Seeding Garden House Press | A Soils Lab with Mother Mother | Practice Map
Hello Creative One! Welcome to Seed & Spark: Journal of the Fertility Abundance Garden. This is a Soils Lab Practice Map. Learn more about An Introduction to Soils and the Soils Lab practice below. To attend a Soils Lab you must be a creator in the Creators Circle. To learn more about the Garden or to join as a creator, please visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center. So much life, labor, and love goes into creating and sustaining the Garden and everything we share. The Garden is sustained by the kindness and generosity of creators and supporters. If any part of our magical world touches your heart and nourishes your being as a creator, please do pour into our Giving Well or join a Sustainability Circle today. If you are already contributing to our bounty, THANK YOU FOR THE LOVE!
Seeding Garden House Press
Soils Lab with Mother Mother | Practice Map
monday | 28 february 2022 | 6pm Est
The dream of Garden House Press precedes the Fertility Abundance Garden. The earliest explorations into a liberated publishing platform for my sacred texts—and those of the brilliant mothers and creators in my village—started off 4 years ago as a soft-time, private, Google Doc exchange between me and a dear sister mama. Inside the safety of our sacred communion I felt free to announce my heart-dream aloud, and expand on it beyond my mind. The support of being witnessed, the intimacy of our sharing cypher, the love of our long-seeded sistership—all of this gave me more and more energy to write, to dream, and create.
Archive Source: Mother Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Barbara Smith, and Hattie Gossett announce the birth of Kitchen Table Press in 1981.
In the years since then, this dream—and the name of the publishing entity—has continued to expand and evolve. Inspired by the story of Mother Audre Lorde’s Kitchen Table Press, I have come to call this vision, Garden House Press. Each word of the future center for our publishing and production labors has a specific meaning. I feel ready to shine more light on what has been seeding for some time now, and to invite more creators to pour into this becoming with me.
In this Soils Lab we will be collectively dreaming forward into the autonomous futures of our sacred texts and creations. We will commune with the birth of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1981 as an entry point into embryonic articulations of what Garden House Press can be. We will joyfully imagine the details of a liberated labor landscape of a mother-sourced, mother-centered enterprise. We will also begin to gather resources for a research archive into the elements of building Garden House Press.
this soils lab includes these elements:
Workshop in development/experimental practice
Writing practice
Vision mapping/dreaming
Story sharing/dialogue circle
Memory bank/archive development
Mother Mother recommends these resources for learning more about Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press:
Barbara Smith, “A Press Of Our Own: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press”, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3, Women and Words (1989), pp. 11-13
JSTOR Daily, “How Kitchen Table Press Changed Publishing”
Al Día News, “How Kitchen Table Press became the voice of feminist and lesbian writers of color in the 1980s”
meet mother mother
Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
I imagine, design, and bring to life multisensory, immersive practice portals that support creators in activating generative realities for their wildest fertility dreams. I consciously create expansive, soft-structure, slow-paced spaces that feel safe and liberating for mothers. My creations, programs, and experiments span a multitude of artistic genres and engage diverse platforms.
I am a Mother Mother, black birthing mother, fertility priestess, spiritual midwife, dancing mother, afrofuturist bush mother, movement facilitator, sacred nourishment practitioner, writer, sacred storyteller, culture maker, emerging DJ, budding astronomer, and devoted caretaker of mothers in my glocal village. I have birthed 4 children that the world can see, ages 8, 6, 4, and 2, and more starseeds that transitioned early before they could be known beyond my womb. My birthing pathways have been through homebirth cesarean, homebirth, and supported free birthing at home. I am a full presence mother and I navigate life as a multitudinous mothering entity. I live in Washington, DC with my co-creator and our children.
The birth of my youngest child seeded the momentum for what would become the Fertility Abundance Garden, a virtual congregation for creators, and sanctuary for mothers. I am currently evolving Dancing Mother, a spiral movement galaxy and digital archive installation portal sourced by the discovery, expansion, and celebration of dance and movement practices that nurture and sustain mothers.
I spend most of my days dancing by the light of the sun, bouncing around with the munchkins, nourishing babies from my body, nurturing my children’s brilliance and discoveries at Wildseed, our family learning lab practice, holding space for the mothers in my community, and dreaming up innovative ways that the world can be a softer, sweeter, and more lovingly vibrant place for mothers.
italicized language is defined and expanded on in the glossary.
about our soils lab
Soils Lab is a central component of Mother Mother’s evolving creative practice methodology, An Introduction to Soils: Preparing the Heart, Mind and Body for Deeply Generative Creations.
Soils Labs are where we explore practices that nourish our soil of creation, the substance from which we create everything we do. Soils Labs journey into diverse creative realms like writing, storytelling, visual art, sacred rituals, healing practices, movement, birth and fertility studies, and so much more. Every creator shares from the wealth of her brilliance, and we all grow from there.
attending soils lab
Soils Labs are collaborative-time (live), virtual gatherings. To honor and protect the intimacy of our sharing, Soils Labs are not recorded. We are a Come As You Are congregation and you are welcome to attend as much or as little of the lab as you like. You must be a creator in the Garden who has confirmed conscious participation to receive the access link for the labs. Please visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center to join the Garden and begin attending Soils Labs. If you have recently or previously joined the Garden, visit the Sanctuary to confirm or reconfirm your conscious participation.
ABOUT SOFT-TIME
The Garden thrives in soft-time expansions. While the Soils Lab is a collaborative-time gathering, we consciously create multiple points of engagement for all creators to participate in the majesty of our explorations and experiments, whether or not you attend the lab. In addition to the practice maps, our Soils Labs are archived in multiple places inside the Creators Portal and the Creators Shared Diary. We also extend conversations and discovery opportunities in the Creators Channel and Fertile Majesties groups. Mattering soft-time practice spaces is a vital way that we disrupt mandates of capitalism, and continue to decentralize fixed-time and cumpulsory-time standards as universally legitimate and relevant. In making space for the diversity of our life rhythms and labors, we take great care to develop generative, nourishing methodologies that honor the fluid nature of our lives as creators.
ITALICIZED WORDS DEFINED AND EXPANDED ON IN THE GLOSSARY
where do you share your stories?
Ask a question + share your story with us. The Fertility Abundance Garden is a congregation for creators, a sanctuary for mothers, a dreamscape for sacred storytellers. To learn more and to join the Garden, visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center.
Are you feeling inspired to share the love?
Thank you for witnessing our sacred labors in the Garden. If any part of this love nourished your being as a creator, please pour into our Giving Well. If there is someone you think would appreciate communing with this post or other shares inside Seed & Spark, please share and post this link with your lovelies and wherever else your spirit moves you. Thank you for being here!
