Sending young magicians to camp.

Casey lives with neurofibromatosis, a condition that causes tumors throughout the body. It changed how he grew up: one leg grew larger than the other, and he was teased for it. Brain tumors left him with learning disabilities, and he finished school with an IEP diploma, which closed the usual next steps most kids take for granted. So he built a different life. He volunteers around his home area, often at events benefiting children with disabilities, and he keeps practicing. In his scholarship application, Casey told us that performing is the one time he forgets his pain, and that he wanted to keep going to camp for two reasons: to learn more magic, and to learn more about himself.

Dan was eighteen, a college student living at home with his father, when he earned his scholarship. For Dan, magic is closer to meditation than to showing off: practicing a routine is how he steadies himself in difficult moments. What he wanted from camp wasn't a bigger trick. It was the craft behind it: how a routine is scripted, and how a magician can hand someone "a new and impossible moment." He arrived hoping to leave with "something new to think about."

Derek was fifteen when he applied, and he had been doing magic since he was nine. He found it during his parents' separation, and he is plain about what it did for him: it helped him through a lot of feelings at the hardest stretch of his childhood. His mom, who Derek says "works very hard," kept it going: she found him a mentor and bought him tricks. What Derek wanted from a scholarship wasn't a trick. He applied, he wrote, because he would "love to be able to tell my mom that I have helped out by getting a scholarship."