Writers pour so much energy into their craft that sometimes we forget that creative pursuits other than writing can fill us up in other important ways. Here, we’ll look at what writers do when they aren’t writing, and how those pursuits affect the return to the page. This month, we hear from two writers—Catherine Kim and Kiran Kaur Saini—on how caregiving fuels their stories.
My job fuels my creativity. I’ve worked as a primary care physician for three decades. Currently, my job involves interactions with patients, students, and colleagues. Many of the encounters are not the stuff of television dramas where people go to the brink and return in the space of forty-five minutes. However, many interactions do present puzzles, not just of diagnosis and treatment but of the mysteries of human behavior. Why is this person acting this way? Why do they want to make this decision? What is the best course of action for each of us? Is there a best course? Compared to other interactions in my otherwise fairly boring life, the arcs can be accelerated and intense.
A common trap for those of us who are professional advice-givers for health is that we begin to believe our expertise extends across all aspects of existence. This is how we make mistakes. I started writing in part because I have read about (and known) physician-jerks, and I worried about becoming one. And in writing about these encounters, I realized that fallibility was something that was hard to avoid, even with the best of intentions. The best I can do, I think—I’m not certain—is to try to understand what happened, to try not to pass judgement before I do. Fiction, the most empathetic of all creative acts, helps me do this. For most of these puzzles, there is no answer. Only fiction, in its offering of a possible explanation, can give perfect understanding of another human being.
Catherine Kim
“I can’t ski.”
It’s a punchline I’ve offered over the years when new acquaintances discover I, at one time or another, play piano, paint watercolors, roller skate, dance Argentine tango, sing in a choir, take ballet, bake baguettes, make spreadsheets and relational databases for fun and stress-relief, have travelled to dozens of countries, and formerly taught Mysore-style Ashtanga yoga.
It’s not uncommon for people to ask, “Is there anything you don’t do?”
Six years ago, I became the full-time live-in caregiver to my elderly mom, who passed away peacefully last summer at age ninety. During the caregiving years, and since she’s passed away, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on what has made me the writer I am, what kind of appetite I have for life, and the value of my pursuits outside of writing.
Growing up, our family travelled frequently with my father’s work and visits to family in India, and my mother made sure we children visited places like El Greco’s house and Nek Chand’s Rock Garden before we were even old enough to know what we were seeing. She was a ceramicist, a painter. She forged brass sculptures. She took acrobatics lessons and did Slimnastics from a vinyl record. She studied African drumming and performed with local ensembles. She wove textiles and learned Indian cooking. She designed children’s clothes. She was a speed skater. She played Smetana’s Moldau and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue on the Grundig phonograph while dusting. She was devouring life.
Right after I moved into my mother’s attic, the pandemic hit. There was no more skating, dancing, travelling, or going to exhibits for either of us. It was just my mom and me, fighting the creeping failure of her body in labored silence together. I rose early and wrote each morning before going downstairs to begin my caregiving day.
In the craft of storytelling, one thing we learn is that for every action, there is a reaction. It may be that the consequences of story events propel us to the next scene, but more importantly, we have to take a beat for the character—and the reader—to absorb what has just occurred, a moment for the emotional and philosophical ramifications of the events to hit.
During these last years of my mom’s life, I wrote stories about Medicare-supplied caregiving robots, about the last outfit one might wear in one’s life, about sounds and memories that might emanate from a parent’s clothes long after they were gone, about lost parents reincarnating into nearby cats to keep an eye on their living children.
Writing itself is the reaction beat to all the other pursuits in our lives. Whether it’s a micro flash or a novel, it’s a distillation of everything we pursue in life, a way of sorting out meaning. Without that extra-writing life-devouring, there’s no reaction beat. It’s no secret that every move we make in the world nourishes our work. Like many, I’m a huge fan of Julia Cameron’s concept of the Artist Date, where, to refill ourselves, we deliberately escape our desks to engage with something playful, inspiring, or outside the box. All that becomes the stuff of our unconscious and fuels our stories in unexpected ways.
As writers, it’s easy to be consumed inside the world of our computers and our pens and papers. Being inside our own heads is our superpower, after all. It’s easy to work incessantly and not come up for air. But it’s a reciprocal relationship. Just as writing is the reaction beat to our outside life, our outside pursuits are the reaction beat to our work. It’s crucial to consciously practice Not Writing, to find something, not necessarily always the same thing, to exercise our brain and body and interpersonal capacity in another way, not just to feed the creative well, but also to encourage our brain’s plasticity, so we continue to grow as writers and as human beings.
So, what am I doing in these months following my mother’s death, when I must venture out anew and find new ways to escape from and enrich my writing life? Have you heard of dragon boats? They’re long shells for twenty people, each wielding a paddle, and a steerer at boat’s end. I discovered a team who practices on a nearby lake and welcomes newcomers. In the past I’ve found being on a body of water, propelling myself in a kayak or canoe, is singularly healing. A twenty-person dragon boat could provide community and camaraderie at the same time.
But then again, even as I enter my own era of creaky knees and protesting joints, there’s a part of me that wonders, is it too late for me to learn to ski?
Kiran Kaur Saini
Catherine Kim is a physician at the University of Michigan. She runs a program for medical students that includes a concentration in medical humanities. Her short fiction of medical and science encounters has won the Ploughshares Emerging Fiction Writer contest and has appeared in the Kenyon Review, where it was noted as distinguished story in the Best American Short Stories anthology. Other short fiction has appeared in LitMag and the Alaska Quarterly Review.
Kiran Kaur Saini is a Punjabi-American writer of literary and speculative fiction. She is a winner of the Henfield Prize for Fiction and a nominee for the Premio Ignotus and the Pushcart Prize. Her stories have appeared in Gulf Coast, Shenandoah, Pleiades, Glimmer Train, Strange Horizons, and other literary journals, as well as being translated into Spanish and Portuguese and anthologized in Best Small Fictions and collections in India and Brazil. Visit her at https://kirankaursaini.com.
Curated by Jen Dupree