It’s no secret that sometimes our staff meet their person at camp. Two summers ago I, along with many other community members, had the pleasure of attending two long time staff members’ commitment ceremony, which was a truly magical celebration of the playful love these two have. They navigated working together, long distance, and competitive natures to find themselves here. And now they’ve moved across the country, Deanna taking on a full time position with us and Mike playing up a storm of percussive music. So of course I start by asking: If you needed to be summoned, what three objects would someone need to ritualistically summon you?
To which Deanna replied: “Number one, of course you would need a frisbee, because I would be so excited to come and chase it down. Number two would be a bottle filled with air from like a warm sunny day that had been captured. And number three would be some dark chocolate.”
And how to summon Mike? “I think you would need a pair of drumsticks.
It’s the obvious one. I think you would need a book, which might make it hard to summon me, because you’d need to find a copy of whatever book I was reading at that time. And then you would need a small vial of rain water that fell on a day in which I did not have to go outside. Because I love a cozy rainy day.”
They both started their Wayfinder journeys as campers and, weirdly enough both heard about camp through a cousin, though they never went to the same camps. Deanna’s competitive spirit brought her back year after year to play harder and try each new level of involvement (community leader, apprentice, staff, summer director). Whereas Mike savored his sword fighting time as a camper, only apprenticing when he was 18 because his friends told him too. Lo and behold, those same friends didn’t come back, and if it wasn’t for Mike’s steadfast nature to follow through on his apprenticing commitment, we would have lost him, but those two weeks apprenticing found him making new amazing friends and finally coming back for the community.
The two finally met at Staff week 2013, where they became friends, and they worked together, a lot, the following summer when they fell in love. Neither living near camp or near each other made camp a very special place where their relationship flourished (after hours and off campus, these two are very professional). “I love people who are motivated, who are good with kids, are exciting to be around, love fun and games, and don’t take themselves too seriously, and all that stuff was on full display.” Deanna said, while they were working at day camps. And they didn’t let their feelings make things complicated at camp, Mike felt that “working with Deanna has always felt really really really easy.”, thanks in part to the soft skills they learned at camp, such as how to really listen to someone, how to see from one another’s perspectives, and how to hold space for big feelings. Skills they both also use in their other careers.
Deanna has always been a passionate person and learned to follow those passions into a number of amazing jobs. As a kid she loved math and science which led her to a degree in physics, which was “very fun, very interesting.” After a couple of years working at a quantum computing startup doing quantum engineering (“which was really cool”), she was ready for a chance to follow her new passion, combating climate change. Having picked up some software engineering (noting that quantum engineering skills didn’t transfer well), she decided to find a startup that needed software engineers to work on climate tech. That’s how she ended up at her last job at the time of this interview. Deanna was working remotely as a senior software engineering manager. She led a team of software engineers, however most of the work force at the company were chemists trying to do something pretty cool. “They are trying to use chemistry to turn carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and then carbon monoxide can be used to make a bunch of stuff like jet fuel or other consumer goods that are being made. The tagline is Made From Air. So more carbon neutral or even potentially carbon negative products. We’re still a startup. We’re still in the prototyping phase. So this works in the lab. We’re trying to make it work at a scale where it is useful to anyone and fingers crossed that that goes well.” And now, lucky for us, her passion for working with kids has led her to take a full time position with us.
Mike graduated from grad school with a doctorate in Musical Arts in 2024. “I’m a percussionist by trade. So nowadays I am teaching.” During grad school there wasn’t time for much else, so Mike is finally getting a chance to breathe and see what new jobs and hobbies might come his way. He started this year off touring, playing music and teaching master classes at Bard and other universities along both coasts. He specializes in modernist music. “For those who don’t know, modernism was this artistic period in the late 19th century up until the late 20th century.” He goes on to describe his feelings for the music, “I think it is quite beautiful but [the music] does not care if you think it is.” Finding that fascinating in college he went to grad school to work with Steven Schick at UCSD who is a leading modernist percussionist in America. Mike has found that many skills he honed while teaching at camp he still uses. “I think that the biggest, most practical one is how to hold space and how to hold the attention of a room, especially when teaching or directing ensembles. I had someone ask me how I became such a good teacher one time” to which he said “it’s because I had to do it with 58 eight year olds in Woodstock in 90 degree weather.”
Wayfinder also helped Mike in other ways. “Wayfinder had a big impact on my development of empathy as a young man (biologically speaking). My gender has transformed as a result of knowledge which came from Wayfinder as well. The ability to communicate empathetically, the ability to think about other people’s perspectives came from the programming we do.” Deanna also notes these skills and more as useful in her life and work. “In my career I have run a handful of team bonding retreat days where we have icebreakers and we have trust workshops/team building.” So she has made play-maps and plotted out ways to have her work teams feel closer in a trusting and safe environment. “That’s just running a camp workshop for adults, a hundred percent.” Through her work, she has also been made to go to manager training which feels wild because “ these are skills that we’re teaching 11 year olds at camp.” These types of skills sadly can be lacking in the school system; and while they are often taught at summer camps, we bring it to another level at Wayfinder. We teach “how to be an active listener. how to create and hold space for vulnerability and how to receive vulnerability and respond to it in a positive and constructive way.”
This ability to hold space and really listen is at the heart of everything we do at camp. To be able to be playful, to be able to tell when it is ok to push a little, is a skill we are all working on fine tuning. When these two get into Adventures Games they are no stranger to reading these cues. They both told me fun stories of how they will invite play with each other while in character. They are both very comfortable with their competitive spirits and with one another, so they can use competition as a form of play as well. While playing Golden Blade, a player vs. player Adventure Game where teams got points by killing monsters and completing quests, Mike saw Deanna, who was on another team, sneak into the woods. Mike sent a teammate after her and within a minute there she was walking past him wearing a spirit costume as they exchanged knowing looks of “you got me.”
Deanna’s story was from The Interstate, a horror style Adventure Game where a small town gets visited by demons. She was playing a mother with a family and found herself confronted by demon Mike giving her the choice of which family member he will kill. She had led a bunch of players, playing as a baseball team, to the scene, and they were waiting outside of the small cabin while Deanna had to make her choice. “My favorite moments in Adventure Games are when my character surprises me, Deanna, and I’m like, oh, that felt like a decision someone else would make, or like a reaction someone else would have, or I didn’t know that I was capable of that.” In a panic and in character Deanna said what she thinks is one of the worst things she has ever said. “There are children outside. Take them instead” Luckily demon Mike didn’t take the kids and took her pretend husband instead. “It was my darkest moment. And my character had a breakdown thinking ‘I can’t believe that just came out of my mouth.’ And out of character I was thinking ‘I can’t believe that wasn’t premeditated.’ That wasn’t to make the scene better. That was just a desperation thing.” However, out of character, Deanna doesn’t think she would make that same choice should our town suddenly be overrun with demons.
That is what LARPing is all about for us at Wayfinder, learning about yourself while trying on different mindsets. Growing your understanding of others and the world through facing challenging choices. And learning when, how, and why to fight. A big thanks to these two for sitting down with us and being such instrumental staff in their own ways. Wish them joy and luck settling into the Hudson Valley.
Written by Trine Boode-Petersen from an interview in 2024