She was used to being the only teen pulling out a book during social gatherings. When everyone did it at this Utah writing camp, she realized, ‘My gosh, there’s more of us.’

When 14-year-old Ellie Seegmiller walked into a room at Southern Utah University for writing camp last summer, it was full of what seemed like hundreds of kids. Her heart sank.

“Oh, crap, I’m going to have to make friends and stuff,” she remembers thinking.

Seegmiller, who’s written a book a year since she was in sixth grade, was excited about the chance to work with famous authors during the first-ever WriteOut camp. But she’d been picturing a classroom setting, sparsely populated with a few other kids from Cedar City.

Instead, she says, the three-day camp was “one of the most phenomenal things that I’ve ever done.