Drawing the Chicken 13: On Nurture

Also introducing The Resilience Cookbook

While I was at Hedgebrook last year, I often heard a version of Gloria Steinem’s description of that residency: “The best way I can express Hedgebrook is to say it's as if women took 5,000 years of nurturing experience and lavished it on each other.” In fact, I has read this description long before I went — it was one of the main reasons I applied. I had done several other artist residencies by then, and I had gotten different and valuable things from each of them, but I was yet to experience one as deeply nurturing. I wanted to know what that looked like.

Hedgebrook did not disappoint. My four weeks in Willow Cottage, tucked away from the world, and free to fully inhabit my body and my words, were the most nurturing experience I have ever had, by far. Some of it was in the gourmet meals prepared around all our dietary restrictions. Some of it was in the great care they were taking to keep everyone safe during the pandemic. Some of it was in the wood always chopped and ready for our stoves, the flowers we were encouraged to pick for our vases, the warm smiles and deep conversations that always seemed readily available. But I kept trying to dig deeper, understand a little more of why that place made me feel safe enough to write and to read with abandon, to fully inhabit my present self and dress I had barely dared to dream before. I needed to understand this because I needed to know how to recreate it, for myself, and also for others in the future.

We did have some interesting conversations about this among the residents. One of the women who was there with me— an older woman from the generation that fought so hard for women to not be defined merely as nurturers— found this description frustrating: why couldn’t we be more than nurture, she asked. Fair question, but that’s not how it felt to me. I want to live in a more nurturing world, and I know that women and queer people have been deeply in trained in nurture, often because our survival has depended upon it. By no means are we only that, or always that, by no means is it an identity I want to claim. But when you talk of it as experience, as Steinem does, then I’m here for it. I can be (and am) many things, and I would love for nurturing to be one of the main things I am, just as I would love for the world at large to be more nurturing. I’m interested in nurture.

At Hedgebrook, I learned about how a thoughtfully designed physical space can be an act of nurture — one of the greatest acts, actually, because it is the kind of nurture I could experience all alone, while doing my work or staring out of a window, without anyone obvious to thank or acknowledge. Nurture in that cottage was the way the window edges were bevelled so that the sun would create little rainbows in different parts of the room through the day. It was the way every cottage can just about see the light or the chimney of another cottage— the reassurance of another’s presence — while at the same time have enough foliage in between for privacy that needs no curtains. It was, for me above all, in the beautiful window seat I have written about before, and in the journals full of fears, vulnerabilities, celebrations, and all types of other process notes kept by all the women who had lived and written in those cottages over the decades.

Mount Rainier from Hedgebrook

It was also in the way Mount Rainier peeked out from behind the clouds to surprise me as I sat on my regular bench for lunch on the one day I was all alone on the campus, between two shifts of other writers coming and going, and it was in the barned owl feather I found on my porch on a difficult day, which in many Native legends is the promise that an angel is watching over you. Nurture was all around me, and I am aware that it was all very intentional— the bench placed just so, the window facing right there— but quietly so. Nurture doesn’t announce itself with fanfare; at its best, it fades into the background, into a cosy sense of well being. And yes, women are more trained in doing this than anyone, and while I don’t love that about the world we live in, I don’t want to respond by doing less nurturing— I’d rather do more, and perhaps try asking as much nurturing from the world as I want to offer it.

I wonder sometimes what that means in the context of my art. The book I’m currently working on — oral histories of eight women across South Asia who were raised by single women — is in some ways full of these stories of nurture. And yet, what does it mean for me, as the writer, to nurture these stories, to give them wings and words, and to insistently carve a space for them in this world? What does it mean to carve a similar space for my own voice, to insist that my poems are telling truths that I care about, to nurture them into being? And more than that, what does it mean to carry out my artistic practice itself as an act of nurture— going back to clay, even though I have no time to go back to clay, only for the way it grounds me, for the simple pleasure of earth against palm, for the simple nurturance of a quieter part of my brain and body being allowed to exist, to come alive? I’m not always very good at this nurturing of self, but I’m working at it. Surely, that too must become part of our legacy as women who have the privilege of being nurtured — to turn those experiences of nurture onto our own selves as well?

Over the last few months, the most consistent nurturing I have learned how to do all comes back to food — to learning to prepare meals that work around all my inflammation and intolerances, that are good for my health, and that my family and I also deeply enjoy. Some of this is my determination to have a better rather than more difficult life because of my chronic illnesses, and some of it is preparation for adoptive single motherhood: let me gather as much energy as I can before the children come!

My friend Neha Buch called this “The Resilience Cookbook,” and the name stuck: My collection of recipes that work around multiple allergens, are deeply nourishing, and work with ingredients I can find easily in Delhi. I’ve been posting some of them on Instagram, and I’ve had many requests to share them more broadly, so they are going to start finding their way here to this Substack. I’ve created a separate sub-section within this newsletter for these posts: If you’re not into food, feel free to unsubscribe to that section, but I hope you’ll stick around for the expansive directions these creative journeys are taking me into.

For now, tell me what nurture means in your creative process? And if you’re not sure yet, take the time this week to play around and see what it might mean. It’s become my favourite word over the last year or two, and I’d love for us to work on creating a more nurturing world — for that to be our shared creative life.