Mark-Making, Care-Taking: On Ritual, Reconnection and the Recording of Motherhood with Kerri ní Dochartaigh
Info
Date: January 16, 2024
Time: 10 am - 12 pm
Duration: 6 weeks
Level: Beginner | Emerging |
Cost: €165 (€150 Members)
Online/In Person: Online
This course takes place on Tuesdays (six sessions in total)
Course Summary
Maggie Smith said of her inability to write immediately after becoming a mother – ‘I remember feeling that the very temperature of my life had risen. There was nothing “cool” about motherhood. It was hot and raw. It was full of blood and shit and milk and tears. It was equal parts light and darkness. I didn’t know how to write that.’
How do we write that light and darkness?
This course will seek to look at mothering in a new light; allowing room for the many voices that make up the song of motherhood.
Course Outline
Mother is one of the oldest words in existence. A word so old, so integral to the fact of our human being but still we are only beginning to understand it; to make room for it to grow in the ways it is begging us to.
This course will span centuries, landmasses and experiences – ranging from the representation of mothers across a wide scope of literature; through the demands placed on creative mothers; touching on the biology of the mothering person; right up to how to use social media as a tool for journaling through the busy early years of motherhood.
Course Outcomes
Together we will explore what it means to journey through matrescence – the process of becoming a mother – at such an interesting moment in our human experience
By the end of this course we will have a heightened sense of the myriad layers of both mothering and motherhood.
We will come away having closely read a wide range of texts that explore motherhood and help us consider our place within this canon and society, allowing us to give voice to our own lived realities.
During our time together we will have examined care-giving as a revolutionary, universal, mindful path.
You will come away with a set of small changes to weave into your days that will help you carve room for your own creativity.
Together we will have reimagined mothering as a song that calls for so many voices, and we will have found new ways to join this chorus ourselves.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s first book, Thin Places, was published in Spring 2021, for which she was awarded the Butler Literary Award 2022, and highly commended for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2021. Her second book, Cacophony of Bone, was published in May 2023. She lives in the west of Ireland with her family.
