New mums in 2020 are coping with particularly challenging circumstances; if you’re one, and you’re reading this, you know it better than anyone. With limited access to usual support networks, sharing experience and fostering community spirit have become even more important. Creativity – in these times more than ever – offers an outlet, a solace, and a means of connection; ‘a breathing room for the spirit’, as the writer John Updike described it. If you like the sound of that, read on…
BORN IN LOCKDOWN is a writing project for new mums, where together we’ll create a collaborative account of what it’s really like to navigate life with a newborn in 2020. The idea is to encourage new mums to write for pleasure and self-expression: processing, documenting, and filing dispatches from their new motherhood experience. The project is open to anyone who has given birth in 2020, mothering a newborn through lockdown and the pandemic; if you have older children at home you’re welcome to join in, so long as there’s a baby in the mix! And you don’t need to have any writing experience. Everybody has a voice – and we really want to hear yours.
The creative approach to BORN IN LOCKDOWN is inspired by the fragmentary prose style used in such books as Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. It’s also inspired by the thinking behind 1 Second Everyday, the video app that ‘stitches together second-long snippets from your life into a compelling, personal movie’. In our current programme of Mothership sessions we read a passage from Offill’s Dept. of Speculation and then do an exercise where the group writes a series of short vignettes or single, unconnected sentences about life with their babies. For our writers it’s freeing to think about capturing brief moments, and makes writing feel accessible to even the most time-poor mum. We then go around the Zoom room, everybody reading out one of their fragments, and the result is a sense of powerful collective experience; a whole, made of many small parts. It’s this effect that we want to create with BORN IN LOCKDOWN – only on a larger scale, and as a permanent written record.
Our project will ask ‘2020 mums’ to get writing in their notebooks, just a little every day, and then send in up to three fragments of their writing by 5th December. These will then be incorporated into a finished prose piece by Emylia Hall, novelist and Mothership founder. We have no idea how this piece will end up, or how big it will get – and that’s the fun of it! But we’ve a feeling that altogether it will present a powerful and honest depiction of life with a newborn in lockdown; a patchwork of both individuality and universality.
BORN IN LOCKDOWN will then be sent as a PDF, designed by Mothership artist Esther Curtis, to everyone who took part in the project. We’ll have made a work of genuine cultural value; one that documents unique experience and celebrates the coming together of mums through creativity in these socially distanced times.
HOW DO I TAKE PART?
Email mothershipwriters@gmail.com or contact us here to register your interest. You can do this any time from the launch day of 10th November up until the month’s end – but for you to get the most from the project, the sooner the better.
You’ll then be sent a PDF that fully explains what we’re doing with BORN IN LOCKDOWN, along with some writing tips and advice too. It’s all you need to get started (other than a notebook & pen)!
Then… get writing! We’ll need your contribution by 5th December (we’ll be in touch during the month to check in and remind you of the deadline – in a friendly, no pressure kind of a way).
The lines you send in to Mothership won’t say it all, but our collaborative effort will – and that’s its power; however many people take part, we’ll end up with a piece of prose that gives a shared account of the BORN IN LOCKDOWN experience.
Throughout the rest of November, we’ll be posting daily inspirational writing quotes and tips on Instagram, with the hashtag #BornInLockdownProject. Do follow @MothershipWriters and use the hashtag to share your writing journey!
Whether you’re taking part or spreading the word, THANK YOU. Now let’s write! x
