Drawing the Chicken 11: Creating a Life

(and new directions for this newsletter)

I’ve been away from screens for the past couple of weeks due to my annual eye surgery. I’m still slowly finding my way back, and over the past 2 weeks of a lot of no-screen, sit-in-a-dark-room time, I’ve been thinking a lot about what creativity means in my life. It’s all the things you read me on here, of course — the poems, the essays, the pottery, the painting, the baking— but I’m also more and more aware that those are just the tip of the iceberg.

As someone who lives with multiple chronic illnesses, has had 30-35 surgeries (and counting!), and is constantly adjusting her life and work to meet her body and heart, I realise that creativity for me is far more fundamental than just making art. It is how I’ve made my life, this specific, particular life, outside every template, professional and personal. A lifetime of asking “what do I need to build? and what resources do I have?” — and then chasing the answers with the imagination and determination that creative work both teaches and demands.

For instance: in my 12 grade year, my chronic eye disease had gotten so severe that I could barely keep my eyes open without being in excruciating pain. A fantastic teacher offered to help, and we brainstormed together: Eventually, I was carried through that year by basically a movement of all my teachers and friends recording my textbooks on audio cassettes so I could study, then somehow convincing the (very bureaucratic and unyielding) examination board to let me write the paper with a scribe. There was no clear pathway in India for a student with the kinds of challenges I had — you were either blind or you weren’t— but somehow, we found a way.

Or, when I came back to India after finishing up my MFA in Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, I had three surgeries in 4 months and was laid up in bed for months, quitting a new job within weeks of joining. It was pretty clear that employers weren’t going to be able to work around my health challenges, so I started looking fora alternatives. A friend asked why I didn’t consider teaching writing, so I made a flier for a workshop, posted it on Facebook, and soon began a decade long career teaching creative writing once a week out of my living room, and then at retreats around the country and finally online— in 3 month chunks so that I could plan my surgeries and have the flexibility for my various health up-and-downs while still supporting myself financially.

But work and illness have only been a small part of all of this. Learning to live creatively has also meant being able to dream up what family means to me, coming from a single mother home with little to no extended family to fall back on, and intentionally cultivating new ways of being family with friends and loved ones since I was 15. It has also meant being willing to take the leap of adopting siblings as a single mother, while being in a long term committed relationship with someone who will be my children’s favourite uncle but cannot be a traditional father figure due to various personal circumstances. Learning to live creatively has also meant finding a one-week-a-month work project in schools in Shimla when I wanted to build a parallel life in the mountains, and equally, it has meant being able to support and rebuild my partner’s campsite after the pandemic, opening up an outdoor cafe to carry us through a year when inter-state travel was restricted.

Most recently, my creative work has been mostly around food: due to a second chronic inflammatory condition, the doctor recently ran some tests and then cancelled 75% of my food groups — no dairy, no gluten, no egg, no dairy alternatives like soy or cashew, no yeast or fermented foods, no corn, no nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant), and a few other things. For the first week or two I was absolutely overwhelmed, eating mostly just fruit as I tried to figure all of this out, but then I did what I so often do at the start of a creative project: I jumped into research. Within two months, I learned an incredible amount about food, learned how to make nutritious and tasty meals — and even indulgences like crackers and Speculous cookies— that work around all of these restrictions, and my family is eating healthier and tastier meals than ever, even as I continue to learn and experiment.

All of these sound like very different parts of a personal and professional life, but for me, they are all the stuff that creative work is made of: imagine, plan, research, experiment, be willing to be thrown entirely off course— then imagine and plan again, find new resources, experiment some more, make copious notes, until Voila!

So, as I move into this new year, with some very conveniently round numbers like 10 posts and 1000 subscribers on New Years’ Eve (whoa — thank you!), I’m now excited to expand this newsletter. My creative work will still be at the heart of it, but from this post on, I’m going to expand the definition of creativity for this newsletter. I will continue to write about writing and clay, but I’m going to also write about this life I’m building— with chronic illness, a freelance career that I didn’t know was possible, new kinds of family, the somewhere-on-the-horizon adoption, the reimagining nutrition and food, and so much else— as my creative project, the best kind of creative project because it is literally a lifelong journey.

I hope you’ll stick around for the ride.