Friendship as creative mode
I went to graduate school in New York City a year after college for a Masters in Fine Arts (MFA) in creative writing. The best thing about being one of the younger students in the program was befriending writers who were a little older and much wiser than I. In fact, the most valuable thing I got from the MFA was not having famous writers as teachers, or working as a research assistant for academic scholars; it was forming a writing group with a circle of five other female writers after we had completed our degrees. We rotated hosting workshops at each other’s eclectic New York apartments – C’s fifth floor walk-up with a claw-footed bathtub built in the middle of the apartment, E’s roomier Brooklyn coop she shared with her partner that had a proper eat-in kitchen, a grand SoHo loft that L, an ex-actress turned writer house-sat for one summer, where she made us Campari with fresh squeezed orange juice and a sprig of mint she clipped from a pot on the windowsill. We wrote about different topics – lost Indigenous languages, secrets that were buried when a mother passed away, technicolor species of birds in Belize, the erasure of Armenian history – and talked about how we imagined continuing writing now that grad school was over and we all had to return, in varying degrees, to real life.
Over the years, some of us got married and became mothers, some of us left New York, some of us stopped writing for a long stretch of time and wondered if we could even be considered writers anymore, all of us started to care for our aging parents. These women taught me how to be a thoughtful reader of someone’s creative work, how to be honest and gentle at the same time, how to hold space for questions.
I moved the farthest from New York – the only one to leave the US, in fact, and have always made an effort to form a local, in-person writing group wherever I landed – first Singapore, then Hong Kong, and now Taiwan. Groups have varied in size from just two people, to four, to sometimes nine. As with any friendship, it takes time to warm up, to get to know each other’s writing; and it takes time to build trust, to know that the workshop can provide the kind of audience and feedback that we need, which changes, depending on what is going on outside of our creative lives.
Outside of my original graduate school writing group, it is in Taiwan that I’ve cultivated the most nourishing writing friendships. Maybe it’s a function of being in my forties (I moved back in my late thirties) – the very fact that I have less time for writing than ever before, working full time, caring for three children and octogenarian parents who increasingly need my attention – that I make time for writing with an urgency more intense than when I was getting my MFA and my only responsibility was essentially to write. People often talk about accountability when you have a writing group, but for me, it isn’t about that. There is no pressure, no judgment – the writing partners I’ve had the honor of having in Taiwan are people for whom writing and being creative is the prism through which they understand being. Because I write in English, my writing cohorts tend to be transients in Taiwan. As I write this, I am about to bid farewell to a dear friend – one with whom I have held regular “creative check-ins” over the past four years – an incredibly talented artist destined for big things. I know I will continue to nurture creative friendships here, but this is one that I will miss very much.
I see now that the skills I cultivated from my very first writing group – how to read, how to be honest and gentle, how to hold space – are the exact skills I have used to be a partner to my husband, a mother to my children, a teacher to my students, a daughter, a friend. But perhaps most of all, these are the skills I've used to be a better writer.
