Drawing the Chicken 5: Friendship and creative community
Yesterday was Diwali, and this past week was the first Diwali of meeting people since 2019. My family has never been big on celebrations of any kind, but my partner and I hosted a pre-Diwali potluck on Saturday, and it reminded me of a beautiful something that COVD took from me: friendship.
Not that my friends and I are no longer each other’s friends — not that at all. But over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking back to pre-pandemic life, where I would have one or the other friend over at home at least 2-3 times a week, where a wide set of warm connections saw me through every week, where friendship was just as much an undercurrent of a regular week as family was. Over the last 2 1/2 years, this shifted. Even as I was thinking about and worrying about so many people in so many places my immediate circle of care and connection shrank, slowly but surely. At some point, my mother, partner, and two friends became the only people I spoke to in the average week, and I realised this past weekend that I hadn’t seen some of my closest friends in the city in over a year, even two. Now, theoretically and in my heart, there is no universe in which I am okay with letting friendships slide— as a type of relationship, friendship is the one I probably cherish above all. But there we have it, in this pandemic-y reality of ours, it had slipped.
So what does that have to do with creativity? Well, nothing, but also everything.
You know the stereotype of the anti-social artist, the self absorbed person who doesn’t know how to relate to people, whose art is all the sustenance he needs (it’s usually a he!). I hate that stereotype so much, but more than that, I absolutely cannot imagine it to be true. If I could offer only one piece of creative advice, “find a creative community” would be right up there with “make time.” Really, if you do just those two things, I’m pretty sure you can live a creative life— everything else is a bonus.
But let’s take a step back. An Instagram following is not a community. Buying the same product does not make a community. And, much as I wish otherwise, even reading the same Substack newsletter isn’t a community. Community is about give and take— it is about horizontal connections between community members. It is about nurture and care and all those strange intangibles that make up connection — real connection.
When I’m stuck in my writing, a call with a professor friend is often enough to get me out of my rut. When I’m out on a walk with a playwright friend, talking about how our different forms influence our individual expressions, I will often have an idea or a breakthrough that would otherwise escape me. When I’m deep in the midst of impostor syndrome (and pretty much everyone is at some point or the other— but more on that another time!), another poet friend will read a line or two back to me and see me in ways that allow me to see myself anew.
But friendship, especially creative friendship, is far from that instrumental. Sometimes, just talking with another potter friend about a new kind of clay I discovered, or a glaze I’m experimenting with, can be all the joy I need that week. Making can be lonely at times, but sharing with another maker is among the deepest connections I know. I recommend it to everyone.
In my teaching, too, I’m veering towards trying to create sustained and sustaining communities around writing and making. This week, as I reopen subscriptions to an online writing community I run, I am thinking constantly of how I might build this kind of care and connection into the anonymity of the online space. It’s a tall ask, but nothing gratifies me more than hearing about a coffee date between two best friends in Berlin who met through my online community, or a gathering in Thane amongst people discovering each other in their words. If all I ever do for their writing is help them find one lifelong writing friendship, I will have done everything I set out to do.
For now, I’m going back to my own communities, relearning how to cherish and deepen them, how to reclaim something of what this pandemic took from me. In a world full of too much ugliness, my friendships are the only sure space I inhabit. They deserve my energy, and I deserve theirs.