My Mother’s House explores death, grief and memories as a Minecraft poem

My Mother’s House is the most moving poem I’ve ever played. It’s the work of poet Victoria Bennett, inspired by her experience caring for her terminally-ill mother, and reliving some of the shared memories in her home.

As I explored it, the poem brought back my recent memories of helping my own mother clear out my late grandfather’s house, remembering and sometimes learning for the first time about different aspects of his life.

Played? Explored? Yes, My Mother’s House isn’t your average poem. It’s a “poem world” delivered as a downloadable map for video game Minecraft, which you explore while listening to – and sometimes triggering – Bennett’s reading of her work.

The project was a collaboration between the poet and her partner, digital artist Adam Clarke, fresh from working together with Tate on Minecraft maps based on some of its popular artworks.

It was funded by a bursary from The Literary Platform, a British firm that specialises in bringing together creators from the worlds of literature and technology – with Bennett and Clarke publishing vlogs of their creative process for other people to learn from.

“For me as a poet, the idea was that somebody could explore a poem from a different angle other than just reading or hearing it: where it becomes something that can be played and experienced in different ways,” says Bennett. “Turning the poem into a physical build so that people were exploring the space.”

Bennett and Clarke were awarded the grant at the start of 2015, just as her mother was diagnosed with terminal Mesothelioma – asbestos-related cancer – and the time they have spent together since was what inspired her work.

“My personal narrative in my life has been about looking at our narratives of family, of past, of history, of relationships – and in the last eight months I’ve been having conversations with my mum about her life, listening to her stories and looking at objects that are important in those stories,” she says.

“I tend to write about where I’m at personally, and it fitted with what we were trying to do with the project. It’s a map, it’s about exploring, so we started looking at the idea of the poem being a series of rooms.”

The Italian word “stanza” translates as “room”, so it’s a fitting leap. As Bennett walked and talked in her mother’s real house, so the idea of life as a series of rooms that we can revisit – but ultimately close the doors on – was fleshed out by Clarke’s Minecraft build.

That included using a relatively new feature of the game. “Minecraft has got ways of creating text that you can see in the game, so you can walk into a room and have it start to fill up with words. It’s something I’ve been doing for a while with the Tate worlds,” he says.

“But one of its recent updates allowed map-makers to put their own custom sounds in too. We can actually now embed any kind of recording we like and have it be triggered as people explore the map. So as you walk into a room in My Mother’s House, you hear Victoria reading the poem.”

The Tate project and My Mother’s House are part of Clarke’s longer term exploration of Minecraft as a platform for art and expression on his YouTube channel.

His work ranges from Greek mythology to a parody of Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came To Tea children’s book with YouTube star Joseph “Stampy” Garett. Clarke also appears as the Wizard Keen character in Garrett’s recent educational show Wonder Quest.

“I see Minecraft as a platform, definitely. I mean, it’s nice playing it as a game: sometimes I do that on Xbox. But on PC, to me as an artist, Minecraft is a platform: this malleable thing that we can present ideas through,” says Clarke.

He also sees it as a platform for education, citing the example of an English teacher he knows who uses Minecraft with children who find reading difficult. “When they do it in Minecraft, they can tell stories quickly, and that encourages them to go into writing, and creative writing,” he says.

“It’s this marriage between the two things. One of Minecraft’s major abilities for young people is that it’s really accessible and unintimidating, whereas books can come with a load of baggage that – for some children anyway – is quite off-putting.”

Both Clarke and Bennett are keen to swerve the books-versus-games debate that flares up regularly, pointing to the example of their own son, who loves Minecraft but also “adores books and stories” – with the couple, like many parents, having made a point of reading to and with him every night.

“Before we had books, stories weren’t about reading: it was about telling stories, and that was the important thing. Children will read: they will naturally head towards stories, if stories are not made into something that is painful and difficult and boring,” says Bennett.

“All things need parental involvement, but to say ‘screen is bad, book is good’ is a bit Animal Farm, isn’t it? I can remember being told to get my head out of a book and get outside for some fresh air when I was a child! Our son absolutely adores books and stories, but he also learned to read from playing Minecraft.”

Bennett hopes that My Mother’s House shows the potential of games as another tool that could help parents and children open up to one another about death and grief.

“Although Minecraft is most popular for children, it’s not limited to them. And, similarly, neither is grief limited to adults: children experience trauma, they experience difficult stuff,” says Bennett.

“Something like Minecraft could allow people – children and adults, but maybe particularly children – to explore and talk about and take ownership of their own stories, and work with those narratives in a very non-threatening, accessible way.”

Bennett adds that the most emotional part of the project was showing the finished poem-world to her mother.

“It was a very moving experience to share it with my mum once it was done. Although the poem elaborates on the idea of somebody dying, she’s still alive – but we know that this is coming. It was very unusual and unique to share the experience of what it was feeling like for me and for her, in a realm that was completely alien to her,” she says.

“There aren’t that many 83-year-old Minecraft players! But she said she found it really beautiful, and hoped it could help people in similar circumstances. And I was also able to share it with our son, and explore through the game that idea of his grandmother leaving – something that was very difficult otherwise to talk about and share.”