I would like to tell you a simple story. This story comes to me by way of Robert Bly, the American poet. Writers, he says, need to preserve their frogskins. Frog-skins, not foreskins; though writing can be something of a circumcision when forced into categories — some-thing between public ritual and private pain. To counteract this phallocentrism let me offer you the metaphor of writing as woman, not only as the re-pressed, but as the source. (Introduction)
