Meet the Bristol author helping women write their way through early motherhood
In a quiet corner of Bristol’s Tobacco Factory, local author Emylia Hall is telling the Cable about Mothership, a creative writing course she founded aimed at mothers with children under three.
Emylia, 46, of south Bristol, is currently writing the fifth novel in her Shell House Detectives series. When writing ‘cosy crime’ isn’t keeping her busy, she shares her writing skills with mums based in Bristol and beyond.
The first flickers of an idea for Mothership Writers came to Emylia in 2014. While writing her fourth novel, The Sea Between Us, Emilya’s son Calvin (now 10) was just months old.
“I was working against a tight deadline and had to carve out time to write during Calvin’s naps,” she says.
Parenting is a journey full of seismic changes
Emylia Hall
“Becoming a mother is so transformative, and it felt empowering, even magical, to write during such an emotive time,” she adds, reflecting on the snatched hours spent writing during the first few months of his life.
She says the many conflicting emotions she felt and the therapeutic practice of writing gave her the idea for Mothership.
“Everyone has stories, but particularly mums,” says Emylia. “Whether positive or otherwise, there’s a need for those to be shared.”
Emylia says no matter how chaotic her life felt at the time, writing gave her a sense of purpose and control. “It provides an outlet for all of the roller coaster emotions that many mums often feel early into motherhood.”
But it wasn’t until 2018, when Emylia had a break in her writing, that she nurtured the idea of launching Mothership. Coming up with the name Mothership during a bus ride home, she later applied for an Arts Council England grant to launch a course – which was successful.
The first Mothership course launched in 2019. Its initial year-long pilot course ran fortnightly workshops – which nearly 60 mums participated in – at Windmill Hill City Farm and St Werburgh’s.
While researching before the launch, Emylia remembers being unable to find anything combining writing with motherhood – in Bristol or elsewhere. It’s one reason she believes the course has been so popular. But as a result of the 2020 Covid lockdown, final sessions from the year-long pilot had to be held online.
Perhaps surprisingly, Emylia describes this as a positive change that made the course more accessible. “I’m grateful we got to meet in person, but I’d always planned to take the course beyond the physical barriers of having to show up in person,” she says.
Later in 2020, Mothership became what it is today, an eight-week creative writing course, accessible to women beyond Bristol, though Emylia says this hasn’t affected the number of city natives that sign up. “So much of our success as a group is from word-of-mouth reviews, and many Bristol-based mums still attend the workshops each season,” she says.
Inside the Mothership
As a Mothership 2021 alumni, I remember the first time logging on. Emylia had sent out a robust session plan a few days before and I was prepared for a lot of listening, expecting most writing to be done between sessions.
Instead, it proved an interactive group full of writing prompts and exercises that spoke to my creative senses. One, aptly named the ‘jukebox’, is an exercise where a song is chosen at random, and its title is used to provoke creativity.
It’s hard to explain to those who haven’t experienced the course the emotions conjured during those sessions.
I remember being in the thick of perinatal anxiety, my son propped on my knee grabbing at my laptop screen. Meanwhile, I shared snippets of my story with a group of women all at a similar stage. Far from being a typical mum-and-baby group, Mothership’s prompts helped me unearth tangled feelings of both fear and joy through the power of words.
Some mums, like me, had babies on their laps, others wore headphones and lay on the floor of their children’s rooms, scribbling one-handed in notebooks and trying to get kids to nap.
Knowing we’d all shown up, with or without children, and with or without goals of becoming great writers, felt so empowering. Some women were there just to expel thoughts onto a blank page, others wanted specific writing advice, but we all shared the benefits of the group: a safe space to be creative.
From stunning poems about labour, prose on breastfeeding and sleepless nights, to simple lines, written about bottle-making in the middle of the night. No two pieces of writing shared were ever the same and there was huge respect within the group, making the space feel safe and non-judgemental.
‘A journey of seismic changes’
Mothership offers two fully subsidised places on each course for those who couldn’t otherwise afford the £80 fee. “They are not means-tested, so a level of honesty is required,” says Emylia. “It’s very important to me that people get the opportunity to participate, regardless of their financial situation.”
Mothership courses usually start at the beginning of a season, with spots never staying free for long, according to Emylia, and some mums even returning to repeat the course. “We’ve had people come back and do it all again, and many mums go on to create social groups off the back of the course.”
In the future, potentially later in 2025, Emylia would love to extend the Mothership space to include mums of children of any age. “Parenting is a journey full of seismic changes, it’s not just new motherhood but all motherhood,” she says.
I realise I’m nodding at this, excited at the prospect of joining another Mothership course, to explore the latest shift in my own parenting journey.
