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Let's talk about writing…and when I talk about writing, I like to begin with the language that started the whole literary endeavor – Sumerian.
First I'll draw a scene – Picture a group of writers working in a house made of earthen blocks in ancient Iraq. They are pushing pictographic signs into soft clay. For writing instruments, they're using reeds that have triangular stems, a shape that allows the reeds to survive in the currents of two mighty rivers, like the Tigris and Euphrates. The reeds are sedges, and they leave wedge-like impressions. The writing place is called the edubba, or house of clay. There are men and women writers there. Sometimes there are children on the women's laps.
One of the women writers is a poet, and she is also a priest and a prince, the daughter of a king named Sargon. She's not called a princess or priestess or poetess. There is nothing diminutive about her or about the feminine in the Sumerian language. The language doesn't add "-ess" or "-ette" onto titles of females – deities included. They are simply female gods. This poet is named Enheduanna. She is the first poet, or writer of any genre, who claimed the text she wrote as her own. She is the first human being in history, man or woman, to put her own name on her own work. There were lots of other writers in the scene I started with, but they were all anonymous.
It wasn't the practice of the day to make your authorship known. So I have come to look at Enheduanna's act as a brave act. I've sometimes referred to it as a transgressive feminist act. It's easy for me to think about it that way because the text that Enheduanna signed was a song for Inanna – a female deity, a brave and transgressive god who decided one day to take a journey to the Land of No Return, and to come back again.
Over the spring and summer of 2023, I was working with Sumerologist Dr. Deb Jones and Depth Psychologist Dr. Sharon Mijares on a 3-act interpretation of the journey the ancient deity Inanna took to a place well-known to Sumerians, a place no one – god or human – had ever returned from. In our essay, Dr. Jones explores how knowledge of Inanna was resurrected by archaeologists, and she tells us about the language and about difficulties one faces in translating from Sumerian.
In the second act, Depth Psychologist Dr. Mijares considers the story of Inanna in light of calls she hears from our contemporary sisters. She discusses the relevance Inanna's journey has for modern women when it is viewed as movement toward wholeness.
I wrote the third act as a meditation on the story told by Enheduanna in her Song to Inanna. In that text, I hear Inanna giving instructions on what must be done to bring her back from the netherworld. Those instructions include images and phenomena that we can find in our own lives, and I propose that when we notice – when we see, hear, smell, taste and touch those physical details – we bring Inanna back from the Land of No Return.
Noticing is the first thing a writer needs to do, and it seems proper that the first acknowledged writer, Enheduanna, actually gave us that advice 4,000 years ago: Pay attention. Perceive the world you live in. Notice.
I am including a link here to the full 3-act essay in Coreopsis Journal of Myth & Theatre.
What I'm reading this month:
I'm taking a journey back into another ancient story, the first Anglo-Saxon epic, the one about a superhero named Beowulf. There's a "monster" in the epic, named Grendel, but that's just the beginning. After a thousand years of Beowulf's prominence, Author Susan Thurston has written a new novel that tells the rest of the story. Thurston's book is The Sister of Grendel, and we'll be talking about her amazing female superhero on Jan. 22 at Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis' Uptown neighborhood. I Imagine we'll get into the topic of the feminist re-mythologizing of old stories. I promise to report back next time.