/ STOCKSY DANYLCHENKO : YAROSLAV PHOTO ONE MOTHER’S STORY My most important decision was to carve out proper time for my writing. I wouldn’t expect my brother to do plastic surgery while his newborn baby napped, and so I decided that I would hire a nanny when my son was four months old. It would be misleading to pretend everything just continued as before. For example, previously I wrote and edited carefully as I went. But with The Burial Plot, which I wrote between the births of my son and daughter, I realised that I just didn’t have the headspace to store vast swathes of the novel in my head, so I decided to get it down on paper and edit it later. I ended up writing the whole novel quickly and furiously, and scrapping the entire first draft. But that was a necessary process for me to move forward with the idea. Likewise, there is an increased pressure on my need to be productive when I’m paying for someone else to look after my children. Never before has the phrase ‘time is money’ been more apt! However, I am trying to let that pressure go. It’s not something my husband feels when he goes to work in his salaried office job; just because I’m self-employed and a writer, doesn’t mean I deserve that time any less. Another thing that has changed is my pottery work – I used to be a professional potter as well as an author. I decided quite early on that this would be something I would set aside. Pottery involves getting very messy, leaving the house, and being there to trim the pots before they dry out. Instead, I’ve taken up crafts that are more easily interrupted, more easily tidied, more easily done in the house. I’ve sewn quilts and embroidered stockings and advent calendars, and started making stained glass. When I was pregnant I saw my son’s imminent arrival as a potential destroyer of my creative freedom. What I hadn’t been prepared for is wanting to work less and spend more time with my son. But he’s growing up fast – he begins school next September. Soon I will have time to sell pottery commercially again, and write from nine to five every day and live in my head a bit more. But right now, I am allowing myself time to balance writing and children, and to take a bit longer with each book. ELIZABETH MACNEAL is the author of two Sunday Times-bestselling novels The Doll Factory (which won the 2018 Caledonia Novel Award and has been adapted for TV on Paramount+) and Circus of Wonders. Her third, The Burial Plot, came out in June 2024. So, what can be done to make things easier for mother-writers? What should be we lobbying for? In terms of practical factors, more affordable childcare came out on top, with almost half of respondents saying it would benefit them – not surprising given the results of thinktank Nesta’s 2023 research that revealed that the average twoincome family now spends one-third of their posttax income on childcare provision. The concept of a universal basic income was also raised by our survey participants: ‘I think basic income or similar would allow creative freedom,’ said one woman. ‘Creative practice needs to be supported by subsidy as it is in Nordic countries,’ said another. It was this line of thought that led to the International Wages for Housework Campaign in the 1970s, a radical movement urging societies to acknowledge and fairly reward the work of caring for and sustaining life. The idea of shared childcare has been extensively explored by Black mothers. In her book 1990 Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins talked about ‘other mothering’, a system of care in which Black women engage in ‘kin-work’ in their local neighbourhoods. In We Live for the We Dani McClain expanded on this idea: ‘My grandmother, great-grandmother, aunts, and elders in the community supported my mother as she raised me. Their investment in me and other children… demonstrated an ethic of care and mutual aid that we can all learn from.’ How might we tap into our community networks to support mothers in sharing the responsibilities of caregiving? Flexible access Aside from dismantling capitalism, what are the practical steps we can take right now in the literary world to make writing more accessible for mothers? Pre-recorded course and event material, accessible at any time, came out on top for our survey participants, with 54 per cent of women saying it would be valuable. (This is one reason we record our events in the Mslexia Salon, so they can be watched by members unable to attend at the time.) Similarly, 53 per cent of women said that an online option for in-person courses and events, that would enable them to attend from home, would also be useful. In Issue 88 of Mslexia we reported that the pandemic had led to an expansion of online I FELT READY TO CREATE WORK THAT IS MORE MEANINGFUL, MORE IMPORTANT, AND CLOSER TO THE BONE THAN BEFORE provision for literary courses and events – benefiting those with caring roles as well as writers with limited mobility – but much of this has been scaled back post-Covid. The importance of this kind of access cannot be overstated: over a third of women taking part in our survey said that attending a writing course was a key factor leading them to take their writing more seriously. Next on the list was the iconic ‘room of one’s own’: 48 per cent of writers felt that access to a free or affordable writing space would benefit their writing practice. Highland writing centre Moniack Mhor now offer retreats for writers with caring responsibilities, with focused tuition and undisturbed time for participants, while their children spend time at the nearby Abriachan Forest Trust. But such opportunities are few and far between. ‘Babies eat books,’ wrote speculative fiction author Ursula K Le Guin, referring to the catastrophic effect of motherhood on women writers’ output. ‘But they spit out wads of them that can be taped back together; and they are only babies for a couple of years, while writers live for decades; and it is terrible, but not very terrible.’ What would happen if we used what we know about a mother’s extraordinary capacity to understand transformation to reframe her place in society, to establish support systems that allow space for her to dream? The results could be magical. ■ MAXINE DAVIES’ bio is on p3. 13 AGENDA / Mslexia / Dec/Jan/Feb 2024/25