All About Our Mothers with Vasiliki Albedo, Simon Maddrell and Mary Mulholland.
Video of Simon Maddrell, Vasiliki Albedo and Mary Mulholland, introduced by alice hiller.
Introduction from alice hiller: I’d like to welcome you all very warmly to this Voicing our Silences workshop and performance with the wonderful Vasiliki Albedo, Mary Mulholland, and Simon Maddrell. They’ll be performing from and sharing their brilliant joint pamphlet, All About Our Mothers, from Nine Pens, and also using it as a basis for prompts for your own work. Of course, the word ‘mother’ speaks to each of us individually. We may think of our own mothers, or their absences from our lives, or indeed those who ‘mothered’, or ‘mis-mothered’, us in their places, irrespective of gender. As a baby passes from the half-dark of a mother’s containing body, into the half-light of the wider world, so there is both darkness and light in the relationship between mother and child thereafter. Sometimes more darkness. Sometimes more light.
In the case of Vasiliki Albedo, whose heart-catching poems begin All About Our Mothers, there is an abundance of darkness, which ultimately becomes its own form of light. As many of you will know, Vasiliki is widely published everywhere from Ambit to the Poetry Salzburg Review. Her work has been placed with great distinction everywhere from the National Poetry Competition to the Hippocrates Awards. Her stunning, moving debut, Fire in the Oubliette, was published by Live Canon in 2020. Vasiliki’s poems open All About Our Mothers like a darkened sun. They trace the arc of that sun’s day through their sequence. This dawns with the speaker on her mother’s shoulders in ‘Pine Summit’: “and she’s shooting/ my one-year-old arms/ to a needled sky.” What follows can feel hard to read for the honesty, and necessity, with which the poems gives witness to a mentally unstable mother’s mistreatment of her young daughter. Like Pascale Petit, Vasiliki captures the quicksands and lighting shifts that destabilise a child’s sense of self, whether she’s locked out all night, repeatedly humiliated, or forced to care for a drunk parent. For all their pain, these poems offer the gift of holding in language what might otherwise seem unbearable. They take us to the sunset of the mother’s ending, and its curtailed gestures towards forgiveness, even as the final poem, ‘Encore’, resists easy resolution: “In my window/ the sun is a blind// rising and falling,/ trapped in-between.”
Following Vasiliki Albedo, Mary Mulholland has similarly been widely published, and placed with distinction in competitions from The Bridport to Wasafiri. Mary also joined and co-edits the game-changing Alchemy Spoon and runs Red Door Poets where music and poetry meet and join. Musicality is central to Mary’s poems in All About Our Mothers. Her opening poem, ‘Things Our Mothers Couldn’t Teach Us’, finds “a quivering scrap, mossy grey-brown/ the wrong shape for a rat”. It’s a leveret, or baby hare, born “self-sufficient from birth”, whom the speaker rescues off the side of the road in heavy rain, and returns in the morning to find gone, hopefully saved. Thereafter, Mary’s mother-figure is as longed-for as she is elusive. Musical, enchanted, sometimes singing as she peels potatoes, she is absorbed by the faraway. ‘The Sea is Sleeping’ calls back her magical, tropical childhood of “picking fresh grass for the manatees” – but “being so poor….they left food at your door”. If these are poems of loss, they are also poems of finding a place of fracture – and understanding it contains its own wholeness.
Simon Maddrell’s poems also perform acts of restoration and retrospective healing. Widely published, everywhere from Ambit and The Moth to Stand, his compelling debut pamphlet Throatbone came out in 2020 with UnCollected Press, while the fierce, pared, brilliant Queerfella jointly won the Rialto Pamphlet Competition. The mother in Simon’s poems is one who defines her family by absenting herself from it. She leaves her husband and children for a bedsit filled with fifty-two shoe boxes. Like Mary’s and Vasiliki’s work, these are poems which hold love and sadness and anger as intermingled as spring weather. In Simon’s case, they also leaven it with a dry humour. Dashes of reported speech fizz with all the brio of soda splashed into a spritzer. The poems’ heart beats hardest in the revelatory ‘She never came unannounced’. At last, a very difficult wartime childhood, followed by a spell in Holloway, is revealed – “Innocence flushed out of the cracks”. Telling it makes her “crumple” like “a blackbird broken as the evening/ chased the sun to the moon.” The poem ends “Then/ there was a stillness, and a song.”
Through sometimes difficult materials, All About Our Mothers offers the deep reward of finding words to voice long-held silences, and speak complex truths. The world becomes more fully present to us for what they reveal – as you’ll see for yourselves if you click the link below to open the Youtube Video. It is captioned for accessibility, and includes discussions of complex relationships between mothers and children. If you want to follow the prompts, please have writing materials ready. Vasiliki Albedo is appearing on audio only due to broadband constraints.
Voicing Our Silences: All About our Mothers with Vasiliki Albedo, Mary Mulholland, and Simon Maddrell: video with readings, interviews and prompts.
If you would like to buy All About Our Mothers please follow this link:
All About Our Mothers, Nine Series Anthology, Nine Pens Press, Jan. 2022.
Words from Vasiliki, Mary and Simon: All About Our Mothers is their collaboration exploring their relationships with their mothers, and the complex feelings around forgiveness, grief and love. A mother walked out on a dad that January, asks for forgiveness on her deathbed and swims through deep dark water. Mothers surprise us by singing when they peel potatoes, by visiting the school wearing only fur and when they punched memories out with truth that splattered the hearth. Mothers give us lessons by force-feeding us raw eggs, turning into a sea-fish, or seeing us with ears that know exactly what we are up to. At other times their milk is pink with blood and puss, they live on the moon, an old photograph is a cypher to the future. They leave us with brown-fringed lilies on a broken swing pounding a mixture to create immortality. Simon, Mary & Vas will each share about ten minutes of their poems and will then chat about both the collaboration and what Voicing Our Silences means to them in relation to this anthology. They will then facilitate some writing exercises with the aim of helping attendees make a start on creating a mother poem.
Vasiliki Albedo
Vasiliki grew up in Greece. She left home at fourteen and lived, worked and studied in five different countries in her teens and twenties before returning. She writes about mental illness, chronic illness, the environment, gender, family and relationships, sometimes approaching these themes through nature, science and myth.
Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Agni, Ambit, Lighthouse, Magma, The Rialto, Mslexia, Poetry International, Poetry Wales and elsewhere. In 2017, she placed second in the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition (EAL), and was commended in the National Poetry Competition 2018. Fire in the Oubliette was joint-winner of the Live Canon Pamphlet Competition 2020.
Twitter: @AlbedoVasiliki
Pamphlet: Fire in the Oubliette
Simon Maddrell
Simon Maddrell was born in the Isle of Man in 1965 and raised in Bolton. After twenty years in London, he moved to Brighton & Hove in 2020. He started writing poetry after the death of his parents and more seriously over the least five years.
Since 2019, he has been published in fourteen anthologies and diverse publications such as AMBIT, The Moth, Butcher’s Dog, Stand, The New European, Morning Star, Brittle Star, The Dawntreader, Perverse and Long Poem Magazine.
In 2020, Simon’s debut pamphlet, Throatbone, was published by UnCollected Press and Queerfella jointly-won The Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition.
Twitter: @QueerManxPoet Facebook: @SimonMaddrellPoetry
Instagram: @simonmaddrell SoundCloud: @simonmaddrell
Throatbone, UnCollected Press, 2020:
Queerfella, The Rialto, 2020:
Mary Mulholland
Mary Mulholland came to poetry following other careers which include journalism and psychotherapy. This year Live Canon will publish her debut solo pamphlet, What the sheep taught me. Mary grew up across five different countries and has a mixed English and Guyanese/ Portuguese background, and an underlying theme in her poems is exploring relationship – with her ancestral past, the environment, but particularly with the Self and one's innermost truths. Her poems are lyrical and spare, sometimes darkly funny, and often with an echo of fairytale or myth. Mary’s debut pamphlet, ‘what the sheep taught me’, is forthcoming from Live Cannon.
She is a co-editor of The Alchemy Spoon and a member of Red Door Poets.
Twitter: @marymulhol
Instagram: @mjwhistler
