For Boise literary nonprofit The Cabin, summer is a bustling time of year. It’s the season for summer writing camps — week-long literary escapades where children in third through 12th grade explore local community spaces while brushing up on their skills in screenwriting, poetry, fiction and visual art.
This year, The Cabin is running a total of 26 camps, serving over 250 campers over the course of the summer. Fifteen Boise State alumni, faculty and students are working as camp teaching writers, assistants, interns and more.
For them, The Cabin isn’t just a fun job, but an opportunity to share what they’ve learned at Boise State with the next generation of creative writers.
Boise State alum Hillary Colton (MFA, creative writing, 2023) began as the education programs manager at The Cabin soon after receiving her degree from Boise State. Colton facilitates The Cabin’s summer camps, helps coordinate writing workshops and runs Writers in the Schools, a program that connects teaching writers to local schools and juvenile detention centers.
In addition to taking graduate-level classes, Boise State’s creative writing MFA students teach one writing class per semester to undergraduates. Colton said her experiences as both a student and a teacher at Boise State prepared her to lead The Cabin’s educational efforts.
“Boise State’s MFA program allowed me to live a creative lifestyle and to encourage one to my undergraduate students, which I believe forces a person to foster empathy and think critically about the world,” Colton said.
Double alum Cassie Woodard (BFA, creative writing, 2022; MFA, creative writing, 2025) has also translated her skills from campus to camps. A teaching writer for The Cabin since 2023, Woodard is passionate about fostering playfulness in young writers. She hopes her campers fall in love with writing as a fluid art form.
“A lot of times, if you give kids a prompt without additional scaffolding, they get paralyzed because they’re more worried about making sure they get a good grade or doing it correctly than they are about getting to fully explore,” Woodard said. “It’s fun to be like, ‘Okay, what’s the silliest thing we can do right now?’ as a way to get them to laugh at the process of writing and how fun and silly it can be.”
It isn’t just campers who are having an educational summer at The Cabin. For The Cabin’s intern Abby Barr, camps represent an opportunity to build career experience in multiple fields.
Barr is a junior at Boise State pursuing a major in creative writing with a certificate in narrative arts. As an intern for The Cabin, Barr assists with administrative tasks and assembling the end-of-summer camper writing anthologies. Her role has taught her about editing, teaching and the inner workings of a nonprofit.
“Since I knew I wanted to go into a career in the literary field, this seemed like the best possible experience that I could get,” Barr said. “I love the work that The Cabin is doing.”
The Cabin runs camps with a variety of themes. “Strange Lands,” for instance, focuses on science fiction and fantasy writing. “One Acts” homes in on screenwriting.
Colton’s favorite camp is “Picture This,” which mixes creative writing with visual art. The camp culminates in a gallery where friends and family can walk around admiring the campers’ artwork. Campers proudly stand next to their work to answer questions and share their process. Every year, as Colton walks through the gallery, she is elated to see not only the work the campers create, but the accomplishment they feel.
“It can be life-changing to have someone encourage you to keep going with your art,” Colton said. “I believe it takes one person, and I love to think we are making that encouragement more accessible with our camps. Creating is a lifestyle, and art is for life. It doesn’t have to be your whole life, but I hope the kids who come through here feel the transformative power of creation.”