At the beginning of this year I was staring apprehensively at the two big book deadlines in my calendar and holding on to the thought of fresh perspectives and creative energy gained on the Mothers Who Write retreats. Instead I've been working in lockdown - retreats rescheduled to the autumn - and only a pair of noise-cancelling headphones and a view of the washing line for inspiration.
But somehow the writing is getting done - albeit in different and sometimes more challenging ways. I have to keep going now as, to keep me motivated in the final weeks before my deadline, my editor cunningly announced my new book last week. You can read more about Earthed: My Year of Hope and Hard Lessons from the Land here and knowingly at the accompanying photo, taken in the time before I had to re-learn column addition, shouted myself hoarse and aged about 20 years.
Deepening under-eye bags aside, in this new-format newsletter I'm pleased to share some words about or of the lockdown period - all contributed by writers who are part of this new Mothers Who Write community. I'm also excited to re-launch the retreats and announce a sprinkling of availability for later this year (with a new, more flexible Covid-specific booking policy) and a brand-new schedule for 2021.
Whether you have been writing your way through lockdown or have found it impossible to do so much as pick up a magazine (both is FINE), I hope this newsletter will cheer, inspire and reassure you. There’s a new discussion section here on Substack too, so do get stuck in and introduce yourself. You’ll also find more discussion, ideas and support over on our new Instagram feed.
And for those of you joining me in person on a MWW retreat it won’t be long until I have the chance to make you a cup of tea on a peaceful afternoon, show you the perfect spot to work outside with a view of the mountains or light your log burner in the morning as we chat about our writing plans for the day.
Until then, look after yourself. x
Denise Rawls on making her own space for writing
I don’t always have the time in my day to write….. well that’s the excuse I have become very comfortable with. But now I’m working from home. Even though most of the staff at the theatre I work for have been furloughed and my days are incredibly busy (and some quite difficult emotionally) I have time now: real, actual time where I don’t have to rush for anything. And it’s liberating.
I’m writing nearly every day: girl has a deadline and publishers waiting for a first draft. It is delightful. Being able to write regularly, in the spaces I have made my own for writing makes me so happy. I guess I am doing what my soul actually wants me to do.
I need to remember this when life tries to go back to a million miles an hour.
Honouring the elder women of the Caribbean diaspora, Denise is writing about identity, motherhood, female friendships, what happens when things fall apart and how women put it all back together. When she isn’t writing you will probably find her out taking photos or rummaging through the grottiest shelf in a charity shop looking for vintage treasures. Denise is part of Spread the Word's London Writers Programme. Read more on her blog.
Announcing the 2021 retreat schedule
The Mothers Who Write retreats are now re-open for booking. The popular 4-night breaks in Wales and Kent are returning for 2021 alongside a new 3-night weekend retreat and a lower-cost 'smart retreat' to cater for different budgets and schedules.
Places are very limited so find out more and book here.
Rebecca Ley with ‘Summer’: an excerpt from her new short story
She had a nice body. That’s what my mother said. I still didn’t know what that meant. Didn’t know yet that bodies could be graded, found wanting.
I didn’t realise that the way she filled her cut-offs was particular. That her box-fresh, creme caramel thighs were any better than my own.
She also had a pleasing face. This much I could discern myself. Freckles across the bridge of her nose, superfluous as sprinkles on a cupcake. Someone you would ask for directions if you found yourself unmoored on a street corner.
From the start I trusted her. Vivian. Which was good because she was to be my companion for the holidays. My friend. One chosen by my parents and paid by the hour, but someone at least, to draw me out of my bedroom, away from the beeping headset of my computer game, into the daylight.
‘Such a tomboy,’ my mother said, of me, aiming for affection but missing. ‘Play football with her. Climb the trees in the park.’ Only the upward-flick of her palms betrayed exasperation, annoyance at her own rank failure in our affiliation.
I was too young to be left alone all day on my own. But too old to do one of the clubs my parents had long relied upon. They both worked long hours in tall, glass buildings, steepled away from slick pavements. And besides, I was sick of clubs by that point. It was finally definitive that I couldn’t do any kind of sport. I had painted all the pictures I had in me and they were bad.
So Vivian it was.
It rained every day. Warm, sulphurous climate change rain that sheeted down, making the idea of going to the park risible.
At first, my chaperone tried valiantly to keep me away from the screens. Those portals. We baked. Played hangman. She told me stories and even, occasionally, sang. Her voice as sweetly uplifting as the sunshine we were to be denied. She tried to persuade me to plait my hair, or at the very least to wear it in a ponytail.
‘You’d be so pretty if anyone could see your face properly,’ she said. But I shucked her off, as I always had my mother.
It wasn’t until week three that she cracked and took the joint controls. I had to ease her in with Mario Kart, a touch of Fifa, before bringing out the big guns: Fortnite.
She was casual the first time that she put the headset on. Humouring me. But within days it was her asking me if we should play.
Her freckles faded as the days spooled. She developed that glazed expression that I recognised from my own face when I washed my hands in the downstairs toilet. Her pretty, open face subtly altered, spliced with oblivion.
Neither of us mentioned it to my parents. And the complicity bred something else between us. Something I had never felt before.
Rebecca is a freelance journalist who has written for a variety of newspapers and magazines for the last seventeen years, including columns in The Times and The Guardian. I can’t wait to meet her on a rescheduled MWW retreat and swap stories about how often people call us Rachel.
Pragya Agarwal on lockdown’s writing lessons
The pressure was there from the start but I was lucky if I managed to write more than a few words some days. My book SWAY came out in the UK on 2 April, just as the country went into lockdown. So much of those first few weeks were spent trying to find innovative ways to launch and promote it. It was not the best mental space to try and write in: exhausted from having suspected coronavirus for almost 8 weeks, sad as all the events and literary festivals had been cancelled, dealing with suddenly having the whole family in the house constantly (and them stressed and anxious with the disruption of their normal routines) and this all heightened by the guilt of being privileged while so many suffered.
Yet sometimes light breaks through. Slowly, while muddling through gardening and baking in rushed childcare shifts, giving virtual talks and webinars on racism and unconscious bias, radio and podcasts for the book, pitching and writing articles to make some money during these financially constrained weeks, organising instagram lives with authors and (sheer madness, I tell you) putting together a 4-day, virtual south asian literary festival, we somehow found a rhythm of our own. I managed to get words down on the page in sporadic bursts: sometimes ten, sometimes 100, but they all stacked up. Suddenly I had a draft for my next book in place. And though it is only the very first draft and I wonder if it is any good at all (imposter syndrome still kicks in often) - it is done. All that remains is the anxious wait to see what my editor makes of it.
What I have learnt through all this is that, even when we are not writing, we are thinking, dreaming and imagining. Beyond the act of actually writing words is the time that really makes us writers. I read and folded pages, underlined words and paragraphs, and this created space for thoughts that sometimes get buried or forgotten. In some strange ways, this lockdown period has made me more willing to take risks, to allow myself to be more experimental and to find out what writing means to me.
I needed this space, this odd time where an acute feeling of claustrophobia was regularly interjected with moments of true bliss, unimaginable terror of losing people I loved alongside the immense gratitude of having those I love most close to me. I don't want to make this sound like a golden period - it wasn’t -but all I know is that I am dreading going back to 'normal', whatever that was.
Pragya is a behavioural scientist, journalist and author. On a MWW retreat we planned an award-winning comedy double-act for the Edinburgh Fringe. Somehow it hasn’t happened but we have each written at least one book each since then. And there’s always next year.
Pragya’s book Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias is out now.
You can read my Observer Magazine interview with her here.
And find out about her forthcoming books here.
Marchelle Farrell on harvest
Harvest. We reap what we sow.
My son drew a picture after we picked our harvest. It showed him tending a bountiful garden within my womb. You grew all this in there for the baby, he said. Yes, I thought. The placenta, with its tree of life.
I think of the wombs before me, the long line of women who culminated in me. I was part present in my grandmother’s womb, she in her grandmother’s. Was it her grandmother before that who was indigenous to the Caribbean islands? I am not sure, our family’s oral histories lose detail over time. I think of mitochondria, those bacteria-like organelles that power our very cells, their DNA only passed on from our mothers. The widely accepted scientific theory is that, once up a time in evolution, the organisms that eventually became us incorporated bacteria into their cell structures - and still we are surprised by the finding that contact with bacteria in soil can modulate our moods. They are intrinsic to our very being.
We are of this earth. Everything is connected.
I am grateful for this harvest that we have eked out of heavy clay riddled with bindweed, our first proper attempt at growing food. But I have been unenthusiastic and neglectful of the veg beds after the early fun of seed sowing. I did not consider why until I read poignant words on farming while Black that shot an arrow of truth through my heart. Of course, to farm the land as a Black person was to be enslaved. Many truths live in my DNA but this is one of the more recent, the more powerful.
My children happily eat the radishes that they have sown and grown. I think of the children who are denied access to fresh fruit and veg thanks to government cuts. I am so grateful that I can provide for my own, for now, but I wonder what next cut will draw against their still innocent flesh. Some have described the wear of experiencing the endless onslaught of racist microaggressions as death by a million paper cuts. I read the news, of sewage spills into our rivers from privatised water companies while the billions paid to shareholders are prioritised over the maintenance of necessary infrastructure. It seems to me that, no matter how your privilege may hold the cuts at bay for now, the scythes are at the door.
It is harvest time now.
Marchelle and I met on Instagram recently, connecting over a shared love for gardening and a desire to use our land as a springboard for discussion, change and personal growth. Here’s what she told me about her new life in the countryside and what she is exploring in her writing. “We arrived here in what felt like a leap of faith and an act of fate at the end of last year. I became aware of feeling untethered since having my first child about five years ago and, like so many others, started searching for a sense of rootedness and belonging through nature, first using houseplants as a way of connecting to my tropical roots, then looking to the plants around me, learning their names, and their herbal uses, as a way of grounding myself. Through that process, I started to wonder whether our collective, painful disconnection from the roots of who we are as human animals might be the thread that ties together so many of society’s ills. Now that I have the incredible privilege of my own garden, I am beginning to give voice to my own journey of reconnection with the earth and, in my writing, try to invite others to think with me about this profound web of interconnectedness that sustains us all, particularly the more painful, perhaps shameful, but urgently necessary truths that it seems past time we all faced.”
Read more of Marchelle’s words on her Instagram feed.
And last (because every word makes me feel seen)…
Rachel Holmes on not achieving her lockdown potential
There’s a hovering sense of failure. Perhaps I’m not achieving my lockdown potential? Some women seem to have found the time to make great strides on their probable Pulitzer Prize-winning novels. Witchy fuckers. Work on my book has come to a dead stop because the children are all-consuming. Forever at me, with their crying, arguing, screeching, shouting. They’re beings composed of noise, small sound-wave hurricanes that blow around the house wreaking destruction wherever they go.
If I'm in a room with my son and I bend over to pick something up (I am always picking things up now), he takes a running vault at my back, hoping to ride me like I’m a horse and he’s a circus acrobat. Other mums say they’re enjoying this unexpected time with their kids. Am I a bad parent because I’m not? I always hated the school run, but now I long for that moment when I kiss them goodbye, push them towards their teacher and am blessedly, wonderfully alone.
Rachel is a writer and journalist. On a MWW retreat she taught us all to play Monopoly Deal, made us laugh till we cried (and cry till we laughed) and, in turn, I gifted her her first taste of the food of the gods: Ambrosia (Devon custard) of course. We did lots of writing too.
Other things I’ve read/seen/enjoyed/done or am looking forward to…
Charlotte Philby’s second book, A Double Life, is out this week. The Times has (sensibly) chosen it as book of the month.
Candice Brathwaite’s debut book, I Am Not Your Baby Mother, is out now and it instantly became a Sunday Times bestseller.
Sarah Langford’s follow up to bestselling In Your Defence has been announced. For a Love of the Land, an “urgent clarion call” for the British farming industry, will be published in spring 2022.
Amy Liptrot wrote about lockdown for Marina Benjamin’s pop-up blog A Garden Among Fires. All contributions will be published soon as an e-book. In the meantime catch up on Amy’s radio 4 series, The Anatomy of Melancholy, here.
Mars Lord has been speaking to the BBC about black experiences of maternity care during the pandemic. Follow her on Instagram here.
Sophie Heawood’s memoir The Hungover Games is out this month. Read an extract here. I believe she’s planning to credit her excellent former doula for its undoubted success.
Nova Reid announced that her debut book, The Good Ally, will be published by HQ Stories in autumn 2021. It’s a book that she describes as for people who, “have started to really engage with their own privilege, prejudice and isms, and are asking ‘what next?’. I’ll be pre-ordering. Follow Nova on Instagram here.
This Ruby Tandoh piece on The Life and Dreams of Esiah Levy was one of the richest things I’ve read in ages.
Clover Stroud is doing regular chats with authors (like fellow MWW retreat-goer Grace Timothy) and they are all a feast for the ears. She and I will be chatting later this month.
Aside from maths worksheets I’ve been reading Jini Reddy’s Wanderland, Where The Leaves Fall Magazine, Tania Hershman’s and what if we were all allowed to disappear, Kathryn Aalto’s Writing Wild, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Wendell Berry’s What Are People For?
And signing up to some soul and brain-feeding newsletters like Katherine May’s True Stories, Elizabeth Morris’ Crib Notes and Claire Ratinon’s What A Time To Have A Garden.
Plus learning how to milk my spontaneously lactating goat, helping run the new Birthrights Instagram and sharing Andrea Poppins and Jamie Wilson’s book Young, Gifted and Black with my family. Am planning to sleep for the entire autumn term.