Drum roll! I’m thrilled to share the cover of the first ever Mothership Writers anthology: Dispatches from New Motherhood. Designed by super talented Mothership artist Esther Curtis, it perfectly captures what we’re all about.
And here’s what it says on the back cover …
In the spring of 2019 Mothership Writers was born, a groundbreaking creative writing programme for new mothers in Bristol. Over the next 12 months, three groups of women – and their babies – met for fortnightly workshops, led by novelist Emylia Hall. Many hadn't written for years. Every single one had a story to tell.
Dispatches from New Motherhood is an extraordinary collection of prose and poetry from the first ever band of Mothership Writers. This is writing done in stolen time, in the margins of the day and night, and each piece shines with honesty and immediacy; from a powerful account of postnatal depression to the soul-lifting effects of a bike ride, from a moving story of months spent in NICU, to feeling lost in suburbia. This anthology offers a tender, hopeful, unflinching documentation of what it means – right here, right now – to be a new mother.
While printed copies are primarily intended as a keepsake for our writers, we’ll be publishing every piece from the book here on our Journal from the middle of May and throughout the year to come. I can’t wait to share the incredible work of our writers with you. And I couldn’t be prouder of this book – or the very many women who’ve made it happen.