Cirrus@Austlit

'Like many who will be reading this, I write. I always have, even before I knew how. When I was four my mother would find me filling notebooks with infinite cursive 'e's, line after biro line of them, pages of stories that could never be read. 'That's very good practice,' she would praise me, but my face would burn with the embarrassment of not yet knowing how to properly do this thing that seemed to me the key to all understanding.' (Author's abstract)