Read a QA with the authors of Mothertongues!

Co-author Eliza Bell is a teacher, writer and theatre actor. She trained at Studio Magenia Ecole de Mime in Paris, the Moscow Art Theatre, U.C. Berkeley, and the American Repertory Theatre Institute at Harvard University. She is currently Dean of Creative and Performing Arts at a Sydney high school.

Co-author Ceridwen Dovey is a fiction writer and essayist based in Sydney. She’s the author of several works of fiction (Blood Kin, Only the Animals, In the Garden of the Fugitives, Life After Truth), and non-fiction (On J.M. Coetzee: Writers on Writers and Inner Worlds Outer Spaces), as well as the bestselling Audible Original Once More With Feeling. Ceridwen is the recipient of an Australian Museum Eureka Award & UNSW Press Bragg Prize for her writing.

Today, Eliza Bell and Ceridwen Dovey are on the blog to answer a few of our questions about their new book, Mothertongues – a genre-defying, collaborative marvel that brings the absurdity of motherhood to the page.. Read on …

Eliza Bell

Please tell us about your book, Mothertongues!

Mothertongues is a co-authored work of bio-autofiction about early motherhood. In it, we have used the tools of experimental fiction to reinvent and reshape not only our own individual experiences, but to craft and play with each other’s stories. The call-and-response form of the book is a way of trying to capture what happens when two women enter into a true dialogue: together, they’re trying to find a way to process what has happened to them, without sticking within the traditional bounds of memoir.

From the start of writing together, we were interested in blurring the boundaries between different modes of expression: prose, poetry, theatre and song. We asked Sydney songwriter Keppie Coutts to work with us on creating eight original songs to be interspersed throughout the audiobook, between the textual narrative. Through music and song, we hope to represent some of the bursts, range and depth of emotions felt by a mother in the years of mothering young children in a way we can’t through text alone. And, as Keppie puts it, music is a way of “feeling thought.”

The form of this book is fascinating and unusual, blending song, memoir, fiction, drama, poetry, letters … What made you realise that you had to tell your stories in this way?

The point of the two of us collaborating as co-authors was to search for new forms and methods of creation that could fit within our fragmented, messy lives. The book’s multi-modal form started from necessity, and then gradually developed into a kind of discipline, or conscious creative practice: not being afraid of the fragment, the scrap; and giving ourselves permission to shift from high to low and back again – from epic history to anecdote to song to absurd little scene that goes nowhere.

Gradually we found a way to blend literary and theatrical influences, collecting and recombining our own salvaged experiences of motherhood and then transforming that raw experience into something else – something more than just the personal. We found that imagining the project as a kind of play – staging it, in other words – helped to make sense of what we were doing: trying to understand all the different performances of motherhood that we’ve witnessed, and the masks that mothers take off and put on to survive society’s scrutiny.

Can you tell us a little bit about how the book actually came together? How did you write it and how did you decide what went into it?

We met at the school gate on the first day our older children started Kindergarten in Sydney many years ago, and have not stopped trying to talk about art, motherhood, creativity, absurdism, feminism and collaboration ever since. This book was written in time stolen from our other (paid) jobs and family responsibilities: on the side of our sons’ soccer team practice on cold winter nights; late at night once our day jobs were done and children were asleep; during Sunday afternoon brainstorming sessions at our respective apartments, while also trying to cook meals for the working week ahead and our kids sat together on the couch to watch a movie.

We did a lot of unusual, sometimes weird things, to figure out how to “perform” on the page different fragments, or scenes, from our mothering identities – and how to craft and shape each other’s personal experiences until these fragments became almost unrecognizable to the person who’d lived through it. The framing of the book as a three-Act play helped us do this. It was Eliza’s long-term interest in the Theatre of the Absurd that was the spark for the whole idea of the book: how this (usually) masculinist artform (dominated by male artist heavyweights like Beckett) was in fact so appealing as a way to look afresh at motherhood and its endless daily labours.

So we played word games, and took turns doing stream-of-consciousness monologues to each other, and put words literally into the other person’s mouth. We’d tell our birth stories to each other and then flip them so that we were telling the other person’s birth story as if it was our own. We dug around in old medieval texts looking for the few and far between scraps that have survived in published books about how women experienced pregnancy and birth in the past. We set each other offbeat assignments to write about (e.g. “describe all the beds you can remember from your own family’s history”) and then rewrote the other person’s assignment in our own style. The goal was always to get away from the idea of this being memoir, and instead to embrace the playful and anarchic potential of it being deeply strange, experimental fiction where not one but two authors co-leapt from the real to the unreal, from the ordinary to the absurd.

Once Keppie Coutts came on board to write and record the songs, the three of us ran a crowdfunding campaign to raise the funds so that she could make the Mothertongues album of songs (which are interspersed throughout the audiobook, and available for readers of the physical book to stream for free). We’re also trying to do as many events as possible with all of us there – so not just regular readings from the book, but live performances of the songs by Keppie and her wonderful musician collaborators and song producers, Maria Alfonsine and Damian de Boos-Smith.

You say that you are imagining a future where women don’t always have to choose between art and motherhood. Can you expand on what you mean by this?

That is a huge and heavy question – and it was to try to find answers to that gnarly question that we wrote our book. So forgive us for responding at length to this one.

Rachel Cusk writes in one of her essays in Coventry that Virginia Woolf herself had always anticipated that women writers would have to invent new literary forms of their own to match their reality, and we use her words as one of the book’s epigraphs to set that intention for ourselves:

Woolf concedes that the woman writer might have to break everything – the sentence, the sequence, the novel form itself – to create her own literature. And she wonders, too, whether a situational link between women’s lives and their work, far from impeding their writing, might actually be necessary to it …

In a later part of Mothertongues, one of the characters ruminates on this:

Why must writing, in order to be taken seriously, be done alone? When women writers speak of making art and mothering, it is usually set up as an antagonistic battle, pulling the woman in two different directions so that she ends up having to choose a side (or risk being cleaved in two).

What Virginia Woolf was urging is something quite different … Woolf’s call to action means rejecting the old art forms that we have inherited as women, the ones we still try to fold ourselves into, at great cost. Rejecting the old ideas that hold such sway over us: that only one name must be on a book of literary fiction or it is not worthy. That a book must clearly delineate whether it is fiction or memoir (blending discouraged). That a single, coherent voice is what is most valued when it comes to literary merit.

Who else might be able to write if we let go of traditional forms like the masculinist thrust of a novel, building to a climax and then the inevitable denouement? This is something the literary critic Jane Alison writes about, questioning why certain narrative types and arcs are still seen as the ur-type. Instead of the build-to-a-climax mode of narrative, she suggests that stories by and about women could instead be shaped to showcase connection, collaboration, the communal experience. Might not, she asks, a meander, or a spiral, be a better patterning device?

So, if we take Woolf’s words to heart, it becomes a political project for us to write literary experimental fiction together. The form of the book is meant to reflect this: the characters in the first sections are alone, lonely, but gradually over the three Acts of the book, they find community and a home not just for themselves as mothers, but as women who are starving for intellectual discussion of why motherhood feels the way it does to them. Often, as a mother, you’re reduced to nothing but a body; this project was about claiming back the mother’s mind too: it’s through the dialogue with the other (m)other that each character in the book can find her way back to a version of herself.

We also had to retrain ourselves so that we stopped thinking of the incessant distractions of writing-while-mothering as detracting from the work at hand. The disruptions fundamentally influenced and altered the book’s form in interesting ways. The traditional “novel” as a literary form is really only possible to write if you have the luxury of huge amounts of time, concentration, and solitude without distractions (in other words, if you’re not the primary caregiver for young humans). So we’re saying: let’s throw out that inherited form and see what other forms we can invent.

And of course, the final form this project takes is a creative collaboration between three women (the two of us as co-authors, and Keppie as songwriter) who all have young children and full-time jobs, who would never have been able to create something if we hadn’t done it together: shared the burden, carried the heavier loads, inspired and motivated and consoled and encouraged each other when the going got tough.

It’s quite possible we will fail together too, since this kind of experimentation is not often rewarded or recognised in mainstream literary culture! But failing together is still so much better than failing alone.

Ceridwen Dovey (Photo by Shannon Smith).

Can you both tell us a little bit about your journeys towards becoming a writer?

Ceridwen has been writing and publishing for almost two decades now, but this is her first co-authored book, so she is a beginner all over again (and loved the process of learning how to collaborate). Eliza has always been a writer at heart – and was a professional actor for many years – but this is her first-ever published book. So big firsts for both of us!

Who did you write this book for? Who do you wish would read it?

We wrote it for ourselves, at first – as a way of helping each other through the woods of this phase of our lives through being ravenously curious about each other’s lived experience. But we also wrote it as a challenge to the literary establishment, to help others who don’t feel they fit in to also ask some of these tricky questions (touched on in the previous response!) that preoccupy us: why are we still writing within fictional forms invented by men who had oodles of spare time to write because of all the caring responsibilities they were never saddled with? Why are all books about motherhood immediately categorised as “memoir” even when they also contain (as ours does) pregnant A.I. virtual assistants in conversation, and theatrical elements, and songs, and other absurd invented set pieces? Why do we still mistrust any mother who writes about motherhood and insists that it’s fiction?

What is the last book you both read and loved?

Eliza has been listening to the audiobook of Paul Kelly’s incredible memoir, How to Make Gravy, and also reading Rachel Yoder’s clever, disturbing novel Nightbitch (where a mother is convinced that she’s turned into a dog). Ceridwen has been enjoying Shirley Hazzard’s memoir of time she spent with the novelist Graham Greene, Greene on Capri, and loved Susan Choi’s latest novel, Trust Exercise.

What do you hope readers will discover in Mothertongues?

An idea we explore throughout the text is that of motherhood as a performance for which we are constantly searching for the right metaphor: perhaps, the characters hope, if they can find the language for it, the mask each mother wears (by choice or force) would slip and fall to the ground. We hope that anybody who reads Mothertongues feels empowered to speak more freely and weirdly about mothering and the body/mind collision it can be, but we also hope that it might inspire other writers and artists to collaborate, and – as we’ve said above – continue to search for new and more capacious and diverse forms to represent modern women’s experiences in literature.

And finally, what’s up next for you two?

We’ve wondered if we might together try to look askance at perimenopause and menopause – not just from the body’s point of view, but to consider ways in which this time of a woman’s life has been represented, misrepresented or hidden from sight in the wider culture and in history. It’s still so rare and miraculously new that women can write about and share their experiences of motherhood for posterity – for so long, this was kept out of the written record – and yet it’s even more rare to encounter the ageing female body on the page. We also have a dream of one day in the very far-off future – maybe in the winter of our own mothering – writing about the idea of ‘winter,’ starting in Antarctica.

Thanks!

—Mothertongues by Eliza Bell and Ceridwen Dovey (Pengiun Books Australia) is out now.

Mothertongues

by Eliza Bell and Ceridwen Dovey

After sharing their artistic frustrations at the school gate, Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell decide to take a risk- to co-write a book about early motherhood. Off-colour, offbeat, off their heads, they begin - but then, what is motherhood if not messy, non-linear, multi-authored and potty mouthed?

What results is songs, memoir, fiction, drama, poetry, letters, pregnant and lactating AI assistants texting each other. Together, Dovey and Bell create a collage of absurd mothering, failing mothering and moving mothering...

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