TONTS. - The Power of Poetry with Fleassy Malay

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

Matrescence AlbumTwo times TEDx speaker and viral poet, Fleassy Malay is an Internationally renowned, evocative and powerful spoken word artist, speaker and coach. A global advocate for Women’s rights, LGBTQI+ visibility, and a fierce voice for the power of authenticity and courage as a social change tool.Founder and CEO of Melbourne’s acclaimed Women’s Spoken Word organisation and monthly event, Mother Tongue, she has guided the voices of thousands of women into the world. A passionate, powerful, vulnerable and honest performer who’s words, workshops and courses leave a profound impression.A British artist now based in Melbourne, Australia; she studied at the famous London stage institution, The BRIT School, which birthed many strong talents such as Amy Winehouse, Adele, Kae Tempest and more.A self-identified queer, erotic, spiritual, mother she has a theatrical and yet deeply authentic performance and writing style, renowned for captivating her audiences with depth, honesty, and humour. She now writes and presents regularly to her online community of over 20k followers with poetry, talks, and opinion pieces.In 2017 she published her book, Sex and God, performed internationally, was a grand slam finalist and became the first women to represent Australia at the National Poetry Slam, USA. In 2018 her poem, Witches, went viral on InternationalWomen’s Day with over one million views in 3 days, and over 3 million views to date. Towards the end of the year she completed a US tour, and launched her album of spoken word, Unhear This. In 2020 she successfully crowdfunded her latest book Virago: A Poetic Manifesto, reaching over 200% of her original goal on Kickstarter and pre-selling over 300 copies across 4 continents.Website - https://fleassymalay.com Instagram - http://www.instagram.com/FleassyMalayFor more from Claire you can head to https://www.clairetonti.com or instagram @clairetontiOriginal theme music: Free by Claire TontiEditing: RAW CollingsSocial Media: Maisie JG Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I create, speak and write today. The Rwandan people of the Kulin Nation and pay my respect to their elders past, present and emerging. Acknowledging that the sovereignty of this land has never been ceded. I want to acknowledge the people who have given birth on this land, raised children on this land, connected to country and spirit for thousands and thousands of years. Hello, welcome to Tons, a podcast of in-depth interviews about emotions and the way they shape our lives. I'm your host, Claire Tonti, and I'm so glad you are here. Each week, I speak to writers, activists, experts, thinkers, artists, and deeply feeling

humans about their stories. And gosh, this week, I have an incredible artist, Fleecy Millay. Two-time TEDx speaker and viral poet, Fleecy Millay is an internationally renowned, evocative and powerful spoken word artist, speaker, and coach. A global advocate for women's rights, LGBTQI plus visibility and a fierce voice for the power of authenticity and courage as a social change tool. Founder and CEO of Melbourne's acclaimed women's spoken word organisation and monthly event Mother Tongue. They have guided the voices of thousands of women into the world. A passionate, powerful, vulnerable and honest performer whose words, workshops and courses leave a profound impression. Felice is a British artist

now based in Melbourne, Australia and studied at the famous London stage institution, the Brit School, which birthed many strong talents such as Amy Winehouse, Adele, Kay Tempest and more. A self-identified queer, erotic, spiritual mother, they have a theatrical and yet deeply authentic performance and writing style, renowned for captivating their audiences with depth, honesty and humour. Felicity now writes and presents regularly for their online community over over 20,000 followers with poetry talks and opinion pieces. In 2017, Felicity published their book Sex and God, performed internationally, was a Grand Slam finalist and became the first woman to represent Australia

at the National Poetry Slam in the USA. In 2018, Felicity's poem, Witches, went viral on International Women's Day with over 1 million views in three days and over 3 million views to date. Towards the end of the year, they completed a US tour and launched their album of spoken word, Unhear This. In 2020, Fleecy successfully crowdfunded their latest book, Virago, a poetic manifesto, reaching over 200% of their original goal on Kickstarter and pre-selling over 300 copies across four continents. My goodness. I cannot wait for you to hear Fleecy. This conversation goes so many places. A content warning that we do discuss men's violence and sexual violence too. So, and we go a lot of deep places. So just go gently with this episode.

Okay. Here they are, Fleecy Malay. All right, Fleecy Malay. Thank you so much for coming on Taunt. I really I'm so honored to have you here. I feel like I have poetry royalty sitting in front of me and reading everything you've done for this interview. I've just kept being like and what and this what so exciting but I was thinking about what to ask you and my first question is probably pretty simple on the surface. What are poems? Well, first, I think I would have to answer what is poetry because poems, in my mind, are the product of poetry, right?

So poetry is the magic that exists in life. It is the feeling, the emotion. It is the magic that exists in life. It is the feeling, the emotion. It is the trauma. It is the way that leaves move in the wind. It is those moments when the sun is setting and everything goes still. It's those moments of inspiration that exist in the world. It is the pain. It is all of it.

And for me, my role as a poet is to kind of fill myself with the poetry of life. And I think all artists do this, whether we're painters or dancers or even sports people, you know, like we fill ourselves with this poetry until I am so full that there is nowhere else for it to go but on the page. And when it goes on the page, that makes a poem. And the poem itself isn't necessarily poetry in my mind.

The poem is my attempt to encapsulate the poetry that exists innately in everything through the language that I'm choosing to use. What was the poetry of where you grew up as a little person? The poetry of my earliest memories was one of a lot of adventure and change. My parents were traveling when I was a kid. My earliest memory is the poetry of that, I guess, is my earliest memory, which is like an open fronted shop on Khao San Road in Bangkok, covered in leather bags everywhere. And there's this smell of leather and a little white rabbit hopping up and down this table.

And so I think I was quite blessed to be raised in a way that meant that my parents really valued travel, they really valued experiences, and I got to see a lot of places before I started school. Once I started school, I was far more settled down in like kind of council estate, outer London suburbs. If you've ever seen Ali G, I'm from Staines. So I'm from the town that Ali G is from.

Yeah, so it's almost the opposite in many ways. It was very white and very kind of lower to mid, lower mid-class area where there wasn't really much to do other than watch Dawson's Creek and play at the park out back. But I think, yeah, having parents who were quite eclectic in their own right gave me this real, you know, my mum was quite into racing motorbikes and going to fetish shows. And my dad was an old hippie. So, yeah, different take on life. Were they artists as well? Yeah, in their own right.

My mum's a hairdresser and I think there's a lot of creativity in hairdressing and my dad is a storyteller to the point where he probably shouldn't be because he keeps going he's a very good storyteller but he was really into their performance and being on he was in a local amateur dramatics thing and he's a jeweller as well. So, yeah, he was an artist in that way too. But, yeah, when I think of my dad being an artist, it is the gift of the gab. He's a Cockney, so he's got that like diamond geezer kind of vibe about him

when he talks like that. Yeah. What did the travelling shape in you as a young person? I think it gave me a good starting point to launch off when it comes to acceptance and love of people, of difference. And not just the traveling, even just like my mom, like she was in a biker gang and we had a lot of people around us. We had trans people around us and we had, you know, gay couples and just at a time when that wasn't day every day at all, I was very blessed, I think, to be exposed to lots of different things,

which meant that, you know, when I was looking, when I was coming out, which was quite early in my life, I never had that, oh, but what I am is wrong. How do I frame this? It was always what I am is right. Why don't people get? It was always what I am is right. Why don't people get that? Why does the world refuse to see how right this is? They're so binary in the way they are. How old were you when you came out? I think when I came out to myself I was 12 and started telling people.

I'd never really been one for like big reveals. I'd just like start being like, well, yeah, of course, this is the way I've always been. I think it's like a bit of a fear of the rejection maybe. So rather than, so I came out as bisexual when I was about 12, 13. I came out non-binary or gender fluid in 2020, I think. But again, my coming out just meant changing my pronouns on Instagram and carrying on like no one had, like nothing had changed and starting to write poetry that confronted gender. I never had like a big coming out moment where I had to sit someone down and be like, just so you

know. I think my partner probably found out just through me telling somebody else, of course, yeah, I'm non-binary, blah, blah, blah. And he would have been like, oh, okay. And just rolls with it. Just rolls with it. In that way. So because of the way that you saw the world as a child and that so shapes who we become, right, even our brain, what we see around us becomes normalised.

So you had a pathway. It's harder to become something if you can't see it. And I think in that, like when i think about the poetry in the world i struggled a lot with mental health as a teenager like a lot and i think now having you know diagnoses for autism and adhd it gives me a bit of framework to look back on as a teenager when you're going through these incredible hormonal changes that mean that regulating emotion is really hard without any support system but what my support system was was a was friends and I had one friend who would regularly um his name was Chris and we would just go and sit by the river uh in in stains and we'd sit and we'd talk and we'd talk about the trees

and we'd talk about the river and we'd talk about the river. And outside of that, we were listening to heavy metal music and like, you know, washing real hard. But like we'd find these moments together where we'd just sit in a public space, people watching and watching the trees. And I think that really shaped me and my capacity to see, yeah, to see poetry in the world around me, to take that stillness and to, when the wildness of the self is tumultuous and, you know, in the way that it can

be, to stop and find that poetry in the world around me is a real, it's a mental health strategy, but a gift as well. Do you think that poems exist and it's your role to bring them into being in that way or do you think they come from you internally or from what you are influenced by? Do you have a spiritual belief around them? I do. I do have spiritual beliefs. I think I've lost a bit of touch with them over the last few years.

I think lockdown closed my world in really small and I did lost connection with the greatness. But, I mean, my first book that I published was called Sex and God and it was erotic and devotional poetry. And I think some poems, like Witches, like I had no control when Witches came in. I had no control of that poem. It was I was driving to go meet a friend of mine for a

chai. And as I was driving, these words started pouring into me. And I had previously watched Elizabeth Gilbert's TEDx talk where she's like, you know, tells a story, I don't know if it was Leonard Cohen or someone like that who was driving along and the muse was pouring songs and poetry into him. And he just actually spoke directly to the muse and was like, you need to stop. If you want me to have this, then you need to stop and wait until I'm in a moment to get it. And I did that.

I actually verbalized it. I was like, you know, if you want me to have this poem, you need to slow down and stop because I cannot take it right now. And when I was able to, I pulled over and I wrote down what I had and then I went off for my chai with my friend and then I went into the toilet at the cafe and was like, okay, more poem coming in. I was like on my phone writing it all in and then I was like, okay, stop.

And I stopped and I carried on and then I drove home and by the time I got home and I pulled into the driveway, I was like this poem was like racing into me line by line by line. And I was having to memorize each line as it came in one by one by one. And I ran through the front door and I sat down and I just typed and typed and typed and typed and typed. And that was the poem. I never edited it. That's just how it is. It's how it came. And I went online and I shared it straight away. And I feel like, you know, that poem wasn't something in my ego that needed to say something. It was something that had to be said.

And it was being said by a lot of people about maybe like within the week, the Me Too campaign, like hashtag went viral and I heard about Me Too for the first time. So it was something that was in the air and in the atmosphere that women needed to say. And it came down to different people, I think, in different ways. It came through different people in different ways. And the way it came through me was the witch's poem. And I never made a Me Too post. I sat and I watched it all and I got overwhelmed by it all. And I felt the pain and the trauma and

my own personal experience in it all. But I've done my bit through witches. It's interesting because the way you talk about that is how I feel about matrescence like it arrived and was like hello and I was like all right okay I'll give it I did the exact same thing I love Elizabeth Gilbert I did the exact same thing I just said to it I will give this my absolute all I haven't sung a note in 15 years really I haven't written a song in this, that amount of time, but I will bring it into being as much as I can. And I didn't even know that word matrescence until I was looking for a word to explain the songs. And then I fell into like a, like a slipstream, like a river. And I often feel it's like a river of lineage of women, right? I'd love to either play Witches now or have you read it. What would you prefer?

Because I can play it for people and then we can talk about it because I've listened to it a few times now. I think play it and then I'll read a different piece later because it has the beautiful piano behind it, which I think is that my friend Harry put together. Oh, it's such a beautiful album overall as well. Unhear This is the title of the whole album, which I actually have a copy of.

I bought a copy at a different poetry night before our friend, so we have a shared friend, Flick, and she's doing your Mother Tongue poetry course, which we'll talk about. Speak Up. Oh, Speak Up. Yeah, sorry. But it's through Mother Tongue, right? Speak Up.

And, yeah, I bought your album before I knew anything about you. I was sitting on the table and I saw the cover. It's so fierce. It's like this green hair and the title even, Unhear This. So I love that Witches is on that. juice had a prey because we move with the cycles of the moon in the past they burned us alive because they knew that we are witches so now we cast spells with our mouths pieces of our heart spill out it is incredible the power of a woman who is not afraid to say no. No, we won't sit any longer while you ponder on our rights and our rights to give or not give life

and our rights to make another woman our wife and our rights to get paid an equal wage, to be safe, to have a voice in places where we might actually make a change. It is incredible the amount of ways they have slayed just to keep us small. If they could have, they probably would have burned us all, but they couldn't with fire, so they did it with words. Laid down laws to determine the amount of our worth. They kept us in contracts and separated our circles, erased us from pages and made labor-saving devices our saviors. It is incredible how quickly knowledge can fade, how much effort

that they have invested just to lead us astray, but we will not come quietly. Well, that's another thing they've tried to take away. Our right to exclaim our orgasms ecstatically. No, we will not come quietly. We will open our mouths, let our spells spill out and cast poetic prayers into the night so that every woman can hear the howl of her sister's delight, reminding her that her voice deserves to be heard. Let her jaw drop, let her shame stop, let her body scream under the soft pleasure

of what it means to be a woman who can speak freely. You see, words carry meaning. And they have fooled us for so long into believing that no means yes. So much so that I'm almost impressed, except, well, I've finally discovered that they were right so I've claimed back that no as mine because every no I throw against their forces is another yes I retain for my own self-worth it's a spell I cast for my own protection it is incredible the power of a woman who is not afraid to say no because this old witch und done with broomsticks and know your place, this witch knows that some knowledge

just won't fade, that every woman is my sister and through the hubble and the bubble and the toil and the trouble we grow stronger when we cast our spells together that we entered the fire and now we rise from the ashes and we are holding our candles

and lighting our matches So that the night becomes lighter And our voices can grow Because we have remembered that we are witches And we have learned to say no Tell me the kind of crux of that poem. Like, what is it to you? Witches is this acknowledgement that, well, look, hang on,

my brain just said something else. My brain said that, interestingly, when I put it out there, it resonated with a lot of people who identified as witches from the more religious sense, right? A lot of people who follow pagan belief systems. And I have in the past definitely put myself into that category. But when I wrote it, that's not what I was thinking about. When I wrote it, like I said, I wasn't really thinking at all.

It just came through. But when I looked at it and I put it out in the world, to me, it was you, you being a society and a system, have actively destroyed us for being who we are. And you've used this word witch against us so you could do that. You've taken this, you've taken us and you have put us under this category so you can have power over us. And actually, if you're going to call us witches, then we're going to own it. We're going to own it and we're going to claim it and we're going to use it as our power source because there is so much,

there's so much power in words. There's so much power in our capacity to speak our truth. And for me, speaking and spoken word is spellcasting. We are making reality when we say our words. We are creating our truths and with with poems like witches when I get up there and I speak it I it's like an incantation I am taken over by the words the words move through me and I cast them out into the world and it's the same when we when we say other things in our life I really believe that and they've been words that

we have been using spells that we have been words that we have been using, spells that we have been casting that people have not been hearing. One of them is simple. It's the word no. And people weren't hearing it. Men weren't hearing it. And society wasn't hearing it. And for me, the kind of overrunning theme of that poem is no.

And it's a no that is a yes in that when I say no to you when I say no to a world that I don't want to take me or to use me or to abuse me or to frame me in ways that I don't agree with when I say no to that that is a deep yes to myself and that that no sits in the cup of yes that I have for myself. When I say yes to that world, all I'm doing is filling myself with telling no to myself. I think that's really what witches is for me. What's in your yes cup? What's in my yes cup?

Really good, juicy sex. Oh, yes, please. The word moist is in my yes cup. What's in my yes cup? Really good juicy sex. Oh, yes, please. The word moist is in my yes cup, as you can tell by my earrings. Yes. Yes cup is people communicating with care for each other, with gentleness and ferocity, with the capacity to be in their truths, with me being in my truth. Let's talk about myself.

My yes cup is me standing in my truth with ferocity in the way that I will call the world and call myself out for bullshit and with gentleness in that I will hold the world and I will hold myself through that experience with compassion if I can. And so for me, my yes cup is treating people with respect. They should be treated with basic human rights, you know. My yes cup is, I mean it's always changing and it's always learning and it's always growing but I think it's about hearing my own boundaries

and my own needs and learning about other people's boundaries and their needs and responding to that truthfully and honestly. And we have to do that with everything, whether that is like, you know, whether I want to engage in a certain job or in a certain relationship or do I want to speak up about the atrocities that are happening in the world? Do I want to speak up about genocide? Do I want to speak up about the atrocities that are happening in the world? Do I want to speak up about genocide? Do I want to attend rallies? You know, like when I frame that through is this my yes cup,

like is this a yes to myself, whether I'm saying yes or no to the world and all those things are a yes to me. Yes, me too. Then there's a deep yes to myself, you know, and that can only happen through that ferocity of holding myself accountable to making sure I listen to what other people need as well as what I need and to bear all those things in mind. It strikes me that with witches, but with all of your work, what you're doing is giving permission for other people to show up in the

world in the way they actually are, not in the projection of where they could be or what they think they should be or what. Even I've thought a lot about women and people through history who speak about spelling, you know, incanting or have voices and things to say that are maybe against particular religious beliefs or patriarchy and how they've been treated historically, the same in the way that if you are neurodiverse or different, then you feel like actually presenting how you are is unsafe and so there's the mask that comes. And unconsciously I think a lot of us are doing that, walking around.

We don't even know all the lineage of people who have been hiding for so long. So in order for you to step into that, it takes an enormous, I think from my perspective, an amount of courage. Do you feel like it's courage? Firstly, I think the only reason I can do that is because so many people before me have stayed silent and they've stayed silent to keep themselves safe and they've done that and literally like if my mother had not stayed silent at certain points maybe she wouldn't of her life maybe she wouldn't have been able to get to the point of giving birth to me if you go back through lineage as a queer person, there have been so many queer people who stayed silent

in the right spaces so that they could survive and thrive in the spaces where they were allowed to. For me, I don't know if it's courage or if it's my autism. It's obstinance or something. Yeah, it could be too, I guess. But in a way, what a gift then. Yeah, I think for me it's almost like because I, I mean, we were talking about this before we started, right?

I have epic rejection sensitivity stuff. I really don't like upsetting people. I don't like people feeling like, I don't like feeling like people don't like me. At the same time, I cannot shut my mouth when something takes me, when I am taken to say something. And I find it very hard to, and it plays out sometimes that's really great. You know, like there are times in my relationship, in relationships with my partner and with other people where I feel

that disconnect. You know, like when it's been a day or so and you kind of, you ask, oh, are you okay? And they're like, yeah, yeah been a day or so and you kind of everyone's you ask oh are you okay and they're like yeah I'm fine but you kind of feel like it isn't and there's like this chasm that forms between people and that chasm feels like the most physically painful place in the world for me I feel the rejection sensitivity comes into my body and I feel like sick and like I don't know who I am or why or how. And I have to call it out. And that means it's like quite a lot of work to be in a relationship with me

because any time that there is a slight distance that appears that I can feel or sense a slight distance in our connection, I'm like, right, sit down, what's going on, we need to talk about this. And sometimes the other person hasn't even noticed it. They don't even know it's going on. Other times, like, you know, I just say things. I just say things. And I say things and then I go, oh, that's probably not the way

that a neurotypical person would have gone about saying that. Like I've been called blunt my whole life. And I think that I did learn to mask for a long time and I think I've got to this point now where I just, I still want sometimes to mask because I wish it feels easier. Sometimes I wish, I said to my partner the other day, sometimes I wish I could just be a secretary and not have a life where I have to speak up about things

and just be very happy being a secretary. And then I go home and I don't think about being a secretary when I'm at home and I just crochet or cross-stitch and then I'm happy and I go to bed. I want to think about working at a pizza shop or a cafe. That would be great. And then I said that to my partner and he goes that doesn't really sound like you and I was like no it doesn't but I feel like part of me in a part of me hungers

to be somebody who can sit in ignorance or can sit in the disc cannot care too much um and sometimes sometimes I think I go numb because I care too much. Yeah. Like especially with what's happening with femicide around Australia. Like there are times when I am raging and I'm raging and I do not shut up about it. And there are times when I go, oh, I'm not talking about this right now. I'm not being as loud as I have been. And it's not because I've stopped caring. It's because I've had to go numb for a bit.

And that doesn't mean the rage isn't going to resurface again but I've gone numb for a bit. Maybe it's self-preservation, I don't know. I think you need to. I feel like that with Palestine as well and what's going on globally, even with climate change, at certain points if you're going to write in this space and you want to be an advocate, you want to stand up and say things and be that person, I've learnt over time it's self-protective.

It's like your body's like you care so much that if you really felt that, you would crumble into dust, like you would just crumble. What's interesting is in order to make art, accessing those emotions and allowing yourself to feel them but in a way where you can be protected from that. Do you have mechanisms other than the feeling that maybe sometimes you go numb around things? I have to say, Zola, I saw you perform a poem about the bear. Bear versus man.

Yeah. Yeah. Can you tell us quickly a little about that? Okay. So firstly, I just want to, because my brain is like responding. I know. That's my problem. I jump into two questions.

There were two questions then. So answer the first one about protectiveness around you. Okay. Well, firstly, if I go numb, I have to, that's where the fierce, this concept of fierce gentle, which was like my friend show and my podcast and everything, is named that because it's a lifestyle for me. So if I go numb, I have to fiercely check in with myself and go,

for example, with things like what's going on in Palestine, do I have a right to go numb right now? You know, and I have to then, that's where the self-ferocity comes in. And so at the moment with what's going on with women as well, with the amount of women that have been murdered this year in Australia, I want to be numb. And yet I'm having to turn to myself and go, Fleecy, should you be numb right now?

And I'm having to question that and guide myself back out of that numbness. As far as writing the poetry, I mean, the poetry, I've always said that my journal is the cheapest therapist I've ever had. You know, it's getting it on the page, getting it or out on the screen, like getting it out means I'm carrying less of a weight inside myself. You know, it's like getting all these feelings and thoughts and packaging them up and putting them outside of myself. It feels like I'm'm offloading and off-weighting that stuff from myself, which in itself is the coping mechanism, actually. It's not that I need a coping mechanism to get to the poetry.

It's that the poetry itself is the coping mechanism. And if I don't write, if I don't create, I start to go mad. I either go so numb that I can't function or I get so emotional and worked up that I can't function. So the poetry is that for me. The other question was about man versus bear, right? Okay. So here's a great example.

So I had gone numb for a while. You know, I actually was talking very actively about femicide for many years. And for the last maybe, I mean, I still was doing my fringe show and there's a lot of talking about abuse and stuff in that and survival, but I haven't been as vocal on that stuff. And then this trend went around on TikTok that is, would you rather be alone in the woods with a man or a bear? And all of these women were responding going, bear, absolutely bear.

And since then, since I've written the poem, it's been being now presented to their partner, usually their male partners going, you know, what do you think? And then the guy is kind of going, oh, actually, you know, it's usually framed as would you like your daughter to be alone in the forest with a man or a bear, this sort of thing, you know, because. Because they can only have empathy if it's someone related to them that they really care about.

Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah, and I was, I saw a couple other people comment on this. I can't remember exactly which creators it was because there was just so much going past on my feed, but it was around, you know, if I would, I would I'd rather a bear because I got mauled by a bear at least I'd be believed and that's what I kind of rode with I was like oh that's so true and I just started writing with it I have a little writer's group that I run once a month and I brought it as a prompt to the writer's group and that's what came up with this poem and the kind of the absurdity of

that of that idea of like what if i was mauled by a bear and it was treated in the same way that we get treated when we are attacked by men how would that look and it's kind of absurd when you start laying it out and i kind of lent into that absurdity of mr bear who's a very good bear he's a very good bear. He's a very good bear. He's just very out of character for him. I know. It's so interesting, that whole notion, because once you start talking about the music festival and there's a bear on the fringes and how in the end they shoot the bear because it's not safe, but then they let the men through the gates. And that just hits so hard because it makes you think about so many things.

Do you have a perspective on why you think there's this increase in femicide? I don't even know. Is it an increase? Like did we accurately, have we accurately throughout history documented the way women have been murdered by their partners? I don't think we do. I don't think we have that. I mean, maybe we do. I haven't done the research. I think Australia

particularly has a problem. The UK as well. I think it's two a week in the UK is the average, which is pretty similar to here as well. They go between one and a half to two women a week. And I think there is many, many reasons for it. One of them is the way that there is a societal belief that it's beginning to be confronted but that we are property, that we are property and we've been property for thousands of years. That's what marriage was about. That's what virginity was about. It was about ownership.

It's not about love. It's about ownership and economics. And on the flip side of it is that society seems to be, this patriarchal system seems to be more invested in telling women what to wear than it is in getting their boys into therapy. You know, there is like… It's a huge topic. Yeah.

Men need therapy. Even if they don't think they need therapy, men need therapy. We all need therapy. We all need therapy, let's be honest, for our own reasons. But when people, like I've had partners in the past, even male partners in the past, cis men who have said, when I brought this stuff up and they've gone, well, don't you know that the highest rate of suicide is men and and I'm like, yes, yes, you're right. That's true. But in the case of femicide, it is overwhelmingly men who kill women.

In the case of partner violence in gay relationships, overwhelmingly men killing men. In the case of male suicide, it is men killing men, right? The problem is the mental health and the way that men are approaching life. And that needs looking at way more than, well, what were you wearing? Yeah, I a thousand percent agree with you. I want to tell you a story which I never normally do in podcasts because I usually just ask the questions.

But I want to tell you this because I think it is interesting. On the day that I came to watch your mother tongue performance, and my friend Flip came to do her first kind of performance after the Speak Out workshop. On that day, I drove my son and my daughter, I've got a three-year-old and an eight-year-old, out to the Dandenongs. And we were out there. We went into the crystal shop. It was raining really heavily. My son is very deeply feeling his age. So there's a lot of emotions around at the moment. And he was very concerned about the fact we were there at all. And it was school holidays and it's raining and this is silly and we should be going home. And so I got back in the car and I thought, okay, we'll drive back home. It's about a 45-minute drive back down the mountain. The Dandenongs are a mountain in Melbourne. And the GPS took us down this forest road and it was suddenly very gravelly,

quite muddy in these huge trees. And my daughter, who is three, I sort of had this really ominous sense that I shouldn't be there. And I was turning the car around and my daughter said, I can see an antelope in the trees. Now, we've never read a story about an antelope. She hasn't seen the Lion King. I don't know.

I mean it's very likely she saw a deer but she called it an antelope. She's three. And so then we drove home and then I went to the spoken word event that you were running and there was a beautiful poet and what is their name? Cat Kid. Cat Kid. So I did a very kind of rushed poem that I wrote about my daughter, about how to keep her safe but also free and it came very quickly.

I'd written it in my phone and as I do, I just was really impulsively, I'm just going to read a poem and Flick was looking at me like, what are you doing? And I'm like, no, I'm just going to read a poem. And Flick was looking at me like, what are you doing? And I'm like, no, I'm just going to do it. And so I read that poem and then this beautiful artist got up and said, I was going to do this poem and I'm not going to do it. I'm going to do two others. It's not going to fit in the night.

And she did two others, incredible characters, amazing. And then everyone kind of said, no, you need to do this poem. She's like, it's very dark. I don't know. It's quite creepy. I'm not sure. Anyway, everyone convinced her to do it. And she just embodies an antelope on stage. And it ends up being that she is using the antelope as an idea of prey and that men are the predators and that in the story, her character, whether that's her or the character in the poem, is raped.

And that whole centre of that is around this idea of the antelope and as a herd. And I kind of left that whole thing going, what is the world trying to teach me about this? Like what does this actually mean? And I grappled with it and grappled with it a lot. And then I went and had a hypnosis session, which I've never done before. I felt really called to do it. And during that, the naturopath asked me that question that I'd asked to be asked, you know, what was that antelope? What did that mean? And I just kept saying on this kind of almost like you were

talking about with the witch's poem in this, I couldn't get my words out fast enough. And I just kept saying, the herd, strongest together, strongest together, predators are real, but your daughter will lead the herd. She is strongest. We do not need to worry about her. The weak look after the strong, strongest together, herd, strongest together. And then there was messaging around my son and it made me think it's not, it's yes, we are strongest together. It's the herd. And also what we need to do is figure out how to help the men, how to help the predators, because it's not a problem with us. Right. And I just had this huge, like, I've been thinking about it happened last week. I've been how to help the predators because it's not a problem with us, right? And I just had this huge like I've been thinking about it.

It happened last week. I've been thinking about it for days. I had dreams about it. I just how do we help? How do we change that reframing? Can I say something to that? Yes. So I have been giving my child age-appropriate sex education from the age that she was, from a very, very early age,

from six years old. And that starts at, in fact, for younger, from like the moment she could talk. It started as like naming her body parts correctly. It started as teaching her that no one should touch her without her consent, no one should be looking at her without her consent, teaching her that she had the right to say no. When we played games, like even blowing raspberries on the tummy,

I would never play the game where the kid's going, no, no, no. You know, I would go, do you want me to blow on your tummy? And she'd go, yes, and I'd blow on her tummy. And, you know, we get older and older and older with them and we create age-appropriate education. She's nine now. We recently went through a book called Sex is a Funny Word, which I can't remember who it's by, but I think it's excellent. It's like a graphic novel designed for that age range, nine, 10, 11, talking about intimacy, relationships, it touches on masturbation and things like that in an age

appropriate way I turned a friend of mine has a kid who's 11 I think a boy who's 11 and my daughter and him went off at a party once together wandering around and I turned to him and I said so have you had have you had conversations with him around sex and consent because my daughter is now wandering around this party with him What have you talked to him about? And he was like, well, he hasn't shown any sexuality yet so it hasn't felt appropriate. And I think this is the difference. This is a big difference is that we wait until boys show signs

of being sexually attracted to people to the point where we as parents and adults see it before we start talking about it. And for a long time we were doing that with girls too. And we've learned that with girls we need to teach them earlier. We need to talk to them earlier because actually, firstly, they're going to be feeling those things long before the parents notice. I know that I was incredibly sexual active before my parents had any idea. I was such a horny kid, right?

Yeah. And I know that. And what seems to be the – and I've asked quite a lot of parents of boys this now and they generally all say, oh, well, we don't – we talk about consent, you know, as far as their bodies, but we don't really go deep into it until they start actually showing signs of sexual attraction. And that's too late.

That's too late. I think these conversations need to be had from six years old. I really think that. From earlier, it needs to be, no, you don't touch my body without my consent. No, I won't touch your body without consent. No, you know, and actually talking about, and I've had to tell my daughter from a young age that women aren't respected by this society.

How many young boys get that conversation at the age of five or six? Not many of them, you know. And this conversation goes, it moves outside of gender it moves like the fact that i that even when we talk about race like white people we need to be having conversations with our kids very very young about racism and what that actually looks like and how they play a role in racism and and it's the same with homophobia we need to start talking about those conversations with our kids a lot younger and how people who are straight are implicit in a system that marginalises and silences people or treats them badly and in age-appropriate ways.

But those conversations have to start early so it's not just being dumped on them. I don't want to walk up to a 13-year-old daughter and be like, so it's time to have that conversation. By that point, she's already had that conversation with kids at school she's already created her own concepts she's already googled what porn is you know that's what happens at 10 years old is the average age for kids to start googling porn right i know kids younger than that have done it so with my daughter when we bought this book and again it was consens consensual. I sat down and I said, I bought this book. This is what this book is about.

These are the kinds of things it talks about. I would like to read it with you. How do you feel about that? And she was kind of like, yeah, okay, I guess. And I said, well, how about I tell you why I want to talk to you about it? And she's like, okay. I said, I want to know that when you learn about this stuff, that you learn about it from someone safe that you

learn about it from me in a way that's appropriate and true because if you're in a school playground and some kids start telling you about sex and you don't know what they're they don't know what they're talking about because they've heard it from their big brother or big sister or a sibling they they're gonna they're gonna tell you that aren't necessarily true or that aren't necessarily kind or that aren't necessarily informed. And I want to know that when you learn that stuff, you learn it well so that when you're in that playground, you can actually step up and you can tell those kids that that's not true, that's not the way it is. And she was like, yeah, great, I want to do it.

We sat, we started that book at 7 o'clock. She didn't want to go to bed. We were up till 10 p.m. going through that book. Oh, wow. And then she still asks for it. She goes, can we go do that book again? And that for me is the way that's how I want to approach it in a way where my kid is informed, my kid is choosing what she learns,

but I am the one that's teaching her that stuff at a time before other people get in there and mess her up. Yeah. It's the door that's opened early. I think that Yumi Stein talks about this and I've tried to practice that in our family as well. It's not one conversation. It's not like, let's sit down and we'll do the birds and the bees and we'll do the consent talk and there we go. We won't shut the door, never have another conversation. Oh, here's a DVD. No, it's from the very beginning. This is your body. This is the correct terminology for it. This is the consent. We use the word pineapple as a word for consent in our house for tickling or anything or no stop. I don't want any more. And if someone says pineapple, whatever's happening,

everything stops. And so having those conversations be ongoing throughout their lives so that you are that safe person. So I think, yeah, I completely agree with you. What's interesting is watching my son trying to deal with his own emotions and they're huge. And I won't go into too much detail because that's his life to talk about, but I know as a teacher of eight- and nine-year-old boys, their rage, their hormones shifting,

you watch them kind of go with these huge surges of testosterone and trying to teach them in a way to navigate that is quite confronting. The kids are your biggest teachers, right? You think about throughout history when women started to exhibit large expressions of emotion, we are pathologists. We're like put into hysteria, right?

And when we talk about menopause, we talk about how grumpy and angry women get and how they're so hard to live with and it's so centred around the experience of the people dealing with them, not the lived experience of menopause, right? It's that when we talk about menopause, it's all about how we impact other people as menopausal people. And when I think about, you know, there's been a lot of focus put on what to do when women get emotional, how to tame women's emotions

and what drugs to give them to help them level out their emotions. And even with things like bipolar, it's picked up in women a lot more than it's picked up on in men. The conditions where there is like big emotional response, it's different. It's different with things like autism, where it was only studied in men. And so we didn't get that privilege of having it picked up on an ass but i wonder when i hate you when i heard you talking about that i wonder if in there there's something around like taking taking the emotions of boys more seriously like i feel like it's not taken seriously it's just seen as something that boys do it's like the boys will be boys thing um yeah well of course

he's gonna get angry about that he's you know that's just what boys do and of course he punched you or he punched his mate but that's just what boys do. And, of course, he punched her or he punched his mate, but that's just what boys do. Or, like, yeah, it's just the testosterone in the body. But that's not actually – there's actually a lot of other scientific things around testosterone that doesn't actually agree necessarily even with that. So, yeah, I don't know. I think – I don't have a son, but I think if the world took the emotions of men a little more seriously,

including men, maybe we wouldn't be in the situation that we're in. It's taking, as Brene Brown would say, emotions as seriously as we do other harder sciences. Absolutely. Because, you know, there's so many shades. I want to pivot a little bit now from that. Yes, let's pivot. Okay. I want to ask you about that connection between the

erotic and the spiritual. So that book that you wrote, Sex and God, to me and to some people, they seem like two words that shouldn't go together almost. Tell me about that. So it was quite a while ago that I wrote that book now. It was about seven years, I think. And I had got into, I'd been wanting to write a poetry book for a long, long time and didn't really know how to go about it, didn't trust that my poetry was good enough on the page, really was the realism. I felt like what carried me as a poet was my performance skills,

not my language skills, which is a whole other topic around elitism within the literary world. But I got invited to an erotic poetry gig. And so I wrote a load of erotic poems for it and came back going, I love this. And I noticed that a lot of my poetry that was erotic wasn't necessarily about people. Often it was about nature or it was about a sense of some kind of God or spirit or oneness that existed.

Which I said, as I say, I'm a little bit disconnected from now, but at the time it kind of imbibed everything that I did. All of my journals, all of my writing, all of my art was imbibed with this idea that I had a lover that I couldn't see, that I couldn't touch, that I might never meet in person, but that was always there with me. I was very influenced and inspired by a lot of the mystic poets. You know, there's obviously Rumi and Hafiz, who are very well known, but there's also a lot of other beautiful mystic poets

that speak to that eroticism. I had a book called something called Love Letters to God, I think it was called, and it was just like a series of many, many different poets who write in that kind of mystic way from different religious and cultural backgrounds. And for me that was my, like I wasn't raised religious. I was in the sense that I lived in a Christian centric society and so my school had like a lot of the people that came

like the youth workers that came in were all Christian youth workers and like you know I went to brownies which had this Christian undertone and I went to like there was all these other ways that Christianity was influencing me but I wasn't raised a Christian by my parents I wasn wasn't raised to go to church. I had a lot of friends that became born again Christians. And if anything, I got quite scared away from the idea of God and from the idea of religion at all. And I think through those formative years of kind of say 17 to 25 that chunk of time that decade was like a time where I began to find my own relationship to to the earth to the planet of earth and to nature and to my relationship with and in that came a sense of belonging where I had a lover in that. I had a lover that wasn't sometimes sexual in some ways.

Like I identified as an ecosexual for a while. Like I would get aroused by sunsets. I would get aroused by the colors on leaves. You know, I was, like I said, a very horny youth. And I found a real sensuality. And that's the poetry again. That's the poetry in life. And that book was my attempt to culminate poetry that was both dedicated

to individuals that were sexual and also about a devotional, an act of really to devote yourself is to give yourself to as a gift to almost wrap yourself up and say here I am here for you and so who I was here for in that poem was was earth was nature was this spirit and sense of of oneness that that I can feel that everything deserves to exist on this planet and that everything has a beauty in it and that was what I was devoting myself to in that Sex and God book. And I do like a title that makes people kind of a little bit frustrated, you know, like Sex and God and Unhear This and, you know, I do like those kinds of titles.

Yeah, it draws people in. It makes them elicit a feeling whether positive or negative and that's what we want, right? We want people to feel. I deeply resonate with everything you just said about that feeling of oneness and I spend a lot of time much more recently with nature just there and it is, it's deeply, I guess erotic is a way of saying it, but it's the energy of all things.

It's kind of hard to put words around that. But it's extraordinary and a beautiful way of moving through the world that we seem to have forgotten. And in making art, I somehow rekindled that in my own, maybe even from my own lineage, feels deeply radical and completely right in the same breath, I think, to move through the world in that way. That brings me to Virago. Speaking of topics and titles. Speaking of topics and titles.

Tell me what that word means. This is your new book. Well, newish. It came out in 2020, yeah. So Virago is a word, means warrior woman in Latin. And I was putting together this book. I did a crowdfunding campaign just before COVID came in. In fact, I released the crowdfunding campaign a week

before COVID hit Australia. It was a very released the crowdfunding campaign a week before COVID hit Australia. It was a very interesting time to be starting a new project. And I wanted to call the book Static in the Mist, which is a title of one of my poems because it feels so poetic and I like the imagery of Static in the Mist. But there was something about it that wasn't sitting in how it would summarize all of my poems that were in the book because the book was very diverse and the kind of poetry that's in there and then i heard this word virago and i looked it up and it means warrior woman

but vir means man is like of man so it's this idea in the research that I did, it kind of came up with this idea that it is a woman who is strong because she's like a man. And I had a real problem with that. And I also had a real problem with the fact that the term virago also has been used to demonize women. You know, she's such a virago and it's used as a slur against women, like so many other words. When I googled it, it said loud, overbearing woman. Loud and overbearing woman, right? So either way I looked at the word, something about it didn't fit for me and it started to make me think about what it meant to be a strong woman.

What does it actually mean to be a strong woman? And so this book became partly a manifesto. At the beginning there's this like real kind of statement of what it actually means to me to be a strong woman. And then the poetry itself is the living embodiment of that. And for me, in fact, I can just read out the little summary if you like. Yes, please. What a treat.

I won't read the whole of the manifesto part at the beginning, but the other part of it I think is that, and this is what we wanted to say earlier, is that I think that we are raised, society raises women to segregate us from each other. We were raised to compete and compare and even the concept of gossiping was created to silence women because actually when you talk about the herd, right, so we used to be able to come and talk to each other

about if there was abuse but then gossiping was introduced and now it's not okay to gossip. It's not okay to talk about things. So if we know that a man is abusive, we can't gossip about him like that. Right? And for me it's about creating that herd, if you want to use that word. It's about bringing women together and creating a place of connection through our shared experiences where we feel safe to talk about that stuff

with each other. I've titled this book Virago because it is my poetic manifesto of what it is to be a warrior woman. Every chapter is another facet of my woman-ness, my warrior nature, every poem a battle cry. Let this become the new definition of Virago, a woman whose strength is evident in her courage to be herself. So please read these poems.

Be hurt by them. Be inspired by them. Be aroused, angered, and enamored by them. And know that whatever you see of yourself in these words, whatever gender you identify as, it is merely a reflection of your own strength and willingness to grow. So that's kind of what the book is. So each chapter is grief. It is uh there's a chapter on

grief there's a chapter on sex and sexuality there's a chapter on anger there's a chapter on mental health a chapter on spirituality it's all these elements that I believe that make me a strong person when you say that all those elements make me a strong person. When you say that all those elements make me a strong person, can you tell me more? Well, I think that we perceive strength almost as, it can often be perceived as stoicness, like holding it all in and just being strong and pushing through, or strength is about physical strength. Whereas I believe that what makes, what gives, I I mean if we're looking at the concept of women here the idea of a woman's strength doesn't come necessarily from one specific form of strength it doesn't come from being able to lift heavy weights necessarily but it can do it doesn't

come from her ability to stay up all night nursing a child and then go to work the next day but it can do it doesn't come from the fact the next day. But it can do. It doesn't come from the fact that she's survived abuse, but it can do. It doesn't come from the fact that she is dealing with mental health issues, but it can do. And it's actually what it becomes is often all these parts of ourselves that have been segmented away from each other and often silence our sexuality, our sexuality, our love, things that have been kind of made to be shameful.

Shameful, yeah, shameful and also like girlified, like love. When I say girlified, I mean like when you make something childlike. It gets used a lot when we do things to men. I'm just trying to think of what the word is. Anyway, it's where we take people who are adults and we treat them like they're children and I think there's a lot of things that get made to be less important because it's somehow childlike. Or infantilising. Infantilising, yeah, right, infantilised.

So we get called girls, we get love and love poems get seen as this almost infantilised thing when actually the first ever poem written was a woman's poem about love. The first poem that had a sense of I in it anyway, a sense of I and of the self was a love poem. And I think that there is power in claiming back those parts of ourselves that have been segmented away from strength. Mental health problems or struggles have been segmented away from strength. Mental health problems or struggles have been perceived as weakness. Sexuality has been perceived as a

weakness. It's like how dare you fall to the apple? How dare you fall to what the snake wants and you fall into temptation and you are weak. Having been abused is seen as a weakness. And I just wanted to reframe all these things. Grief is perceived as weakness sometimes. And I just wanted to reframe all these things and be like, no, these are strengths. These are part of, these are all the pieces that build up the full picture of strength in everybody, especially in women, where we've been told that they shouldn't be there. I couldn't agree more. It's that phrase, the wound is where the light gets in. Yeah.

Right? Which is, in essence, us growing through the trauma that you go through, that post-traumatic growth that you see everywhere in nature. You know, after a bushfire, those tiny feathery leaves that grow all the way up gum trees. How else do we grow and expand as a person if not through pain? Really, I completely agree and thank you so much for the work you do. Could you then tell me what it's like now running Mother Tongue but particularly running Speak Up where I often feel like you have people coming who have intense trauma and pain. How do you help them to alchemise that and find strength?

Well, firstly, I might explain what Mother Tongue and Speak Up is. It's a good idea. Very good idea. So Mother Tongue, they're actually separate. They are separate, but there's a partnership between them because I'm a linking factor. So Mother Tongue is a not-for-profit organization I established 11 years ago now, and it's been a space

to amplify and equip women's voices through poetry. And we do that through the poetry events, which is where you saw Cat Kid before, where you got up yourself. And the idea there is to create a platform for women to be able to share their stories and this was you know pre the pre the me too campaign it it was a quite revolutionary actually to have a space that was consistently bringing 60 to 90 people into the room every month to hear women speak like it when i look back on that and see how the world has changed or how the

conversations have changed in the last 11 years, I can really feel that revolutionary aspect that it had. And the idea was that it would bring people into a space that wanted to be entertained and get them to think deeper, but also people who like to have deep conversations and allow themselves to be entertained a little bit, you know, because it's not just trauma. We get all kinds of stuff up on that stage. And then Speak Up is the course that I run, which is a spoken, essentially a spoken word. It's purist factor. It's a spoken word course. But like I say, writing is, I believe writing is therapy. I believe that the stage is one of the safest places we can be in the world because your audience will give you more room

than if you were to stay walking down the street or something. If I started leaping around and making animal noises in the middle of the supermarket aisle, people would be like, I don't know if I feel safe around this person. Whereas if I was doing that on a stage, the audience would go, okay, so where's this going? And I think that

the idea of Speak Up originally was just to help people write spoken word. And what's unfolded for me is that the people who come, come because they have a fear of public speaking. But really what that means is that they have a fear of being seen. And in that they have a hunger to be seen and a hunger to take up space and to take up time. And really what Speak Up is is a space to support them to take up space and to be seen. And it's a very slow progress, I say, from heart to page to stage, right? We don't start with a stage.

We start with seeing ourselves, with getting our words on the page. And I'm not a trained therapist, so I have to be really clear about that and be like, look, I'm not a therapist, I'm not a trained therapist so I have to be really clear about that and be like look this is not I'm not a therapist I'm not a counselor but I'm here to guide you as a poet and in that we have this opportunity to allow ourselves to see ourselves and then when we feel safe enough allow ourselves to be seen by the group and then when we feel safe enough allow ourselves to be seen outside of the group and sometimes that's just general i haven't felt like i've been seen and sometimes that's specific parts of ourselves so often i get women coming in working on their anger or i get people coming in

working on eroticism or i get people coming in and working on grief and there's a specific part of themselves that they feel they haven't seen or been able to be seen in that they want to work on through their writing and it's transformative it's it's it's incredible i've seen incredible shifts and changes in people including myself in those spaces i think a big part of it is the realizing that the world changes and i change every day and this idea that you know you go to a five-step course to for confidence in speaking and you'll come out of it a really confident speaker taking up space and being great at what you do. And it's just not true and it's not possible because who you're speaking to is going to be different every day.

The world you're speaking in is going to be different every day and you're going to be different every day. So I think the biggest change that's happened in myself is the compassion and care I have that, you know, maybe one day I'll get up in front of a group and feel, not even need to feel courageous or confident because it's just what I do. You know, it's just there. And then another day I might get up and feel like the world is closing in on me

and I don't know if I belong in front of that audience and to be able to go, hey, it's okay. You've got this. I've checked it out. We're definitely safe. You've got this. And I think that's been the biggest shift in me through this journey and not having to hold myself up to the standards of who I think I should be or who the world thinks I should be when I show up.

And that's hard. When you've had millions of people around the world seeing your art and created a very specific opinion of who they think you are and what you should be um based on the art or the specific pieces of art they've seen of you it can be really scary to get up and do something different it can be really scary to feel like well what if i let them down what if i let these people who who really are invested in a version of me that they've created, what if I show up differently and I let them down? And that rejection sensitivity as well. It's like, oh, my God.

It's like one thing to have one person, not like it was a whole other thing to have like three and a half million people who saw witches kind of go, oh, you're different to what I wanted you to be. A big part of that came up for me when I started talking about gender in a different way. I'm still here standing up for women's rights, and at the same time I'm going to stand up here and stand for trans women's rights, and I'm going to stand up here

and talk about non-binary people's lives and trans men's lives and how all those things are. We are all fighting the same enemy. We're all victims of a patriarchal system that tells us we shouldn't exist and when i started talking about that stuff i did get a lot of people mostly women who had seen witches and loved it and then gone how dare you abandon us like this like somehow i'd abandoned the cause of of women's rights because I broadened the conversation outside of just cis women.

And the fact is I've always had that broadness, but I wasn't as overt about it necessarily. Or maybe they hadn't seen those pieces beforehand. They hadn't seen my erotic queer poetry maybe. They'd only seen witches. I don't know. But, yeah, it was a really interesting experience to to go well it's more important that I'm being true to myself and I'm allowing myself to show up and if these

people don't like what they see can I stand in what I've said and if I can't stand in what I said can I stand in my reassessment of what I said and then stepping forward from that place yeah does that make sense makes so much sense as artist, you're not making it for what the audience will think. It comes from here, like you said, like you teach. And it strikes me as you were talking about the oneness of all things, that it's a binary way of thinking if we're just fighting for just women's rights only. That's just another binary way of thinking.

There's that beautiful diagram, I don't know if you've seen, from ego to eco, and it's a First Nations concept, but it really explains patriarchy as a triangle. At the top is probably a white man, let's say, then there's a woman kind of just underneath it. Women. Sorry? White women. White women underneath it. And all the, sorry? White women.

White women underneath it, exactly. And then it goes down and sort of all living beings kind of fit in this triangle, but there's someone at the top of dominance. And there's a Greek way of defining it as dominance of the fathers, the word patriarchy. And if you think of matrescence or I would say matriarchy, which is I think where I see the solutions going, it's the same as this kind of ego to eco, the idea that we are a circle, that all beings, the octopus, the trees, the plants, women, non-binary people, cis men, everyone, people of colour

from wherever we are, we are all living beings in one equal circle. And that to me is a model that I think moves past that kind of smash the glass ceiling, girl boss, women on the top kind of thing. I think also when we talk about, I love what you're saying and when you said, you know's it's not just women's issues um but actually remembering that for example um health care for people living with disability is a woman's issue right looking at racial inequality is a woman's issue and throughout you only have to look at the history of feminism and I've been really lucky to have been guided and told where to look and to learn more.

But, you know, feminism was this idea of white woman feminism was really where it's been centred is what feminism should look like. When there was, you know, this idea of there being inequality, when the vote was fought for in America for women, and it wasn't really all women. It was just a very specific type of woman. And I think that quite often when people think about women's rights, it's very often that people think about women like themselves.

So whether that's to do with their biology, so cis women thinking about cis women, whether that's to do with their race, white women thinking about white women, whether that's to do with their ability, able-bodied women thinking about able-bodied women, whether it's to do with their age, women in their 30s fighting for other women in their 30s and forgetting about our elders who are going through all kinds of stuff about being forgotten by society. But really if we're going to really be feminist,

we need to be fighting for all of those women. Yeah. That's exhausting. Oh, so exhausting. And how – can I swear? Of course. I've been holding it in. Oh, my God. And how, can I swear? Of course. I've been holding it in. Oh, my God, this is such a safe space to swear.

How fucking dare you as a system put us in this position? Right? This is exactly it. The anger that I feel that we have been put, that people are put in this position where we have to carry the weight of all this trauma the system has done to us and fight for our own rights against the system that's done it and also fight for the rights of other people that this world is, that that system is trampling on.

How fucking dare they? And that's what I use to drive me is that anger rather than the fatigue. Like I said, I let the fatigue get me every now and then and I give myself that space and that time when I really want to go, where is that energy going to come from? It comes from anger. Like how dare we as a race, like when I say a race, like a race of creatures on this planet, a species.

How dare we as a species have created a way of being that's done this to so many people? And that's the bit that drives me. It's like the rage. The rage. It's a very helpful emotion, Inga. Oh, so good. Yeah, guilt, not so much. Rage, great.

What's interesting, actually, guilt, when I think about guilt, not so much. Rage, great. What's interesting actually, guilt, when I think about guilt, I think about what Brene Brown says, which is that shame is immobilising. Shame says I am bad. Guilt says I did bad but I can do better. That's an interesting distinction, isn't it? So shame can be so immobilizing, whereas guilt actually, especially when partnered with rage or with love or with another emotion, I think can actually become a driving factor towards our own change.

I know that guilt has driven me to try and be a better person. And with my like absurdly anxious self, guilt drives me through so much of my day. Totally. Oh, my God. We didn't even get to talk about your beautiful poem about matrescence and that transition. Oh, I have so many motherhood poems, so many. I did bring one with a feeling to think about performing it

and sharing it. Because that's an interesting part of this piece, that matriarchy to me you can define it as in the beginning the mothers and I had not connected my work in matrescence with feminism in some ways I don't know why it hadn't or with the whole solution to everything but the more I look at it really closely the more I see that we all come from a mother and when we build centres of societies that used to exist where we centre the mothers and the children and babies the way birth happens, we centre that, everything seems to be centred and cared for in a

different way and the fact that we're not honoured or really even understand what happens to our bodies and ourselves when we go through matricence therefore means we often land in a Western sense in an isolated place. What was it like for you to move through? For me to move through, I don't think I ever really actively wanted to become a mother. I think I may have had, this might be a little bit of a touchy subject for some, I think I maybe actually even fetishized the idea of getting pregnant. And I think that, and I actually have what I consider to be an allergy to pregnancy,

as in I get hyperemesis gravidarum horrifically when I get pregnant, which has caused me to not finish multiple pregnancies. One, I did take to full term, which is my daughter. And the journey of being bed bound for six months, unable to eat or drink or take a shit or anything, to then suddenly becoming a mother. And I was stepping into this motherhood with this grief of the loss of the person that I was. And I didn't see anyone around me at the time talking about that. It was this expectation to be happy.

What do you mean? You've got this baby. I even had someone very close to me at the time say, why are you talking about all the lasts you should be talking about all the firsts you've got coming up I was like you don't get it because in that time and now now I'm not thinking about all the lasts I had now I think about because I'm deep in I'm nine years in this is my life but at that part of my life, it was so important for me to feel the grief of losing my childhood self or losing my pre-motherhood self or losing the part of me that had zero

accountability or accountability, responsibility over anyone else other than myself, really. I didn't have to be responsible for anything else. And I think a lot of fathers get to continue in that mindset because there's always going to be the mum there, you know, to back it up. And that's not exactly what women's experiences are. And even if it was that socially, physiologically, things have changed. Your body changes so much. No one told me about that. No one sat me down and said, did you realize that for the rest of your life

your body is going to not function the same way that it did before, that every day you will be reminded of the fact that you did this? No one said to me, did you know that your mental health will change after you've had a child? Did you know that if you have ADHD that that will flare up with the hormones? Like no one said any of this stuff to me. And they're not saying it about menopause either, actually. I'm coming into perimenopause.

I think I'm having early perimenopause at the moment. I don't know. No one's fucking talking to me about it. I don't know. I don't resonate with that. Exactly. I don't know. Exactly.

And I think so for me a big part of those early months especially and years because I had postnatal depression was grief. And in that I felt like I was failing as a mother because I didn't want to be in that situation actually. And as much as I love and adore my kid now, back then I was regretting the choice that I had made. And I had one woman, one woman come to me and I just applaud her for her courage.

She was an older woman, older than me by about 20 years I'd say. And she said, I wish I had never become a mother. I knew her and I knew her kids. She loved her kids. She goes, don't get me wrong, I love my kids, but I wish I'd never become a mother. And I've never heard another woman say it, and I think it is the most courageous thing for a woman to admit

because I know that part of me feels that way. I wouldn't give up my daughter. I wouldn't give up the life that I have with her at all. But there's a part of me that little, I relate her to like the little girl, but it's not the little girl. It's just the part of me that, because I actually know, I think about, you know, friends of mine in their forties who don't have children that still have this, which is that freedom to just up and leave or to change house or to move to a different suburb or to do all this stuff and to emotionally go through whatever they want without having to factor in a child and how that is going to impact their child.

And I totally own that it's a choice that I made to get pregnant um but I think that society I think it would be kinder on mothers if society were allow women would allow women to have that feeling as well without shame yeah and I remember her saying that to me and it probably is what got me through the depression is knowing that I wasn't alone in the feelings of grief, in the feelings of, oh, fuck, what have I done? And I was able to come out of it the other side and find myself and find myself as a mother in a way that actually feels beautiful

and inspiring and strong and I have a fucking stunning relationship with my daughter. But I don't know how, I don't, what helped me get through was that knowing that there was a woman out there who wished she'd never become a mother and she has two great kids who I knew. They were my age, lovely people. And she was lovely. But I had this respect for her in a way that gave me permission to just be honest about the fact that I was grieving.

Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, I deeply resonate with that too because it is in the end so hard and so much harder than we are told on every level. Plus we're operating within a system that isn't supportive in the same way that it could be too. And when you talk earlier about like the looking after our mothers, you know, like centring the mothers in society,

it does happen a little bit more. You know, when women are pregnant, they're this precious thing. We have to look after everyone. You know, we'll move everything around them. They don't have to do anything because they're pregnant. We've got to protect the baby. And babies are like the most precious thing in the world, right, to us as a society. And then the newborn mothers, because they are so close to the newborn, they also get some cushioning around them. The further you get away from being a mother of a newborn, the less relevant you become in society. So when you think about the fact that at the moment, the largest demographic of homeless people in Australia is women over 50.

Okay. That says to me, and I'm making presumptions here, but knowing that generation as well, that that says to me that women got married and had kids and spent all of their lives looking after their kids, not building up a superannuation, not building up a nest egg for themselves, but in developing the family. The kids have moved away. The relationship has broken down with the husband. This is a lot of generalizations, you know, obviously. Yeah, but I do think it's a very common story.

And those women have been left forgotten with very little to their name. And some of those women have ended up in the streets. And that says to me that we are not caring for the mothers because they are still mothers. Even though they're in their 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s, they are still mothers and they are they're in their 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s, they are still mothers and they are mothers that have been forgotten by society. Yeah.

I completely agree. I think that there's a huge piece about the matriarch and the wisdom that comes when you are allowed to fully grow into yourself as a woman through those seasons. And I know you work with women through those seasons of menopause and beyond and the wisdom and the storytelling of someone who's been through that full life to not be honoured in the way they should be.

Yeah, there's so much in that. We could do a whole podcast on that alone. I can't even imagine the feeling that would be in my body knowing that I had done so much throughout my life. Like when I think about the women I know of that era, maybe women in their 70s that I know, so members of my family even, who spent their life cooking three meals a day for other people to meet other people's expectations, doing other people's laundry, cleaning the house for other people,

to then find yourself abandoned. Like that sense of abandonment must be huge. I don't know. I'm fully projecting that because I'm like 38 or whatever. But I do think that in the end, yeah, it's a decentering of care in our culture overall that I think we have so much to learn and so much to change. Two things I want to finish with.

I know we've been talking forever and I could talk to you for so long. This has just been so valuable. I'd love you to choose a poem to read us. But before we finish with that, I think one of the other key pieces of this whole conversation is joy. How do we bring that joy? What do you bring with you into your life that brings you joy? How do you cultivate that?

Great sex. Yay! Just to go back to the other yes in my bucket. Yes, please. Yeah, no, I think for me it is choosing joy actually. I was talking to my partner about this this morning that I think joy is a choice and we can, like I've been with my partner for six years and when you get with, when you've been with somebody

for a longer period of time, it's very easy to just slip into the kind of life, the mundanity of life and those moments of overwhelming joy can disappear so quickly, so easily. And for me, I've started a practice of choosing joy. So choosing to immerse myself again in art and take art in because that's a joy for me. Choosing to take time away to make art, to be in the art myself, in the poetry, and to put it out again.

So the inspiration and the exploration of art, right? Choosing to put down my phone and be present with my kid and when she asks if I'd like to meditate with her, being absolutely, and we sit down and we lay the blanket out we do the full meditation and um choosing to tell myself how much i love my partner and how grateful i am to be with him and choosing i think yeah i think that sometimes joy has to be a choice that we make because i know that my mind and the neurology that I have means that I slip into a very, I can easily slip into a depressed or an anxious state of mind.

And so I actually have to coach myself into joy. And once I get there, it's easier to stay there. You know, the more I'm doing it, the easier it is. The more I focus, I mean, gratitude journals, you know, like, but if I actually do take a moment every day with my partner where we share what we're grateful for for each other, it starts to help me when I choose to eat food that I really enjoy and love, you know. That helps me.

Yeah, so it's that choosing and acknowledging it when I do, being like this is me choosing joy right now. Okay, well, on that, will you read us a poem i can read you a poem okay so this piece is called patience i take a deep breath flick my fingers a few times say okay well when you need me, I'll be in the other room. I turn and walk. There is silence, followed by the sound of a shoe hitting the wall. And the air is heavy with your frustration, thick with your mood.

I want to swim through, wrap my arms around you, but I know that you'd just push me away. You so often do. From those very early days when I would stretch my arm back to you, when you were screaming in the car seat, try and place my hand on your little leg to remind you that I was here. You couldn't even walk yet, but you could grab my hand and push it away don't you dare use me to placate your own discomfort to my pain you would say without saying it but i felt it through the movements of your months old body and the strength of your will a thump on the floor in the room next

door and the air is heavy with my desire to fix thick with my trauma the urge to just scream at you to throw something too so you'll just put on your damn shoes and we can get to school so i don't have to be here so i don't have to feel this this this helpless, helpless, helpless. I wonder if that's how she felt. The air is thick and heavy with familiarity, thick with my trauma, the bark of my own name, the slap of my own skin, helpless. I wonder if that's how she felt. A single mother in the grip of early 90s London, undiagnosed, unsupported, underfunded, underslept, helpless. A frustrated growl from the next room, another shoe goes flying. The air is heavy with your frustration, sick with your mood. I love you, I call through the open door.

I'm here when you need me, when you know what you want. There is silence followed by silence, broken by the words. I want to go to school, mum baby i reply i take a deep breath get up and walk to you and the air is heavy with healing thick with our love oh that is so beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you for the gift that you are in the world to so many people. I would say in the thousands probably, more than that. Millions really have watched you on YouTube.

But that incredible work you do of allowing people to see themselves and be seen. Thank you. I've really appreciated this whole conversation. Is there anything you'd like to share about any upcoming events that you have or any work that's out in the world that you'd like to talk about briefly? Well, firstly, thank you for inviting me. Thank you for inviting me here.

Work out in the world. Well, I've just released Fierce Gentle, which is my, which is the name of many things that I've done, but this particular one is the live recording of our fringe show that we did last year. So that's on Spotify. I have a Patreon that I'm trying to get more support into. So if you enjoy my poetry, you enjoy my writing,

or you want to write with me because I run a writer's group through that, then look me up on Patreon, patreon.com forward slash fleecy, or you can find me on Instagram and those places. I do run classes in Melbourne, Speak Up. The next one's in August. And Mother Tongue is every other month and it's gorgeous and it's not just my space, it's everyone's space and I'd love to see more people there.

Oh, I can definitely vouch for that and for all of Fleecy's work. Okay, thank you so much. You've been listening to a podcast with me, Claire Tonti, and this week with artist Fleecy Malay. For more from Fleecy, you can head to their website or head to at Fleecy Malay on Instagram and also over to Mother Tongue as well. If you'd like to sign up to the Speak Up course,

I totally recommend it. For more from me, you can go to ClaireTonti.com or follow me on Instagram at ClaireTonti and you can find my music, Matrescence, on my website or on Spotify or wherever you listen to your songs. All right. I am going to be in the UK going on tour from the 11th of June. So for more details, you can head over to my site as well. I'm so excited to be performing and singing over there again this year. I'm also running a Matrescence festival in Exeter on the 21st and 22nd of June. Artists, poets, speakers, advocates coming together to talk about the metamorphosis of

motherhood. All right. As always, thank you to Roar Collings for editing this week's episode and to Maisie for running our social media. Tom's out. They're gonna tear it down. This cage you want us in no longer fits our crowns. Cause we are fire and we can be free. We can unlearn all the things that they told us we should be. Cause we are fire and we can finally breathe.

We can unlearn all the things that they told us we should be We can be free We can be free And don't forget that bodies can break They want us hungry and humble thinking our worth isn't our weight thought if we starved ourselves to fit their box and fit their mold

we'd lose our fight stay small, wait to be told that we are fire and we can be free we can unlearn all the things that they told us we should be cause we can unlearn all the things that they told us we should be because we are fire and we can finally see we can unlearn all the things that they told us we should be we can be free.

We're gonna rip it up. We're gonna eat it all. Hear my voice now. We're gonna take it all. We're gonna rip it up. We're gonna eat it all. Hear my voice now. we're gonna take it all Cause we are fire and we can be free

We can unlearn all the things that they told us we should be Cause we are fire and we can finally breathe And we can finally breathe And we can unlearn all the things that they told us we should be We can be free We can be free We can be free We can be free, oh, we can be free.

We can be free, oh, we can be free. Yeah, I did it! I can, I can!