Special Mother’s Day interview: a life in pursuit of creative connection

In my exploration of the relationship between health and creativity, I couldn’t think of anyone better to turn to for insight than my mom: actor, writer and teacher, Ethelyn Friend. I’ve watched her path as an artist and performer unfold throughout my life, and also seen her face addiction and other health issues as I was growing up. This interview gave me a chance to talk about some of this in a new light and hear how those challenges affected her creative work. 

When I was a young child, my mother created a one-woman theater piece, Songs My Grandmothers Taught Me, in which she explored the lives of her two grandmothers; both were singers who gave up their voices and careers after marriage. I’ll always remember the strange experience of watching my mom transform into her own mother, and her grandmothers, as she performed their story and sang their songs onstage. Although I don’t often think about it, I know that watching her create this personal piece of art during my childhood had a strong impact on me, and has affected my own creativity and my path of becoming a singer-songwriter. My mom and I talk more about Songs My Grandmothers Taught Me, and this specific family karma, throughout the interview. 

This month in my blog I’m exploring the connection between health and creativity. How do you see the relationship between health and creativity playing out in your own life? Does one affect the other?

There’s a give and take between them. I don’t think one causes the other. Some might think you have to have a certain level of health to be able to have that creative flow. But I think that creative flow itself creates health, or demands health. It’s interesting to me this idea of which comes first or which affects what. I guess the word would be idiosyncratic, or surprising. Not one way, many ways. Often it’s the last thing I would think. Either the thing I think about my health that would not allow me to be creative allows me to be creative, or a surprising, creative thing happens that changes my relationship with my body. 

A lot of my life I would be motivated by my art, because I put myself as being an artist above everything else. So I would sacrifice my health for my art: “so long as I can have a good opening night, or, so long as I can write this poem…” And then as I’ve matured and had the hard knocks of life I’ve realized that I couldn’t sacrifice myself to my art in that way. But that it sort of would motivate me a little bit — in order to be able to make this art I need to have a solid foundation of physical health. And so it makes me more motivated to clean up my diet, or do those things. I know that if I want to keep performing, I’m going to have to sleep and take care of myself just to be able to function and be able to do it.

When I was performing in House of Blue Leaves, that was one of my happiest balances of creativity and self-care, because I just had such a good routine. I realized that what I had to do was finish teaching at Naropa [University] every day, go home, eat a big lunch, put myself to bed for two hours, wake up again, have dinner and go to the theater like it was a fresh day. And so I had this routine and I knew that it was going to work. There was no way I could be teaching all day, come home and then go do a really intense show that night, but because I figured out this way of dividing it up into two days, it was one of my happiest times. Because I was on a schedule, eight shows a week, and my creativity had this place to go every night. And I figured out what to eat and when to eat and when to sleep, and it really worked. 

You said that you used to put your art before your health, and then there was sort of a switch of priorities. How do you think that affected the art that you were making? Looking at the art you made when you were younger, do you think that the product was different because of the way you worked? Or that your relationship to it was different?

I don’t know, that is such a hard question, right? Because my whole world then was brilliant poets and writers who were also drug addicts, and dying. Not all of them, but a lot of them. And then I had to get out of that community and that way of life. This is part of what held people in that, was they felt that they would not make as good art if they weren’t also active in their addictions. They felt like those things fueled the work. Even when I was about to get sober I was reading this book called Creativity and the Veil of Addiction that my mom probably gave me to read, and I was still drinking and reading that book and trying to figure out what was wrong with me and what was going on. I think artists can often have a relationship with addictive behavior that they feel like is helping them on one level but is also getting in the way. 

I was mostly doing acting when I was younger, and I don’t know if my acting was better or worse then, but I think there was more pushing, driving from my ego. I think I was running on adrenaline. I believe now, from where I am, that an audience perceives the body of the performer and the energy of the performer. And the amount of actual presence they take up in their own body is one of the most important things that can happen in a live performance: that the bodies of the performers and the bodies of the audience can meet and have a deep connection that’s beyond the story or the emotion. 

And as I started leaving behind my addictions and training in other body-centered acting practices, there was much more of me available, or a different part of me. It wasn’t just my emotions and my psychology. My old acting self was just about emotion, running on adrenaline, running on the glands if you use the BMC (Body-Mind Centering) word. That’s what I’ve worked a lot with Erika Berland on, shifting my presence from glands to organs to bones. So I definitely believe that makes a difference now. 

As far as the content — did I write better poems then or now, did I make better art? I don’t know. But I know my presence onstage is really different now that I’m in a healthier place. Less nervousness and more gratitude. Because I got to this point where I just felt, “I’m so happy I’m alive and I’m so happy I just get to act!” It was really simple, it was just that joy instead of that ego nervousness of whether I had a good show or not. 

You touched on the relationship between artists and addiction, and there is definitely this idea in our culture that to be an artist you have to suffer. That to make good art you must be troubled, full of inner turmoil… Is this true for you?

I think my own suffering or pain from past traumas or things that I’ve had to work through has definitely motivated my art, or motivated me to make art. The Grandmother Show (Songs My Grandmothers Taught Me) was the first thing that I made on my own that was for theater, and that definitely came out of a real sense of suffering and pain over my own voice being shut down, and what happened to my grandmothers, in my mind, as I imagined them losing their voices in their marriages. So it came out of a kind of turmoil for sure. But I don’t consider it a self-indulgent kind of turmoil, but just, “I am feeling angry about this, I need to find out what happened, I’m going to make a play about it!” It was an empowering kind of turmoil. There’s definitely an energy that comes out of that. 

As far as the actual place you’re in when you’re writing – even if the content is something traumatic, are you really in that state when you’re writing it, or are you in more of a detached place? When do you do better writing, if you wake up and feel angry and tormented or you feeling more calm and content?

I think it’s something beyond that. It’s just this weird emptiness. For me when I’m writing, and maybe acting too if it’s good, I’m setting aside everything and just listening. It’s a weird listening, like something is coming through — words, brain, hand. Tuning into the radio station or something. I don’t do good writing when I’m writing out of the immediate state of upset, I don’t think. I think it could be cathartic or useful, like morning pages, just putting everything down, like emotional venting. 

The only time I really created something out of quietude was when I got very sick with adrenal fatigue, and I just couldn’t function for a while. I had to rest a lot of the time, and I didn’t know how to rest, and I was really pissed. Because people were telling me, “just rest!” And I’m thinking, “I don’t know how to do that.” So I was meditating and sort of just dozing off one day. I was sort of dreaming and I heard something in my meditation/sleep that said, “Write the songs of the marrow.” And I thought, “What, who said that?” I looked up the word marrow, and then I just got completely obsessed with marrow! I wrote an entire manuscript of poetry, and I worked on it for five or six months while I was very weak and unable to do things.  I was actually going into my marrow and researching marrow as a metaphor for my own sense of my deep core that was missing.

I was going into these very trippy internal performances where I’d go into my own marrow in my bones and try to experience what was there and try to write monologues and poems out of it. And it was completely unlike anything I’d ever done, and I was just lying around, resting a lot during that whole time. So that was an example of a surprise, of a bad health crisis being very creative. That was one of the most surprising turns. 

In my last blog I wrote about a quote from Martha Graham: “Keep the channel open.” I’ve been thinking a lot about this and how it relates to health also, and I feel like it’s my main job in life to keep my own creative channel open and clear. 

I really relate to that quote too, like each one of us has our own particular access to this creative channel. I guess the biggest thing that I feel, and that’s partly what I felt like I was making a statement about in The Grandmother Show, was the cost, and the health cost [of shutting down that channel]. My mom and I used to talk about this — my grandmother, who died of ovarian cancer. Whether there was a correlation there or not between the shut down of her creativity, her passion, her excitement. I’ve done a lot of research on that kind of cancer and different perspectives on it, and I’ve seen a lot of things that say, “get as inspired and enthusiastic as possible, from your depths, from your deep core, and just keep expressing.” 

My mom had a hysterectomy because she was so afraid of having that cancer. I always wondered about it, because she was blocked with her creativity a lot of the time. My mother is now in late stages of Alzheimer’s. She always talked about the book she wanted to write, a book about her spiritual journey. She wrote music and hoped to share it more widely in the world but found that very difficult. So we’re carrying that from generations of women. Women are in a different place now, but they’re still carrying traces of that underneath — that it’s not worthwhile, it’s not important to have our own creative expression. And I think it is really important. I still combat that belief in myself. “Oh no, it’s not that important? Then what are you here to do?!” I’d rather help someone else open up their channel, you know. I’m good with that, let me help you open your channel. Ok, but what about mine, now, today. What is it now? I need to always keep that question alive. It’s always going to keep changing.

That’s so interesting. In my Ayurveda program right now we’re studying the pathways of disease, and the six stages that disease takes to manifest. So the ideas about the ovarian cancer and life choices and different emotional factors is very interesting. 

It’s always easier to see in someone else. That’s why we all need help. There’s a certain blindness just because of the ego and our ideas, we just can’t really quite see ourselves and our own blocks. The blindspots that are inherent in being human. So finding a trusted person to help you find those blind spots and be willing to help you uncover things, whether its a therapist or a coach, or for me the twelve-step work — all of the above is really helpful. 

Because still, I carry that through my grandmother, and who knows about all the women before, and my mother, but I still have my own piece to do. And it’s not like I don’t feel like I have — I have worked on it, I am working on it. But I have to remember, today, it’s my responsibility one more time to value myself. Value opening up my channel, what that is for this day. 

The health part is really important to me at this point, because the older I get the more sensitive I am and the more important it is. Like what happened just a few months ago, I just went off and started eating all this gluten and stuff and had a major depression attack. I couldn’t function! A very quick downward mental health slide from eating gluten and a few other things. It was good, it was really worth it actually for me to be reminded — this is life and death, this is serious. Like you said in your last blog post, that’s the good news, because you can just choose not to eat those things, and feel better! 

When do you feel most aligned with your creative flow? What practices help you get to this state? 

I like when I exercise and do things with my muscles first and then write. I have these practices that I do every day where I do a section of movement, a section of voice practice, and then writing. So I’ve been teaching this to my students as a form and I’ve been doing this most days. So I get my juices flowing by using my body, using my voice pretty strongly sometimes, and then going to the page and writing. I really love that. 

Can you describe how the practice works?

I call it 10/10/10 but you can do any number of minutes. But for ten minutes let’s say, you move: movement can be anything, could be dancing, could be doing exercises, stretching, pilates, you could just be feeling your body, sensing your body, breathing into your body. And then there’s ten minutes of voice, and that could be anything too. Maybe you’re making sounds, maybe you’re doing vocal exercises, maybe you’re singing a song that you love, but for ten minutes non-stop you just let your voice out. And then after that, it’s like morning pages, you just hit the page and write for ten minutes without stopping. But you do these things, and as soon as the timer is up you start the next one. You don’t transition, you just go. Sometimes I do it for a whole hour with students, and then I do 5/5/5, 3/3/3, 1/1/1, and 1/1/1 is really fun because you just have one minute for each, and you’re just frenzied! One minute of moving, one minute of singing, one minute of writing. And sometimes that one minute of writing just really gets to the unconscious like you’re blurting out something, or you get a cool little one minute poem. I like doing that, it’s really fun. And that can just be a prep or a warm up into your work day. In my ideal world that’s how it goes. 

You have a practice that I admire where you schedule writing retreats for yourself. I know that even in quarantine you’ve been scheduling virtual retreat days with your friends to help motivate each other to be creative. What do these days look like to you? How do you structure your time?

Usually I would do that kind of 10/10/10 warm-up in the morning, and then I would continue with a period of writing, and then I would get together on a Zoom call with my friend, wonderful writer and actor Barbara Dana. We would have lunch together and talk about what we were working on, and just discuss how we’re feeling. Sometimes we’ll send each other some writing, and read each other’s work, and then we’ll go back and work for the afternoon. We decide how long we’re going to work and when we’re going to check in. So maybe at 4 o’clock we’ll check in again. So it’s just like having an accountability partner, but also across this particular time [during the COVID-19 lockdown]. Barbara is also alone in her home like I am. So I think we’re both feeling compassion for each other and needing each other more than somebody who’s stuck in their house with their partner or their kids. It’s just different. So now instead of it being a “writing retreat”, we’ll just say, “let’s do it again tomorrow!” So it’s just become life; now we’re writing three days a week together. It just makes me realize again how much more can happen with the support of other people. 

What does your Ayurveda practice look like right now? Is there one thing you’ve learned from Ayurveda that has been particularly helpful?

 Oil massage. Love yourself actively. I should go do it right now. 

Beautiful. Thank you. 

Thanks Mom!! I’m so grateful to Ethelyn for sharing her unique stories and her powerful wise-woman words. These are some of the things that resonated most from what we talked about, and are reminders I know I’ll need to hear again and again:

1. The relationship between health and creativity is complex and surprising. As we grow older we may have to reexamine that relationship and change the ways we’ve been used to working. Finding your personal balance between work and health is something that is always evolving, and it’s worth reevaluating with each new project, each new season of life.

2. We all have our own unique access to inspiration, and it’s our responsibility to keep our own channels clear. It’s our job to value ourselves and prioritize our self-expression. 

3. We all need help and support. We all have blind spots we can’t see and blocks we can’t get past on our own. I love Ethelyn’s idea of doing virtual “retreat days” especially during this pandemic, to stay connected and support one another. 

What did you resonate with in Ethelyn’s story? How do you see the relationship between health and creativity in your own life? Has that relationship changed over time?