///Scene: Binah dances through the labors of a miscarriage/// Check out the Fertile Freedoms Listening Party where Binah creates online performance and storytelling events about her fertility journeys.

We are collecting fertility stories as part of the Fertile Freedoms Movement. Increasing awareness around the diversity of our experiences as creators is a central part of the Fertile Freedoms vision. As we explore, cultivate, and sustain more fertile and creative possibilities for ourselves, sharing our stories with each other is one ways we collectively seed more fertility abundance in our world.

Sometimes we start out responding to one idea, but surrendering to the writing takes us some place different, some place else that we really need to go. Discovering that flow of transparency and honesty in our words can be life-changing. Writing, in this way, becomes one of the most courageous and liberating things we can do when committing to nurturing and sustaining fertility wellness.

The following writing prompts are offered as points of entry to support you in getting deeper into your story. They are inspired by a mashup of fertility and creativity stories. Wording is intentionally soft and nonspecific sometimes to encourage you to interpret (or edit) as needed and write from a voice that makes space for your story to exist in a way that is authentic to you.

1. Write the story of your mother giving birth to you.

2. Write the story of your grandmother giving birth to your mother.

3. Write the story of your grandmother giving birth to your father.

4. Write the story of your great-grandmother giving birth to your grandmother or grandfather.

5. Write about getting your first menses (period).

6. Write the story of your womb. What has she seen? Where has she been? Who/what has she birthed? What has she released?

7. Write about your first sexual experience.

8. Write about a time when you felt so alive, so excited, so passionate about what you were doing or where you were going.

9. Write about your journey to conceive a child.

10. Write about your journey to become a mother.

11. Write a letter to your pre-motherhood self.

12. Write a letter to your little girl self.

13. Write a letter to your mother the night before she gives birth to you.

14. Write a letter to your grandmother the night before she gives birth to you mother.

15. Write about a powerful orgasm.

16. Write about a time you followed your intuition.

17. Write about deciding whether or not to keep your baby.

18. Write about choosing whether or not to be a mother.

19. Write about giving birth to your child/ren. Optional: Write a separate story for each child.

20. Write about deciding whether or not to adopt.

21. Write about your ovulation ritual.

22. Write about how your menstruation cycle has evolved from girlhood, to womanhood, to motherhood.

23. Write about meeting the father/s of your children.

24. Write about the moment of conception.

25. Write about losing a baby.

26. Write about your postpartum journey.

27. What does it mean to be a Creator?

28. What does it mean to be fertile?

29. What does it mean to be a mother?

30. Write about why you want to have a baby.

31. Write about why you want to have more children.

32. When did you first know you were a mother?

33. Write about your relationship with your mother.

34. Write about your relationship with your sister.

35. Write about your relationship with your daughter.

36. Write about your relationship with your grandmother.

37. Write about your relationship/s with your children’s father/s.

38. How does it feel to be pregnant?

39. Write about waiting to see if you are pregnant or not.

40. Write about waiting to go into labor.

41. Write about the eggs in your ovaries. What has their experience been, since they have been with you since your mother was pregnant with you?

42. Write about something you feel very passionate about.

43. Write about someone you love.

44. Write about someone who loves you.

45. Write about your breasts and what they have been through.

46. Write about your vagina and what/who has passed through it.

47. What does it mean to be an artist?

48. What do you create?

49. Write about your postpartum body. 

50. Write about how it feels when you dance naked.

51. Write about who you see when you look in the mirror. 

52. Write about a dance experience that made you feel so alive.

53. Write about something you want to create that is always on your mind.

54. Write about a place you’ve never been to but really want to go.

55. Write about a time you travelled by yourself to a new world.

56. Write about your girlhood.

57. Write about your teenage years.

58. Write a letter to your mother about your fertility.

59. Write a letter to your grandmothers about how it has been being raised by their children, your mother and father.

60. Write a letter to your sister.

61. Write about being everyone’s auntie and having no children of your own.

62. Write about having a hysterectomy.

63. Write about having fibroids.

64. Write about navigating hormonal imbalances.

65. Write about the foods you crave when you’re cycle is on the way.

66. Write about how your children have saved your life.

67. Write about how becoming a mother has changed your life.

ready to share your fertility story?
check out the fertile freedoms storyboard.

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I decided to start calling myself an author now. This process has been years, decades in the making. In the past few weeks I’ve started drafting the raw material that will at some point be my first book. It came to me that I don’t have to wait until the book is published to begin calling myself an author. I am already inside the heart of the process of authoring this work. I am already performing all the labors it will take to bring this book to life. I am already what I am also becoming.

I asked a dear mommy friend, who is also an editor, to work with me on this project. I have my first due date for a rough draft to get to her. It’s my birthday, coming up in a few weeks. Every morning before the munchkins are awake I try and write something. I don’t worry about it being cohesive, fully fleshed out, or even really good writing. I get words on the page. I know there will be time to transform these words into a strong, compelling narrative. For now, my job is to just write, and write, and write.

Recently I located and organized all my journals spanning the 20 years of my life from young adult, to woman, to artist, to invisible mother, to birthworker, to mother, to mother mother. This collection of pages journeys through major and minor life changes, relationships, travels, creative projects, pregnancy, losses, recoveries, births, career advancements, life partnership, familymaking, mothering stories, dreams, and the root motivations of characters I am constantly creating for short stories, novels, and plays. Having all my journals on one united shelf feels like a fullness I’ve been needing to experience for so long. The journals have been with me all this time, but they’ve never lived so intimately as they do now, gathered together in the shared celebration of their contributions to my evolution as a mothering artist.

Most of what’s in these journals has nothing to do with the content of the book I’m writing. But the accumulated magnitude of all the words, my words, in close proximity to me supports this knowing that I am already an author. The words, the sentences, the poems, the paragraphs, the scribbles in the margins, the pages, the bound volumes and spiral notebooks and loose papers of life documentation offer a sort of proof, and act as a loving witness to my process. It’s like situating my words so near to me helps me make new words. I am never starting from scratch, in this way. I am always building onto more of my practice. The foundations of my format, and tone, and flow for this book are readily available to me. I can trace my beginnings seamlessly, even as I push passionately forward into new literary worlds.

This writing process, more than anything, excites me. Even when I feel like I don’t know all of what I’m going to say at the start of a new essay, or whether what I’ve spent the precious, pre-dawn, pre-munchkin circus hours writing will actually make it to the final draft—I feel a deep satisfaction in having poured myself into my practice anyway. I love that I have added in some way to the larger becoming of my authorhood. Every word matters, because just like steps, it brings us into the next word, and the one after that, and the one after that. The process for creating my first book is showing me, over and over again, the magical, limitless nature of writing. It is bringing me into more intimate communion with the art of crafting my own narrative, and connecting it to the broader human story of life. For this, I am already so grateful. Everyday, I look forward to stretching and growing more and more into my words. This book is happening. Here we grow!