Author Archive: Paula Coston

Childless writers: should we use the childbirth metaphor for the act of writing?

Last year I finished a novel. Three years of sweat and tears, false starts, protracted labour, the wish that I’d never conceived it in the first place. I had an eerie sense that it was attached to me by an umbilical cord, but once it was done it had a life somehow distinct and separate, […]