Sights & Sounds: Camille Bacon

Sep 06, 2024

Common Discourse is a project designed to help others (and ourselves) think through creativity, focus, and intentional work—from Alex Tan & Alice Otieno.

Every Tuesday we share an idea from us, a quote from somebody else, and links worth sharing. On Fridays we invite a guest to share images from their camera roll and a sound that resonates with them.

Camille Bacon is a Chicago based writer and editor. I came across her writing last summer through Jupiter Magazine, which she co-founded with Daria Harper, and her newsletter, For Opacity.

Encountering her work has put into perspective the responsibility that writing has, in creating structures of safety for ourselves and others. When the world’s cracks become more visible, that’s when our gifts are best sharpened and required. Her contribution this week embodies that; unveiling the state of our present time, while shedding light on the hope residing in works we hold closest to us.

I have found comfort in reciting the words Ming Joi Washington responded to her, found in the introduction below: “we are each other’s audience”. A reminder that after all, the real labour at hand is in making work that mirrors and bears witness to our interior lives.

A slightly different formatting this week as each image is paired with its own sound. Here’s what she shared with us.

— Alice

Sights & Sounds —

“Come back,” wrote Toni Morrison in a missive addressed to the poet Lucille Clifton.

Then new friends, Clifton had sent Morrison a manuscript of poems to review, which would later be published as ‘Good Woman’. The letter, dated November 5, 1973 and typed on Random House, Inc. letterhead, contains not only Morrison’s feedback, but also oozes its own poetic valence: “You covered that acid in comfort,” she says on the subject of Clifton’s ‘Good Times’.

“I wish we had more time…

Come back,” she said. “Come back.”

To a woman she had met only days before,

Morrison crooned

“Come back.”

We can only imagine the worlds conjured during their first meeting, which seeded Morrison’s subsequent editing of Clifton’s memoir, ‘Generations.’ Perhaps we can think of this letter, then, as a kind of courting, an early instantiation of an enduring bond between two women who would go on to incarnate a chorus of possibilities for Black women writers on a global scale.

It’s the vigor and urgency of the plea, the yearning it signifies paired with the fervent willingness to express it that has coaxed me back to this document again and again over the past couple days. The way it spills, the brimming, unashamed want of it, the open-air longing for Clifton’s company… that’s what gets me.

Lucille Clifton and Toni Morrison at the 1996 National Book Award ceremony. Source: Screenshot, Lucille Clifton Papers at Emory University’s Rose Library.

The feeling that the “come back” indexes is a familiar one. I know that sensation well since my cherished co-conspirator, Daria Harper – the Morrison to my Clifton – dwells several hundreds of miles away from me. In re-reading the letter now, with this in mind, it seems “come back” is also a means of unabashedly testifying to a desire for intimacy, a way of stealing time to be in together, it’s another way of saying “I love you.”

The cadence of the letter also reminds me of something a new friend and fellow writer, Ming Joi Washington, said to me today in response to my nervous question about where we, as those who attend to the shadow and evade the concessions we are seduced into by those seeking to commodify us, will find audiences for our work. Awash with unflinching potency not unlike that of Morrison and Clifton, Ming responded: “We are each other’s audience.” The air around her crackled confirmation and I understood her proposition as one that urges us to consider “audience” here as a verb, rather than a noun, where “to audience” is synonymous with

to honor

to revere

to tend

to witness

to pay precise attention

to “cover that acid in comfort,”

as Morrison and Clifton enacted for one another, and as I and my fellow sister-writers carry forward today.

— Camille