Purpose & Place: The Makings of a Mothers Writing Lab

Nursing baby Wonder at a Mothering Gourd Writers Collective gathering, November 2015

In truth, the Mothers Writing Lab has existed long before now, cycling through every season of my mothering journey in one form or another, with a new name each time. Even before bearing a child from my own womb, I immersed myself in the labors of creating and sustaining spaces for mothers to Be, to Feel, to Unravel, to Recover, to Share, to Love, and Be Loved by one another. This has been a life’s work. I am still evolving with it and through it. 

I want to share some about why the Mothers Writing Lab is coming to life anew in this space right now. Situating the lab within TheFamily Dances home studio and core programming is something I knew needed to happen for a long time, but only now do I feel all parts of it coming together. 

There is so much overlap and integration in my art as a dancer and a writer. When I am dancing, I am composing lines for essays, plays, screenplays, and novels in my head. When I do get the words on the page, arranged in just the way I like them, I still have so much more of the story to tell, and often it’s through movement that I want to expand and extend the written narratives. 

As a creator, my writing and my dancing are often born in tandem. Now more than ever, it feels necessary to amplify a sacred space for my own writing, and to also make that space accessible to the mothers in my village.

I want to really trace the threads of everything that is at play here. The Mothers Writing Lab is not an island; it is not a new idea in that way. It is something that has been within me, has been growing and pushing and pressing and now it is bursting, here, inside of our home, which is also our studio. And there is so much love pouring out already. Four mamas have already registered for our first lab! I am thrilled! I LOVE gathering with the mothers. 

That’s why I named the blog, Mother Mother Everywhere. This is the world I dream about all the time. A lovely, magical, happy, peaceful, vibrant, colorful, abundantly spacious place where the mothers are free to be together as much as we need to, and our children and our families are welcome to be with us wherever we are.

Mothers Writing Lab is a space for a spectrum of mothering writer realities. This space is for mothers and women who are writers, and want to share, develop, and receive feedback in a gentle, nurturing, creative community of other mothering artists. 

This space is for mothers, who may or may not identify as writers (yet), but who want to cultivate their writing as a transformative tool for survival and sustainability when processing and navigating the many labors of motherhood. 

This space is for women who are not seen as mothers by the world, but who still feel deeply connected to their motherselves, and who need a warm and welcoming space to write about and explore the many layers of their in/visible fertility, creativity, dreams, fears, traumas, passions, and unknowns. 

This space is for mothers who are in the thick of their labors, birthing and breastfeeding and raising children, and want to discover tangible methodologies for engaging in their writing practices while being authentic with their day-to-day lives as mothers. 

This space is for women who want to write intimately and honestly about motherhood, who want to journey freely within themselves and their stories to write about their own motherhood, their mother’s and grandmother’s motherhood, humanity’s motherhood. This is a space for women to articulate truths about being daughters and sisters and wives and girlfriends and boo-thangs too. This is a space for deep excavations of thoughts, questions, and visions about all the women we become when we blur lines of identity and wear our many, many selves.

This space is for the mama who is working toward publication. This space is for the mama who just bought her first journal and doesn’t yet know what to put inside of it. This space is for our children to be here with us, witnessing us, participating in our magic, as we sort out our metaphors, stumble over our meanings, sift through the pieces of things that are still maybe too hard to say aloud when we’re all alone.

This space is for mothering creatives to be seen and felt and heard in our fullness, and on our own terms. 

Learn more about the Mothers Writing Lab

Read our blog Mother Mother Everywhere

Register for the next Mothers Writing Lab