Building a "Sweet Black Writing Life" with Camille Bacon
"I knew if I didn't let myself free fall and take that cosmic leap of faith that I would look around at the content of my life in five years and be utterly dissatisfied.”
Listen to Camille’s full interview on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
H: Tell us about yourself. Your name, your pronouns. Your bio, whatever you want that to include. Let's get into it.
Totally. So my name is Camille Bacon. I am a Chicago based writer. I use she or they pronouns. I am a Taurus Sun, Pisces Moon, and Aries Rising for those wondering. I've been back in Chicago now for about two years and before that I was at Smith College doing my undergraduate degree but I am from Chicago as well and lived there until I was eight. My family and I proceeded to move around for about a decade, and then I came back from my last year of high school. So that's the brief trajectory.
H: Where did you move around to? I didn't even know that.
We left Chicago when I was eight, like I said, and we moved to Sligo, Ireland, which is like, in the true back ass of nowhere, Ireland. We were there for six years and then we moved to Mumbai, India, and I did my first three years of high school there. And then it was very clear that I was gonna go to college in the US and my parents were like “You're Black, you need to go back and figure out what that means in an American context before starting college in the US” So that's why we came back.
G: What was that experience like? Moving around in such a pivotal time of your life?
I feel like I'm still trying to answer that question for myself. I think we go through things as kids and kind of take them for granted. You know- that was just my life and it was the life of everyone that I was around to because we went to a lot of international schools. I think the one thing that I continue to remember, and have really deep reverence for is the way that being picked out of one context and dropped in another without much notice is that I'm really good at keeping in touch with people. I'm really good at maintaining friendships across wild time zone differences. Massive, massive geographical degrees of separation- and I think that's so much of what writing is. Pulling these disparate threads together and finding a way to get them to coalesce. So slowly but surely, I'm starting to understand and live through the things that that experience taught me.
G: I'm kinda curious, has there been anything else that you’ve recently looked at through a different lens?
Definitely. I think since graduating from college, being back in the same city as my parents, and also just having more life under my belt, I'm really starting to understand that my parents are people in excess of being my parents. Starting to relate to them not as these people that I hold on a pedestal, but rather as people that I can have moments of critique with and have really earnest moments of conflict around fundamental ethical differences in terms of how I see the world relative to my parents. I think that's been really generative in understanding the totality of who they are. That has really deepened the intimacy we have as a family and I really appreciate that.
G: Have you been able to express any of that through writing?
Definitely. So I am really close with my father and my brother is really, really close with my mother. I definitely have a more complicated relationship with my mother. But recently was asked to write about, a series of photographs that an artist in Chicago took of Black children and Black adults swimming underwater in Lake Michigan. I chose one photograph of a Black girl, kind of like floating close to the surface, and I was writing about it while I was in Martinique, where my grandparents live, where my mom's side of the family is from.
I was asking my mom the classic question of “Would you rather live in the ocean or space? Like, would you rather like know and discover everything about the cosmos or everything about the ocean?” And she said, “I would totally pick the ocean because I have never fully submerged my head underwater and I know I'm missing an entire ecosystem”
I had an opportunity to think about what it means to be an Afro-descendant person who is afraid to put your head underwater. And thinking about the discourses of ontology and how swimming for Black subjects is really almost like this citational practice because if we think about the ways that water has held history, the ways Blackness as an identity category was literally formed during the Middle Passage on the Atlantic Ocean.
This is all to say that I had an opportunity to take up that question, but also consider what it means that I've never been afraid to go under. I've never been afraid to sink. I've never been afraid to submerge my entire body underwater and. Thinking about how every time I do that, now that I know my mom has always been afraid to do that, thinking about how I can bring back a piece of that ecosystem for her and just place it in her hands. So I hope that answers the question.
H: What is something you think people need to hear right now?
I think people need to hear that separation is not what's going to save us on every single level. Being in intimacy and being in connection with ourselves, with other people, with the divine, non-human living entities. Being in separation is actually what has fucked us over as a species so deeply. I think that's the thing that any oppressive system has tried to get us to believe is what will save us when in reality, interdependence, codependence dependence in general, is where we can locate.
The kind of future that I want to live in and that I want for anyone who's coming up after us is that being in connection is a lot scarier because our nervous systems have forgotten how to do that. But it's such a worthy task to continue dedicating ourselves to, is learning to be in connection with one another.
🎧 You can listen to Camille’s full interview here.