The Motherhood Project
In November of 2018, I attended a conference for artist-activists called Culture Shift. It was hosted by the US Department of Arts and Culture - a people-powered department taking grassroots action to incite creativity and shape a national culture of empathy, equity, and belonging. It was a beautiful gathering. I met three women - all from different walks of life, but connected through our work as story-tellers in the theatre. We hit it off and in the following months created a feminist theatre collective called Moderate Woo.
Our collective spent the past six months launching our first undertaking - The Motherhood Project. I serve as Playwright in residence for Moderate Woo, but I also work as a co-producer, marketing director, graphic designer, facilitator, and more.
A little about the project:
What don’t we know about motherhood in America? Moderate Woo is on a mission to unearth buried stories, reclaim our collective history, and share our story in a way that radically shifts the dominant cultural narrative surrounding motherhood in America.
We’re already engaged in a national listening tour, collecting stories and recording interviews. Our interview pool is very diverse and includes individuals who possess lived experiences of birth, adoption, miscarriage, in vitro fertilization, child-free by choice, trans and non-binary parenthood, infant death, border-crossing with and without children, sterilization, forced-adoptions, Child Protective Services, foster-care, incarceration, multiples, step-parenthood, and more.
While most of our interviews have happened in person or by video chat, we’re now unable to keep up with the huge response to our initial call for interviews. If you’re interested in taking part in this project and want to tell your story, please click the button below and JOIN US!
Last month, the Moderate Woo team (Molly McCarter, Willow Jade Norton, Kristi Good, and myself) met up for our first working residency in Pittsburgh, PA. We’ll continue collecting interviews through Christmas 2019. We are currently in a script construction phase, which will continue through spring of 2020. The first draft of the script will be ready for a residency in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in May of 2020. Here are some photos from our most recent residency:
I’m so excited about what the future holds for our little feminist theatre collective. We’ve had an enormous response to The Motherhood Project and we’re humbled by the beautiful interviews we’ve had the honor to witness. I’ll keep you updated here on my personal blog, but please follow us on social media for all the latest news! Here are the links: