Camille Acker is the author of the short story collection Training School for Negro Girls. She grew up in Washington, D.C. and holds a B.A. in English from Howard University and an M.F.A in Creative Writing from New Mexico State University. Her work has been published in The New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Electric Literature, as an Audible Original, and in the anthology On Girlhood: 15 Stories From the Well-Read Black Girl Library. Her writing has received support from the Tin House Residency program, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Voices of Our Nations Arts, and Millay Colony for the Arts, among others. She was a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in 2020 and named a 2022 Fellow by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. She has two books under contract with Random House and lives in Philadelphia.
Lee Davis: In interviews, you’ve talked about growing up in a house full of books and that your parents were bibliophiles. Also, you’ve described an elementary school assignment that had a profound affect on you. Looking back, do you think that “love of words” environment shaped you as a writer?
Camille Acker: That environment absolutely shaped me as a writer. For many years, my mother was an editor at Howard University Press where she worked on books by and about Black people. On the bookshelves were books she edited but also books she and my father had bought, read, and collected since the 1960s. Our house was crammed with books on literature, history, sociology, psychology, and art. All those topics made their way into our everyday interactions. Dinner at my home growing up was all of us sitting at the table watching the evening news and then talking about it, often within the context of all of those books lining the shelves. That environment made me into a thinker, but I think more importantly a person who recognized that ideas could become tangible. That was a powerful realization for me as a girl and one that still keeps me in awe of the work I do. And yes, in fifth-grade, my teacher gave the class an assignment to write a story from that week’s spelling words. It turned out to be the best homework assignment I’ve ever gotten because it was the spark that made me decide I wanted to be a writer.
In Training School for Negro Girls, you’ve noted the common thread linking the stories was about being educated, “the learning of yourself.” Can you expand on that idea?
As much as we may resist it at times, our lives are meant to be learning experiences. We often think of education as facts and memorization, degrees and conduits for pay increases but the real learning, the toughest learning, is figuring out ourselves. That is a lifelong project and not an easy one. The characters in Training School for Negro Girls are each at challenging moments of understanding themselves in new ways, a girl grappling with what it means to have a mother who’s depressed, a woman who has fled from intimacy for much of her life, a young woman yearning for a fresh start in the halls of a university. They are all making mistakes but they are trying and that’s how you learn who you are, being courageous and curious enough to figure yourself out.
From “Cicada” to “The Ropes” to “Mambo Sauce”, this collection shows a beauty of language and tone. There’s also a range of black women voices, spanning various timelines. Did you find the characters or situations guided you toward using specific elements of craft?
The characters and situations did lead me to particular elements of craft. I knew that a story like “Strong Men,” about a pivotal moment in a family needed to be long and epic, a saga, but the girls in “Who We Are” roaming the streets of DC needed to be short and staccato. “Cicada” is about a small moment, a piano competition, but I tried to make the language in it languid, lingering, so that it felt like a song on a summer day. That’s what the redrafting and editing process helps refine, what the story wants to be and how everything from the length to the language can convey that to the reader.
What has been your experience with workshops before, during and after getting your M.F.A.? Can you talk about how certain people had a positive effect on your writing and revision process? You’ve spoken about an MFA class where you had to write one story a week. Did that experience change your process?
Workshops have been invaluable to helping shape me as a writer. Before I got an MFA, workshops helped me understand what made a story. During the MFA, it helped me refine the kind of writer I wanted to be. I made a decision after a particularly vicious critique by someone in my MFA program that if I was going to get trashed as a writer, I might as well get trashed over work I really wanted to write. Luckily, the vast majority of the writers in my MFA program were wonderful and kind readers who encouraged me as I developed my voice. Workshops after the MFA program really helped me feel a part of a community and got Training School for Negro Girls ready to go out into the world. I’ve been supported by so many people in my writing life, wise mentors, generous readers, and cheerleading family and friends. A creative life really is easier when you’ve got your people. After years of both being in and leading workshops though, I think the true value of those spaces is the development of your own discernment about your writing. Hearing multiple critiques means that you can listen for the one that rings true, you can spot the reader who really gets what you’re doing, and ultimately you figure out how to problem solve your way to your best draft.
Most writers are in conversation with or are influenced by certain authors. Can you talk about how your collection of stories, set in Washington, D.C., is in harmony with authors Toni Cade Bambara and Edward P. Jones?
I was deeply influenced by Edward P. Jones’s collection, Lost in the City. I was able to see the city I grew up in through his eyes and read about characters who felt as fully realized as my family, my friends, and my neighbors. Both he and Toni Cade Bambara have such a love for Black people in their work and I hope that comes through in my work too. They are also both so skilled at the revelation of a small moment. That quotidian appreciation of the world is also what connects me to short stories. An entire world of feelings can be shown in just a day’s time as Edward P. Jones shows in his story “The First Day” and Toni Cade Bambara shows in “The Lesson.”
You’ve described how you’ve experimented with process, from reserving blocks of time at sunrise to burning the midnight oil. How did you land on a writing process that works for you?
It took years for me to find the process that best enabled me to create but the most valuable piece of that process was first accepting that my process was my own. Once you allow yourself to be yourself—night owl or early bird, writing every day or not writing for weeks—you can then figure out how to make the best of it. It doesn’t help to try to shoehorn ourselves into what someone else says about what we should be doing. And always, always, be gentle with yourself. Creativity can live under duress but it can’t thrive under it.
What was the timeline to getting Training School for Negro Girls published?
It was a long road to getting Training School for Negro Girls published. I went out to agents with it but ultimately that didn’t lead anywhere. Then, I had the great fortune of being laid off from a job and that gave me time to do some more work on the book. It was around that time that a friend sent me the call from The Feminist Press about their Louise Meriwether Prize for a debut book by a woman of color. I sent in my manuscript and reached the final round of that competition but didn’t win. Feminist Press loved the book though and asked if they could publish it. They were phenomenal partners in bringing that book into the world and even though I could never have charted that path, I’m so grateful it happened as it did.
What is next for you in the realm of projects or publishing?
I’m currently finishing a draft of my novel and there’s also a short story collection that’s pretty much finished. Both books should be coming out in the next couple of years.