ABSTRACT
Although it took me a while to get going, in the end this book was written very quickly – something to do with making the most of snatched and discontinuous gobbets of time, in between changing jobs and the usual emotional and material complexities of life. Nothing new about the process I suspect, especially in the production of women’s writing, squeezed in between more pressing duties and responsibilities, and often the passion that gets jettisoned in the tension of competing claims. Add to this the structural exclusions operating in terms of class, ‘race’, sexuality and disability and it’s not surprising that the balance is still considerably distorted in favour of white, middle class, able-bodied men when it comes to who gets published, who gets heard, and what is said.
