the mother and the myth

workshop, residency, exhibition news

before a summer break, we’ll have one more moss and milk writing workshop, a series of workshops with mothers, writers, carers, growers, including

Alice Kinsella

, Erica Hesketh, Victoria Adukwei Bulley,

Kerri ní Dochartaigh

, and Liz Berry, around mothering, caregiving, interconnectedness, nature, and everything in between.

live session spaces are limited to 12 and ‘playback-only’ tickets are available for anyone who can’t make the live session (if you’re a paid subscriber and would like a playback-only ticket let me know — it’s one per year). there is also one subsidised place per workshop, please get in touch if you would like to apply for this space. deadline for this is april 15th.

if you would like to book directly to avoid platform fees, let me know!

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WORKSHOP 2 DETAILS

The Mother and the Myth

with Erica Hesketh

June 11th, 10:30-12:30 BST, online, live ticket: £20, playback-only: £10

For thousands of years and all over the world, mothers have been an important subject in myth and folklore. We have appeared as forces of creation, destruction, protection, wisdom, unquestioning love and much more. How can myths help us to frame contemporary motherhood? Or how might we challenge mythological language, or imbue it with new meanings? In her collection In the Lily Room, mother-poet Erica Hesketh engages with myth in various ways. In this friendly, generative workshop, she shares work that plays with myth and mythological language to explore motherhood — from Fiona Benson to Pascale Petit, Victoria Kennefick to Louise Bourgeois — and offers prompts and provocations, with lots of space for writing and discussing.

Erica Hesketh is a London-based poet, originally from Japan and Denmark. Widely published in magazines and journals, her poetry has also been commissioned by the Royal Festival Hall, Spread the Word and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. From 2016 to 2024 she was Director of the Poetry Translation Centre. Her debut collection is In the Lily Room (Nine Arches Press).

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there are plenty of playback-only tickets left for workshop one, as well as one live space:

there's more to it than milk

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i would also love to introduce

Emily Flannery

from

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

, who has just become a motherlore writer in residence:

Emily Flannery is a mother, a midwife and an experienced facilitator in the perinatal education space. She has always considered herself a person who writes, if not a writer exactly, but first-time motherhood cracked her open in a way that she had never considered and she was left without the words to make sense of her feelings.

Emily, now a mother of two, has spent the past ten years supporting birthing people and families in a wide variety of settings, and each encounter leaves her awed by the power, resilience and vulnerability of those bringing new life into the world. Over time, she has become more and more aware of walking a tightrope when navigating the tension between physiology & intuition and the prevalent medical model of maternity care.

As she has put space between herself and those initial intense and fraught days as a new mother, as well as the unrelenting thirteen-hour shifts on a labour ward, the words have started to reemerge, alongside the fervent urge to document the minutiae of daily life — a keen desire to remember, which has grown from the fog and loss of severe postnatal depression.

Emily hopes to use this platform to explore the grey spaces between the reality of motherhood and a maternity system that often no longer feels fit for purpose, and aims to harness her unique perspective on both sides of the birthing line to examine the huge, sometimes painful, transformation that accompanies matrescence.

“My book of choice is After the Storm by Emma Jane Unsworth, which delves into the tangled threads of new motherhood and unflinchingly depicts a postpartum depression experience which held up a mirror to my own brutal emergence as a mother, and which I hope to explore more deeply in my writing project.”

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finally, i am so overjoyed that motherlore magazine is part of the m(other)ing exhibition! if you’re able to go and see the exhibition in person, it looks amazing: