Just a little preface… for my English 102 class at Boise State University, we had to pick a theme upon which our papers would be based. At the last minute I chose art therapy, thinking I would at least get to read about art and might be somewhat interested. Suffice it to say this was a perfect topic for me to pick, and my other two papers (including the OTHER paper I was writing while at February Brave Girls Camp!!) have included bits about BGC. This, however, is an ethnography–I had to observe a community. What better art therapy-type community to observe than Brave Girls!! I hope you like it… xoxoxo
Brave Girls Club: an Ethnographic Adventure
To call the following experience a mere ethnographic observance would both be a massive understatement and would do no justice to it. I experienced something while observing, attending, and working as staff at the February 2010 Brave Girls Camp (BGC). As I sit here to attempt inscribing the remarkable experience that is BGC, I am trying to feel a small piece of the atmosphere created there. I am browsing the Facebook pages of my fellow staff members and of the guests, telling them how much I’m thinking about them. My “Brave Girl” playlist is singing to me from my trusty computer, Eleanor. Several artifacts from my BGC experience are scattered about my bedroom: a wooden figurine from the first BGC is wearing the charms that graced our goblets around her neck; my apron, designed by me and sewed by my dear friend Camille, hangs outside my closet on a thumbtack; and a 16 oz. bottle of glossy Mod Podge is sitting next to Eleanor on my desk. Alas, I cannot recreate the feeling one has while attending Brave Girls Camp. What I shall do here, however, is attempt to portray and explain that environment to you.
Brave Girls Club is an artsy women’s organization created by artist Melody Ross and her sister and business partner, Kathy Wilkins, to enrich women’s lives in a heartfelt, long-lasting, and meaningful way. Being “brave,” as the group’s name suggests, is a major theme of the Brave Girls Club and their quarterly art & life retreats. However, defining Brave Girls Club or even coming up with a sufficient description of what it is can be tricky. The Random House online dictionary defines brave as “possessing or displaying courage; able to face and deal with danger or fear without flinching,” (“brave”). To Kathy, being brave means: “doing HARD things with grace and dignity and growth and joy and yes, even with humor. [It] is having the courage to be your 100% authentic self.” Melody’s definition of “being brave has meant getting up every day, whether I want to or not, and making at least one thing in my life better than it was yesterday,” (“Brave Girls Club”). While each Brave Girl’s definition of what it takes to be brave is different and unique to them, we can surmise that the following quote by Georgia O’Keefe encompasses the feelings of each woman: “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.” If that is what being brave means, how does that apply to Brave Girls Club? First, let’s take a look at what actually happens during each Brave Girl Camp.
According to their advertising, BGC is a “four-day, all-inclusive retreat […] offering both beautiful cabin accommodations and meaningful art projects and instruction,” (Wylie). In an attempt to shed light on what makes the Brave Girls Camp experience so unique and special, let’s break down the preparations the staff attends to in order for the guests to have a truly life-changing experience. The term “staff” is used here loosely, as all involved in preparing for and running the camps are the founders’ family and extremely close friends.
In the weeks before BGC arrives, Kathy, Melody and their staff hold “Brave Girl Work Days” to make sure things are in order for the upcoming retreat. Gifts for the guests are made. Journals, complete with little Brave Girls Club labels on the inside cover, are covered in Melody’s designer paper. Paper gift boxes are made by hand. For this camp, Kathy’s daughter, Chelsea, lays out the new schedule she designed to help ease the standing-time of staff members working in the kitchen. Recipes for the hand-prepared meals are discussed and staff members’ mouths water at the thought of a week of such delicious food coming up soon.
“The set-up,” as in the day before guests arrive, is quite an experience for a staff member of BGC. It begins with a caravan of stuffed-to-the-rooftop vehicles heading up to wherever the cabin is for that particular camp; this time, the caravan heads up to a tiny town in the Idaho mountains—Crouch, Idaho. A couple minivans, Melody’s husband Marq’s pickup, a few miscellaneous vehicles and a designated BGC trailer full of supplies needed for the upcoming retreat are stuffed: multiple shopping carts worth of soon-to-be gourmet, hand-prepared food; tons of collected, bought-in-bulk, and donated art supplies from various sources for the guests and staffers; and boxes upon boxes of vintage, funky decorations are just some of the things driven up the windy road to BGC.
Once the destination—the enormous cabin—is finally reached, the staff members of the retreat never seem to stop moving; little does that cabin know, it is about to be transformed from an admittedly beautiful facility to a funky, artsy, fabulously healing safe haven for women.
The staff members separate into teams: the Kathy team, to help with the setup, organization, and cleaning of the kitchen; the Melody team, sent to the giant art room to set up the supplies and etc. for project time; and the décor team, to be dispatched throughout the house to do decoration and bedroom setup. Melody’s Bose stereo is plugged in upstairs and happy, catchy music blares throughout the house; everyone sings along with Frank Sinatra, Eva Cassidy and Ingrid Michaelson, creating a constant yet pleasant stream of noise no matter where you go.
The kitchen team, Kathy’s team, gets busy unpacking the kitchenware: a medley of new kitchen appliances, like a Bosch bread maker and a Kitchenaid mixer, and vintage dishes and goblets collected in the months previous to camp are set up in their new cupboard homes. Silverware both new and vintage is piled into one giant silverware drawer much to the delight of those scheduled to do the dishes later throughout the week. The hook on the back of one of the staff bedrooms serves as an apron hook; when the staffers finally resign to bed much, much later, their personalized aprons hang there waiting to be snatched up again only a few hours later when morning arrives.
Melody’s team, meanwhile, is busy in the basement-turned-art room. Several pieces of visqueen have been laid down as a base for the art area, taped together into one enormous sheet, and wedged between the carpet and the baseboards to protect the rented cabin’s carpet. A paint-splattered painter’s canvas is laid down on top of the visqueen to prevent the plastic from ripping and for further carpet protection. In one section of the developing art room, art tables and chairs are set up and covered with white paper, upon which guests will work on their projects. A sewing machine is set up against the wall, complete with scraps of vintage fabric for the guests to use. Staffers hang up their artwork from the first camp, so the guests can get ideas for their own projects and see how individual each project really is. The area of the basement opposite the guest tables is used to set up more tables, this time for the art supplies. More than a dozen plastic boxes of designer paper and ribbon are arranged by color—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—for easy access by guests. Squeeze bottles of paint, tiny plastic Martha Stewart glitter shakers, and baskets full of vintage-style stickers and brads and pieces of chipboard are set up on the other tables.
While the kitchen and art teams are hard at work, the décor team swoops about the house to deck the cabin out in true Brave Girl style. Vibrant, joyful colors of green, red, blue and yellow are central to the design theme both on the website and in the décor. In the living room, bright green tule is strung around the window frames, and then surrounded with faux foliage complete with tiny white flower buds. White Christmas lights are hanged around the tuling to give night time in the cabin a warm, cozy ambiance. A dozen or so pictures deemed significant by each guest and sent in before camp are finally clipped to the lights, making the guests feel at home in their new surroundings. During an email interview about her experience, Cheryl Waters said this about the pictures hanged on the glittering lights: “I could feel the love. When we walked into the cabin . . . there were photos of our family and friends we had sent. We were still connected to our family back home but we also had a new family,” (Waters). To complete the living room a giant red shag rug is rolled out in the middle of the carpet.
More lights and tule are hanged throughout the house, including in the art area and around the doors to the bedrooms. Original, mixed-media paintings by Melody are hanged throughout the house; many of them are inspirations for the art projects the guests will be doing in the following days. Amid the set up of the cabin, Melody is found painting messages like this on the tops of mirrors: “Hello, brave girl. You are a beautiful, cherished work of art.”
Throughout the week, all staff members become part of the décor team, changing the arrangement of the various bird sculptures, flower arrangements, and pictures placed throughout the house in further efforts to show the guests each day is a new, fabulous, loved beginning for them.
Not to be forgotten, Marq and some of the other husbands are out in the garage organizing the boxes from the BGC trailer. Box after box after box is unloaded, tables are carried out two-at-a-time, and more artwork is carefully set aside. While the sight of only one refrigerator in the cabin was at first a worry, the February weather in Crouch allows for the garage to be turned into one giant refrigerator and pantry; the snow-covered back porch a freezer. Marq, the master of organization and a relentlessly hard worker, is busy arranging the boxes according to exactly when and how they will be needed: canvas books go here, extra supplies go there; fruits and veggies on this table, drinks underneath that table. Though the other men helping with setup had to leave to attend to business at home, Marq was able to stay through the week to help around camp and give the women a safe feeling that, if something were to happen, at least one man is around for protection.
Setup continues into Tuesday, even minutes before the guests arrive. Marq heads down the mountain to meet the guests in Eagle, Idaho. Guests follow Marq back up to Crouch in a chartered minibus, where they have time to get to know one another and experience the dazzling Idaho Mountains. About the ride up to BGC, Lisa Stanton said she felt “the sense of being with women in for a very special experience,” (Stanton). When Marq calls to alert the staffers that the bus is within minutes of arriving, what seems like a million things happen at once. Everyone cheers, squeals, and dances in excitement that the week they’ve all been preparing for is finally here. Décor team members quickly finish hanging their pieces of decoration; those working in the kitchen do a quick check to make sure dinner is on schedule and no dishes are left out; several art team members rush downstairs to make sure everything is in its place and set up properly for the guests. Those who happen to be empty-handed at the time Marq calls rush to help those who need it. Melody walks out to the end of the road to meet the guests and give them a short welcoming speech: Worries Are for the Birds. Each guest receives a bag of birdseed to represent their worries about what is back at home, and all at once their worries are scattered to the wind. Simultaneously, staff members wait on the porch to greet each guest individually as they walk up the stairs to BGC.
Through the breakdown of just the setup of Brave Girls Camp, we can see several themes present in the attitudes and actions the staff members emphasize and display. Firstly, unconditional love: if the Brave Girls Club staff members did not love each and every one of the guests coming to the retreat, it would be extremely difficult to spend hours and hours making sure every single detail was attended to; it would be almost impossible to spend that time making sure each guest felt safe and at peace while at camp; and surely the staff members would succumb to thoughts like, “Is all this work worth what’s going to happen this week?”
Secondly, hard work is a major mind-set of a Brave Girl staff member. Setting up Brave Girls Camp is a flurry of nonstop movement, of detail-oriented, sometimes tedious work to make sure each guest knows exactly how much they are loved. Despite the fast-paced and physical work that is setting up BGC, each staff member’s face shows the same level of excitement and love of serving the guests throughout setup.
When outsiders ask what Brave Girls Club is about, or what Brave Girls Camp is, those who have experienced it firsthand often come up with a variety of answers. Artist, mother, and Brave Girl staff member Camille McClelland describes BGC as “life-healing retreats for women.” When asked to further explain her definition of Brave Girls Camp, Camille went on: “[While at Brave Girls Camp,] we learn how to self-examine and see who we are and what we are worth. Once we know [how to do] that it is easier to put whatever personal trials and struggles we might be experiencing into perspective and have a better understanding of how to get through them in one piece,” (McClelland).
Learning to self-examine and especially seeing one’s self worth are further major themes of the Brave Girls Club camps. Melody Ross, the artsy side of the BGC founder duo, helps guests to do this by giving meaningful, useful art classes once daily. And yet, while Brave Girls Camp is described as an art retreat, it was not actually created for the purpose of creating art. The purpose of the art projects taught at BGC is to help women find the tools to succeed in doing “hard things,” making difficult and often life-changing decisions, or in coping with situations in life they would otherwise be unable to. As Camille said in her e-mail interview about her experience, “Brave Girls Camp does not solve all life’s problems, it just gives a woman the insight to be able to live through them,” (McClelland).
Each day just after sunrise, Melody and Kathy led those who chose to go on a nature walk in the area surrounding Crouch. The crisp, early morning allowed women time to talk, time to reflect on what they felt their purpose was both at Brave Girls Camp and elsewhere, and time to get to know one another further. Dawn Blackstead called the morning walks “A time away to relax and get fresh air and get ready to begin our day with a clear mind,” (Blackstead).
Another major part of the Brave Girls Camp experience was the meals. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and snacks are all hand-cooked and specially selected by those working on the kitchen shifts. Guest favorites included Chelsea’s husband Luke’s Tri-Tip Steak, caprese salad, and crème brule. In the preparation, service, and quality of the meals, we can again see the hard work and love put into the retreats. Staff members on kitchen shift spent a majority of their time chopping, browning, baking and otherwise preparing the meals for the camp. The vintage dishes used were in a different arrangement every night, again suggesting to the guests that with a lot of hard work and even more love, even the smallest details can make a difference in their lives.
The tear-down of BGC is much like the set-up, only staffers have gone on about half the sleep they normally would and have to do it all over again. The work is hard: tables need to be carried back up the stairs, couches need to be moved by exhausted staffers; an immaculate cleaning of the cabin needs to be done; decorations need to be carefully taken down and (somehow) fit back in to the box it came in; Marq immediately gets to work planning the packing of the trailer that the staff will be doing in the coming hours. The staff members are exhausted from the few hours of sleep they got each night during the retreat; their cheeks are still wet with tears from seeing their new, Brave sisters drive away on the bus; carrying the tables and moving the couches makes their brows sweat and their muscles ache. Yet no one complains, no one leaves slack for others to pick up, no one sits and watches while others work. In fact, there is still the cheery aura about the house full of music and laughter (even if it is sometimes laughter from how silly it seems that you’re able to carry a table when you’re that exhausted). Why? A worn out Brave Girl staff member needs only think of the change they saw in the women waving goodbye in the windows of the bus, many of whom came to camp heartbroken and left full of joy; she needs only think of a breakthrough a guest shared while working on her projects; she needs only remember the love she feels for her Brave Girl sisters to make it all worth it.
Such an experience is difficult to put to writing; this observation and staffing of Brave Girls Camp changed my life forever. Seeing the hard work, love, and dedication put into such an organization simply because of the love the founders feel for others is awe-inspiring enough, let alone when combined with meaningful art projects and newly formed lifelong friendships. While not everyone will have the opportunity to experience such an event, I believe everyone should have a chance to feel what the women felt there—unconditionally loved.
