran a gay conversion camp called Camp Levi that Dillard attended when he was fifteen. A fellow camper has turned the experience into a slasher movie and Will is forced to reckon with his experience at Camp Levi, including the role he played in the death of a fellow camper.
Watching the film spurs Will to return to Mississippi and visit the ground that was once Camp Levi. As he makes the journey, Will recounts his upbringing with his loving mother Debra, who dies when he is still relatively young, and his father, a racially-sensitive but gay-phobic reverend, who called Will “Rooster” in an attempt to ramp up Will’s masculinity.
In spite of his father’s efforts, Will’s true nature emerges. Will gyrates in church, imitating the heroine of the movie Written on the Wind. His father scolds him and later strikes him. In an act of solidarity and love, Will’s mother reveals that her brother was also gay by saying, “Johnny had a flare, nugget. Like you do.” She shows Will the tiara she wore as homecoming queen. When Will puts it on his head she caresses his face and says “There he is Mister Mississippi.”
White’s insight and humor comes across most vividly in a scene where young Will masturbates and experiences so much pleasure that he blacks out.
Later I’d wonder if other people—grown-ups who had jobs and lived in the world—knew such a thing on the body existed, If they did, how were they able to do anything else but this? When I did it again and again, I began to believe I was touching something more ephemeral than organ, the very essence of my existence, that part of a person you call a soul.
When his father catches him masturbating in the church, Will is sent to Camp Levi, a gay conversion camp run by Mother Maude, who is misguided but well-intentioned, and Father Drake, a sexual predator who believes religion can steer him away from his own impulses.
In the second half of the book, White deftly alternates between Will’s memories of camp and his present day experiences in chapters that evoke the conversion experience—orientation, reorientation, treatment, rehabilitation, and release.
The scenes at the camp are southern gothic, the boys are forced to recite I am nothing I am no one God rend my flesh burn me anew, baptized in a polluted lake that leaves them covered in lesions, and sent to solitary confinement in the sweat shack. They play games of Smear the Queer, tackling each other until they inflicted pain. Will observed:
We were no longer driven by our hatred of Dale. He didn’t even matter. As we bashed ourselves against him, we were only damaging our own bodies, a kind of self-hate that was somehow honorable. I wanted to keep going.
In the strange confines of the camp, the boys attempt compliance, forcing Dale into the lake to be baptized. Later they plan an escape, but one of the boys betrays the plan and Dale ends up fatally injured.
In his journey back to the camp, Will encounters his fellow campers, now grown men, each of whom have carved out a life for themselves in spite of the tragedy. He connects with his estranged father, who is now married to a black woman and has a child. He comes face to face with Father Drake, who is hanging around the site of the camp with an underage boy.
As Will confronts Father Drake he relives the memory of the camper who died and grapples with his own complicity in the camper’s death. Will chooses between exacting revenge or coming to a new understanding of forgiveness and self-acceptance.
White’s telling of this tale is unique in that it is free of condemnation. He clearly loves this region with all its faults and draws nuanced portraits of its flawed inhabitants as they try to make sense of the world.
Growing Up Gay in Backwoods Mississippi: Nick White’s How to Survive a Summer
Reviews
By Nathan Scott McNamara06/19/2017
When Will Dillard was 15, his Preacher father caught him pleasuring himself with a candle in their Baptist Church. “He was not a violent man,” Will, the protagonist of How to Survive a Summer says, “but this — this — had been on the docket for a long time.” After beating Will until they’re both exhausted, Will’s father sends him to a backwoods gay conversion camp owned by their unqualified family in central Mississippi.
In the present-day of Nick White’s debut novel, Will is a graduate student in the Midwest, but we spend plenty of time revisiting his childhood in the rural south. Many of the most engaging stretches of the novel take place at Camp Levi, where activities include forced testimonials, the game Smear the Queer, and swimming in a lake full of sewage runoff. “We would spend the first two weeks with mother Maude and the second two with Father Drake,” Will remembers. “They wanted to emulate childhood development as they understood it. Campers would bond with the mother and then the father. It’s important, I think, to mention that neither of them held degrees in psychology. They were running the camp on instinct and prayer.”
As a grown man and aspiring academic, Will has successfully buried the trauma from his experience at Camp Levi. Like most graduate students, he’s poorly adjusted — always broke and struggling to see things through — but he seems to have largely prevailed over the wounds from growing up gay in Mississippi. But he still hasn’t shaken the memory of the death of one of his fellow campers.
Like in many good horror stories, How to Survive a Summer has a particular nightmare at its center — a camper standing in his dirty yellow shirt, his fingers around the hilt of the knife in his stomach. On everything from the particulars in the moment to the long history of hate and failure that preceded it, it’s unclear who’s to blame. Regardless, there’s a boy bleeding quickly from his gut in a desolate part of the country at night. Everybody’s culpable. One character says to Will, “You know you had just as much to do with Dale dying as anybody.”
Critics sometimes wonder what our attention does to the still-living people offered up by certain biographies — like in the podcasts Serial or S-Town. How to Survive a Summer offers a fictional example of someone’s personal history being cracked open by popular culture. At the center of this novel is a slasher movie called Proud Flesh — reinterpreted from a sensationalized memoir by one of Will’s fellow campers, about Will’s actual Camp Levi experience. The movie, which comes out years after the camp shuts down and Will is in graduate school, forces Will to re-examine the scars from his past, but it also captures the variety of ways a story can be shaped, exploited, or re-appropriated as it’s told. About a gay man in the woods who murders young campers, Proud Flesh is initially received with disdain and protest from the queer community. But that outrage turns to amusement and a cult following. Queer groups flock to it. Gay clubs throw viewing parties.
White’s debut, in the spirit of the lush and multi-tiered storytelling of a writer like Alice Munro, and the Southern decay of William Faulkner, also has all the schlock of a B-horror movie. Having the past reopened is complicated for Will, and in a true Southern fashion, the pathways of blame are long and twisted and trauma stretches back generations. Before Will even suspected he was gay, he was already tangled in a family history of persecution and violence; there’s no escape, even as an aspiring academic in the north. “My God. It’s like I can never leave,” Will shouts in one scene, “Like I will always be stuck at camp, praying and hoping and striving for God to take away my abiding love to suck cock!”
Similar to Will, White grew up in rural Mississippi and his childhood also revolved around church, gossip, and family get-togethers. Unlike Will, White didn’t come out until later in life and he says that this book began with asking himself the question of what could have happened if he had done it as a teenager. Being gay was a sin. White says it wasn’t a stretch for him to imagine he might have undergone “rehabilitation.”
“I didn’t need a bargain to get me to attend,” Will says, “I wanted the camp as much as [my father] did. Maybe more. Mother Maude’s promises that I could be changed had awakened a little hope in me, too.” Promises of conversion and salvation might feel compelling for a guy like Will in the rural south. Like many places, Mississippi has an unsettling past and present, but here the awareness of that doesn’t help the enlightened do much better.
‘How to Survive a Summer’ by Nick White
Review by Gordon West
August 12, 2017
How to Survive a Summer. It’s the sort of title an innocuous confession about camping in a cocoon of roasted marshmallowy goodness would tout. The camp part is true enough here, but there are no marshmallows, archery contests or canoe-tipping. Camp Levi is a gay conversion bastion in sticky, sweaty, rural Mississippi where Will Dillard and four contemporaries endure its inaugural brutality, humiliation and a tragedy that clogs Will’s arteries of social, psychological and sexual development. Years later, a bastardized slasher movie version of a Camp Levi tell-all (written by one of its then-closeted gay counselors) is catapulted into cult status, bulldozing Will into sorting through the compartmentalized toxicity of his past, present, and potential future.
Sashaying between flashbacks of his Mississippi youth as a preacher’s son to his current existence as a growth-stunted grad student, the origin of his inner turmoil is alternately revealed and re-examined. His ineptitude at sustaining a relationship, engaging in fulfilling sexual experiences and pursuing something as simple as a kiss with a new love interest are the repercussions for enduring and not fully processing a childhood polluted with religious zealots and abuse. As layers of Camp Levi and repulsive echoes of religiosity are exposed, readers will gradually grant clemency to Will’s social blunders as an adult. After all, his formative years were spent having brainwashed fever dreams of self-deprecation, hoping conversion camp would work against the “tyranny of homosexuality” and praying that his dormant heterosexuality would finally sprout. When conversion doesn’t “work”, Will eventually also hates who he isn’t—a straight man of whom his father can finally approve and love, leaving Will an underdeveloped in-betweener.
While Will is virtually invisible to his colleagues and has a voice with the resonant power of a mouse, his first-person narration belies this taciturn nature; it holds the same captivating, melodic quality of the dewy lipstick-ed Douglas Sirk melodramas over which he obsesses as a film student (no coincidence that Sirk’s films often featured closeted leading man, Rock Hudson—the paragon of a man’s man and a homosexual hiding in plain sight). Whether recalling his doting late mother, describing his wicked be-wigged aunt, or questioning the love of his delusional father, Will’s inner voice serves to captivate the reader and oppose the perception of him as a lost social cause; if he can think such engaging thoughts, maybe he’ll be able to eventually translate them into substantial discourse with a friend, father or lover, right? If so, there’s the hope he could morph from a forgettable film-studies wallflower into something more complex.
There’s certainly a complexity to the demographic of Summer. And it isn’t delivered as disingenuous compliance with #WeNeedDiverseBooks. Though white Will is on a sojourn in the South, this does not a colorless cast make. The surrounding characters represent a spectrum of skin tone and sexual orientation that blonde and blue-eyed neighboring literary worlds ignore or address with haphazard reluctance. His father remarries a black woman, his childhood friend is Chinese, his adult best friend is a lesbian, one of the Camp Levi boys is Filipino and another black, and Will’s potential love interest is a Puerto Rican trans man named Zeus. Though these are people real-world society marginalizes, their otherness isn’t in question here, instead it’s Will’s ineptitude to embrace his own otherness that is. In their first meeting, Zeus makes a remark that sums up Will’s inner turmoil and journey toward self-love. “The danger of becoming the person you are is you run the risk of hurting the people who love the person you were.” An unspoken, implied closure to this observation is that when you no longer love the person you were, then what the hell do you care about hurting someone who still wants you to be that person? Answer that and you’ll have the solution to summer’s survival.
How to Survive A Summer
By Nick White
Blue Rider Press
Hardcover, 9780399573682, 352 pp.
June 2017
Southern Backwardness Meets Present Day in ‘How to Survive A Summer’
August 17, 2017
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A review of Nick White’s debut novel about a Mississippi summer camp centered on gay conversion therapy.
by Brett Yates
In Nick White’s debut novel How to Survive a Summer, a Southern transplant named Will Dillard is a graduate student in film studies at a Midwestern university. “My future in academia was in question,” he admits at the start, with his dissertation having lost its direction. Meanwhile, his personal life—spent in a decrepit apartment in “one of the cheapest neighborhoods in the city”—is a fog, in which he evades potential lovers and flakes on friends, relying on film to achieve “a state of total absorption in a story that overwhelmed my own with the spectacle of beautiful people and their beautiful problems.”
Then he comes across the trailer for a new movie, “Proud Flesh,” a slasher flick in the tradition of “Friday the 13th,” set at a haunted summer camp; the twist is that, in this case, the summer camp was dedicated to conversion therapy for gay Mississippi teenagers. In the universe of the film, one of the campers was lost, left behind and assumed dead, shutting down the operation, but now stalks the abandoned campground, keen to exact vengeance for the wounds he suffered under an evangelical regime of homophobic abuse.
Will, however, knows that the summer camp in the movie was real, and that one of the campers actually was killed. He knows because he attended the camp in the year 1999 and was even involved in the death of the camper—an event his conscious brain has largely repressed. The release of “Proud Flesh” sends him reeling into the traumas and conflicts of his past: the diabetes-related passing of his beloved mother, a locally famous cook and world-class raconteur; his tense relationship with his preacher father; and, especially, the summer when, in a moment of shame, he eagerly signed up for a stay at a lakeside cabin where his homosexuality would be “cured.”
White’s novel is several things at once: a detailed reminiscence of a Bible Belt boyhood; a story of homecoming; a painful exposé of the atrocity that is conversion therapy, which remains legal in 41 states; and a postponed murder mystery, with Will’s previously frozen memory gradually unspooling the tale of the lost camper as he journeys southward, abandoning his academic duties. A serious literary novel in its thematic and conceptual complexity, How to Survive a Summer has some of the plot and pacing of a thriller, and a prose style halfway between the two. Perhaps most intriguingly, however, the book is a self-reflexive examination of the “gay novel” and “gay film” genres, pondering the validity of the gory, exploitative storytelling of “Proud Flesh” while casting doubt on some of the more polite takes on what it means to be queer in America, and only occasionally does the thoughtfulness of White’s social-aesthetic critique palpably give way to commercial fiction’s demands for action.
Before Will has even seen the movie, a lesbian campus activist, Bevy, unaware of Will’s personal connection to the subject, has recruited him on account of his cinematic expertise to speak against the film, arguing that the work—in which a “group of pretty straight people are terrorized by a damaged gay dude in the woods”—will be “incendiary” enough to lead to “rises in gay bashings, suicides, and oppressive laws.” But Will backs down at the last moment, and “Proud Flesh” soon becomes a campy cult hit among gay audiences nationwide. Certain critics laud it as a gay filmmaker’s “defense of queerness as difference”—a bold, artistic rejection of the we’re-all-the-same philosophy that, in the eyes of some, has helped erode a distinct gay culture since Obergefell v. Hodges—and contend that the killings should be regarded metaphorically.
To Will, who experienced the real events, the movie is a “violation,” but he’s at least equally annoyed by the gentle coming-of-age memoir upon which “Proud Flesh” was loosely based, to the chagrin of its author: The Summer I First Believed, an affirmative gay love story penned by a young employee at Will’s camp, according to which the counselors “Rick and Larry spent the summer battling their attraction to each other” until tragedy struck, ultimately bringing them together. Will explains that the memoir “didn’t lie exactly; it told the truth poorly,” because “Rick never experienced Lake John or the Sweat Shack firsthand. In his book, the focus was on acceptance of himself as a gay man and his secret rendezvous with Larry at night while the rest of us slept.”
By contrast, the concerns of White’s novel are expansive. Centered on Will’s struggle, it also carefully regards the confluences and bifurcations of similar stories of oppression, past and present, in Mississippi and beyond. Before a college-town screening of “Proud Flesh,” Will meets Zeus, a Puerto Rican former lesbian who, after his transition, realized that his true identity was that of a gay man. The two flirt, but when Zeus notes Will’s skittishness, he comments that gay men “are fickle beasts—once they learn I’m trans, it’s a no-go.” A mid-movie hookup goes awry, and both walk out during the film’s first act. They agree to a second date, but Will stands him up, and later, when Zeus attends another showing of “Proud Flesh” alone, Bevy’s prediction of violence comes true, though not in the way she expected: Zeus gets into a fight “with some queen who called him a tranny” and finds himself thrown into a women’s jail.
By the time Will leaves Bevy and Zeus behind for his long, dark trek into the past, he understands that his own simplified narrative of liberation—a “typical migration to a metropolitan area,” in which he’d “left a small town for the promise of a big city, where your identity could be fully expressed”—has in some sense failed to bear out its desired conclusion. In Memphis, he meets up with a group of fellow Camp Levi survivors, who want to rehabilitate the cabins and turn the property into a gay-positive summer camp for LGBTQ teens; however, in a strange twist, the deed for the land now belongs to Will’s father, whom Will, even after driving hundreds of miles to see him, finds he can’t confront.
The apparent villainy of Will’s father is complicated by Will’s recollection that, at the same time he was rejecting his gay son, he was working desperately to integrate the all-white church over which he presided, firmly convinced of the deep evil of racial segregation. The effort cost him his position at Second Baptist, but it was his shame at his son’s homosexuality (and at his own failure to prevent it from blooming) that persuaded him he didn’t deserve a second shot elsewhere. Simultaneously, Will was in the process of destroying his sole teenage friendship, which he’d formed with a girl, Suzette Jin, whose parents owned the only Chinese restaurant in their stretch of the Mississippi Delta. When Suzette revealed her attraction to him, Will was too embarrassed to tell her the truth about himself and instead cloaked his rejection within a judgmental religious disapproval of her “lust.” In White’s vision, homophobia is a universally destructive force, making victims not only of gay people, who internalize it and go on to victimize themselves and their peers, but even of their heterosexual bullies and innocent bystanders.
One of the many reasons why Will can’t let go of his time at Camp Levi, even when he tries to forget it, is that his connection to the dank, buggy Central Mississippi wilderness where its horrors took place is, in fact, twofold: the camp’s setting, a deeply rural, lawless borderland between Holmes and Attala counties, was also the birthplace of Will’s mother, who, during Will’s childhood, regaled him with colorful stories of the area’s bootleggers and prostitutes, refashioning the traumas of her own harsh upbringing as “wild fantasies” of a place she nonetheless loved. These tall tales—not “Proud Flesh” or The Summer I First Believed—are the ones that touch Will’s heart. He doesn’t love the Neck the way his mom did, but its story is now his to continue, and his quest for a resolution mirrors the novel’s internal search for a point of interchange between the lush romanticization of Southern backwardness in which Will’s mother’s joyfully Gothic yarn-spinning reveled and the necessarily forward-facing path of a gay Mississippian in the 21st century.
“I knew so many stories about the Neck, and not a one of them was completely true,” Will says. “Each one represented, instead, a single person’s attempt at truth. My own story wasn’t any different.”
Brett Yates has lived in New Orleans, Durham and San Francisco, where he works as a reporter for the Potrero View.