Camille King GOT WORDS

Singing Helps With Her Writing

It’s June. Camille King has just graduated from Bishop Luers High School and is headed to Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana to study neuroscience and French as a double major.

King is not thinking about neurosurgery though.  “I’m interested in how we all have virtually the same brain, but [we all] do so many different things.  A lot of time we don’t understand why.”

King has an interest in research; specifically, she wants to focus on the why of bullying.  She was a witness and a recipient during middle school.  “I wanted to study psychology, but [the field] doesn’t have enough of a research base for me.  There weren’t enough reasons why the brain affects how humans act.”

And King has always loved French, ever since she was young.  She studied it in school.  The language “feels like a second language to me,” King said.

The summer of 2018 is a very wide door for King, and the only thing the second oldest of five siblings has to look forward to is the rest of her life.  “I’m very excited for college because I can finally spread my wings,” King said.

“It’s the summer before I go to college.  I kind of want to be in bed right now.”  But Camille King has been a member of the Voices of Unity children’s choir for 8 years, and it’s two weeks before a Voices of Unity Choir concert: The Summer Spectacular, a Tribute to Disney on June 23, 2018.

The Summer Spectacular will be King’s last concert, at least for a while. College kids are encouraged to return to Voices of Unity in some capacity. “I’m really, really sad,” about leaving, King said, who dedicated every weekend for seven and a half years to the choir.

Fourteen days before a concert means boot camp for the choir.  Their standard is excellence and nothing less.  Pre-concert boot camp lasts from 1 P.M. to 5 P.M. every day with an hour break before their usual rehearsal time starting an hour later.

“Mr. White, our choir director, is training us to do is to be ready for rehearsals [with our boot camp] so we don’t have to learn the material when we could be perfecting it,” King said.  They got to put in that work.  “I can see the bigger picture.”

King’s family has always been a musical one; her single mother played the flute and she got her kids piano lessons.  The Voices of Unity was King’s first choir, other than the one at school.

“The singing is just an attraction, but when you get here, there’s like a deeper family bond,” King said, “you learn about life, about success, and how to be prepared for what’s coming next,” like providing Camille an avenue to explore her writing, her “random stuff” like poetry and short stories.

Voices of Unity has a creative writing program called Expression where King’s writing has been cultivated.

“I can write what I want, write what I feel,” King said.  “What we learn I can take to my research papers and essays which is really my strong suit, but now I know how to make it mine, how to let my voice come through in formal writing.”

King pulls from different art forms, especially music, to bolster her writing.  “Being exposed to many types of music, with different types of meters, helps for different rhythms in writing, whether it’s just prose or poetry,” King said.  And “it helps having an emotional connection to the music.”

King might be sneaking in some journalism courses, or some college newspaper writing, while at Earlham.