The thing is this. I write for me. It’s a need, nudge, more than that, a have-to. How did I get here? Good question. As an embryonic writer, I hid my words, doubted them, my face-up down. The thing about a writing urge, no, need, is that I was completely alone. I was a nobody, an Island Wife, immediately secondary, supportive, the second fiddle. When I look back to other female writers afore my time, they who really fought for a voice into the Voice Acceptable, as if the crowd ears had no way of hearing a female voice. Good G we have lived with this for hunnerds of years. And still now, here I am unsure about my voice out there. Women, we know, still battle the patriarchy, and it may just be that I am, in my mind and my teaching still running for the coal skuttle to wrack up the fire, or to the kitchen to create bacon butties or something instant because in my life, instant was the only way to feed the men. Longer than an instant and they were gone.

I know it should/could be different now, but is it? This writes me and thinks me. And so I write on. Life changes and shifts dynamics, and punctures and whips away and demolishes completely. There’s a post apoloclypse here and an ok there. I’m in between. How the feck do I cope with that, those, them? It’s sunshine one place in in one life and in one time and then the cold wrack of the worst in another. I’m on a rock inversive where the Atlantic comes in and goes out but never quite proffers a dry walk to shore.

This is why I write. I write for me.