Since then I have written lots more books and started a publishing company more aligned with my own vision: one that celebrates women’s creativity, supports them emotionally as they launch their work, pays them fairly and promotes them sustainably.

We may have spent half a lifetime being told off for day-dreaming, being anti-social, being a bit too…different. We might have been branded an attention-seeker, unrealistic, weird, a slacker… Creatrixes tend to habitually live against the grain, indulging in aesthetics, personal expression, questioning and subverting cultural norms.

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people. Ursula le Guin

In our Western culture, we’re always rushing to fill something, do something, make something […] As a result we are almost unaware of the space prior to the doing or making as being anything that is relevant or worthy. It’s almost as if we can only see ourselves if we see what we’ve done to the thing rather than being in the presence of what we hav

So many of us are longing to partake in these raw, hard-to-articulate discussions about the experiences of creativity, spirituality, sexuality and birth-giving that shape every layer of our beings.

I am aware that this means that parts of the book will make you uncomfortable too, depending on what has been suppressed in your own life and expression.

The creative soul simply needs a trusted empty space in which to try things out unobserved and make mistakes. It needs a boundary – even if it is psychological – to keep the world at bay.

archetype of the Creatrix. I learned to embody her energies more fully – to work with her, rather than sacrifice myself at her altar.

Facing the void feels so overwhelming because it is the birthplace of limitless possibility. It is the place of potential new life, and the repository of the old.