Literary Friendships
It’s no secret that artists can be competitive. And paranoid, and insecure, and territorial, and obstructive, and hostile, and, and, and... But it’s also no secret that competition can push us out of comfort zones—the places where we might be dangerously safe—and into zones of experimentation, risk, and greater freedom. My time on this planet has made me wonder, though, how many people take up competition in that more expansive—I might even say encouraging—way, and how many simply use whatever they have at their disposal to take everyone else out at the knees, unless they sense that certain someones can do them significant enough favors.
We’ve all seen our fair share. Some of us get a little sadder about it than others. I don’t really know why that is. Suffice it to say, the times when I’ve found literary and philosophical friendship that challenges me but is not primarily animated by that very small and lonely down-punching instinct, it’s been a breath of fresh air and a reminder that I’m not insane for hoping to find relationships of mutual inspiration and expressiveness and support. This is what literature (and all of art) is for, anyway.
Here’s Ursula K. Le Guin on what she calls “the mother tongue.” It’s not the language of power or commerce or domination or “success.” It’s the language of everyone—our first, most common, banal, colloquial experience with expression:
“The mother tongue is language not as mere communication but as relation, relationship. It connects. It goes two ways, many ways, an exchange, a network. Its power is not in dividing but in binding, not in distancing but in uniting. It is written, but not by scribes and secretaries for posterity; it flies from the mouth on the breath that is our life and is gone, like the outbreath, utterly gone and yet returning, repeated, the breath the same again always, everywhere, and we all know it by heart.”
I believe that most people first start writing and singing and painting and dancing in the mother tongue. It’s the language of art (and urgent questions). At some point they realize that if they’re going to survive, they’ll have to become proficient in what Le Guin calls “the father tongue” (you know exactly what it is). But to stay in the father tongue—to become monolingual—is a mistake.1 To abandon one for the other is to lose too much. The mother tongue is so vital, so raw, and so necessary.
I’ll be exploring all of this and much, much more in an upcoming workshop, along with two friends who inspire and challenge me, Elle Nash and Charlene Elsby. We’re calling it Femgore.
On September 1st, we’re going to meet virtually to discuss three short pieces of writing that exemplify the beauty, power, and brutality of femgore. And then everyone is going to write together, in the moment. We’re doing this partly because of our adamant refusal to give up the mother tongue, like many women before us. But we’re also doing this because we’re friends, and we support each other, and we are determined to grow together. If you want to join, send $100 via PayPal to celsby@gmail.com, and put your name or email in the notes section. That’s all it takes. We hope it will be generative, freeing, and exciting.
Thank you to friends, known and unknown, near and far, past, present, and future. We make each other possible.
The way “mother tongue” vs. “father tongue” sets up a dichotomy or a hard binary here is troubling, possibly, but I think we can resolve this by acknowledging that we all contain both, and we have to keep them in balance.