Each month we celebrate an Australian debut release of fiction or non-fiction in the Kill Your Darlings First Book Club. For May that debut is How To Be Between by Bastian Fox Phelan (Giramondo), a memoir about female facial hair, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and negotiating identity for those visibly between gender binaries.

Our theme song is Broke for Free’s ‘Something Elated’. Sound production by Nial Hosken.

Further reading:

Read Ellen Cregan’s review of How To Be Between in our May Books Roundup.

Read about Bastian’s favourite books and reading habits in this month’s Shelf Reflection.

How To Be Between is available now from your local independent bookseller.

Stream or subscribe: Apple Podcasts / Google Podcasts / Spotify / Other (RSS)

Let us know what you think by rating and reviewing in your app of choice!

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TRANSCRIPT

(Music)

Ellen Cregan: Welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings podcast. I’m KYD first Book club host, Ellen Cregan, and today I’ll be bringing you our May First Book Club interview. Our book for May is How To Be Between by Bastian Fox Phelan, out now from Giramondo. Bastian Fox Phelan is a writer, musician and zine maker living in Mulubinba Newcastle on Awabakal land. Their zines are held in connection around the world and they have worked with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia and National Young Writers Festival on major zine fair events. Bastian’s writing has been published in journals including Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, Archer and The Lifted Brow. An exploration of youthful anxiety, medical discourse and shifting identities, How To Be Between shines a light on what it means to find joy, resilience and radical self-acceptance in a body that refuses to fit within gender binaries. I sat down with Bastian to discuss their book and other creative work.

Hey, Bastian, thanks so much for joining me today.

Bastian Fox Phelan: Hey, how are you?

Ellen Cregan: Good, thanks. We’re just going to start with a reading.

Bastian Fox Phelan:

I was behind the curtain in the doctor’s office, naked from the waist down, sitting on a paper sheet. I come for a Pap test, but the doctor was unusually quiet as she performed the task. Afterwards, while I dressed, she told me what she had observed.

‘You’re very hairy.’

I looked at my legs. A covering, a warm mammalian coat. I’d heard remarks like that before, but never from a doctor.

She questioned me about my periods, investigating the record of my female health.

‘I’m going to send you for an ultrasound, see what your ovaries are doing.’

I touched my belly, in the place where I imagined they were. Doing, or not doing, something. The doctor handed me a letter addressed to the Women’s Imaging Suite.

On the street, I opened the envelope. Please see patient for pelvic ultrasound. Medical conditions: oligomenorrhea and hirsutism.

I felt uncomfortable. ‘Hirsute’ was not how I described myself. I put the letter away.

The next day, I lay on another bed, another paper sheet. The beauticians smothered my legs in warm wax, pulled the skin taut, and ripped. My follicles were in shock, the skin singing. I came to this salon, in a weatherboard cottage near my house, because it was more comfortable for me than a mainstream beauty salon. Yet even here I’d had conversations that made me uneasy, like the time the beautician told me that it takes a lot of physical strength to wax bodies, especially when people have a lot of hair.

As she worked over me, denuding my legs, I thought about the ultrasound appointment I’d just booked. If I’d come here before the Pap test, perhaps the doctor would not have noticed anything. But once again, my hair was causing trouble. Once again, it was changing the script, and all I could do was follow.

*

The waiting room of the imaging suite was lined with vinyl chairs, occupied by women, most of them pregnant, in various weeks of gestation. I chose a seat in the corner. I felt annoyed about having to be there. I wasn’t pregnant. Maybe I never would be.

My name was called, and a sonographer ushered me into a small, dark room. I disrobed, and she produced a wand-like object, wrapped in plastic. It occurred to me that the wand was for internal examination. I hadn’t understood what ‘pelvic ultrasound’ meant.

As the sonographer guided the foreign body, sound waves rebounded off my organs.

‘Ooh, your ovaries are covered in them!’, she said, swinging the monitor around so I could see.

I gazed at the grainy black-and-white image on the monitor—a moonscape with black craters.

‘Those dark spots are ovarian cysts.’

She clicked on the machine, taking pictures.

‘The cysts are what happens when you ovulate, but the egg doesn’t mature. If the follicle can’t release the egg, it doesn’t get reabsorbed. It sticks on the ovary and turns into a fluid-filled sac.’

My body, the egg factory. There was a problem on the production line.

‘They say it makes it harder to get pregnant, but don’t worry. When you want to have children, they’ll just give you a drug to make you hyperovulate.’

My body, the mass-production egg factory of the future, ovulating on command.

It seemed apparent that I should care about my fertility, but nobody had asked if I wanted children. Nobody had asked if I even wanted to be a woman.

Ellen Cregan: Thanks for that Bastian, that was lovely.

Bastian Fox Phelan: Thanks.

Ellen Cregan: So for those who are listening, who haven’t read your book yet, can you give us a brief summary of How To Be Between?

Bastian Fox Phelan: Yeah. So it’s, I guess, a memoir of my teenage years and my twenties up until sort of my late twenties. And it starts from, I guess, the point of realising that I was a little bit different to other female assigned people that I knew. And that sort of came about when I went through puberty and started to grow facial hair. So it took a few years before I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome, so that happened when I was about 21, and in the years sort of like before and after that diagnosis, I guess I thought about hair in different ways, and it kind of changed over time as I got to know myself and explored different aspects of my identity. So the book kind of like, follows this process of coming to terms with this, I guess sometimes I call it a marginal form of sex variance, because you know, there’s a way in which the hair is challenging binary gender norms. And it’s something that, you know, from the time that probably even before I noticed it, other people noticed it and commented on it, because you know, that’s what people do. They comment on young women’s bodies. And it was always kind of like in the vein of like, what are you? Why are you different? Why do you have this thing about your body that makes you different? But I guess I also felt like there was a part of who I was that was also different, (Laughs) not perhaps fitting the mould of what a girl or a woman should be like in terms of personality or social expectations of how you interact. And yeah, I guess…the book is really just like, sometimes I refer to it as like a map of all the questions that I asked about identity in this process of trying to figure out who I was, and how I fit in. And also how to write about that, because yeah, that’s another layer.

Ellen Cregan: So as we heard from the little excerpt you just read, you’re a very beautiful writer and of course you’ve written a lot, but you came to writing in part through zines. Can you speak a bit about how you got into zines and that sort of world?

Bastian Fox Phelan: Yeah. So I was, as a teenager I grew up in Wollongong, and I didn’t have that much to do in a regional city, (Laughs) and I used to go to the youth centre on Saturdays just to hang out, and one day I went there and there were all these people dressed in black and they were having a punk festival, and so I walked into the kind of like main sort of hall area, and it was filled with tables covered in these little paper photocopied booklets and yeah, I would just pick one up and ask somebody like, what is this? (Laughs) And somebody gave me a copy of their zine and I took it home and kind of deconstructed it. And next year when the festival was on again, I booked a table and I made my own zine, because I just thought it was the coolest thing ever, that you could make your own publications and share them with people. So yeah, I became really, I guess, embedded in the zine making scene and made friends through zines and travelled to different zine fairs and started organising zine fairs. And as I started to read more zines, I think the ones I gravitated to the most were personal zines or ‘perzines’, and these were just stories about people’s lives, and they could be about very…very personal and moving topics, or they could be about very mundane things, like, you know, I’m bored at work and I’ve got access to a photocopier so I’m going to write about my life and make a zine. (Laughs). And I think I just really enjoyed the voice of these zines. They just seemed so real and so personal, and it was like reading a letter from a friend. And so I eventually started making perzines as well. I guess because I had this feeling like I wanted to share something of myself. But I think also the writing, the process of writing zines always helped me to figure things out about myself, like, just a way to reflect and start to understand myself in a different way.

Ellen Cregan: Coming across a room full of people all dressed in black is the dream of any teenager. (Bastian laughs.) It’s really what we were all hoping for, and you got to live it.

Bastian Fox Phelan: Totally, totally.

Ellen Cregan: So you’d written about yourself in zine form several times before you wrote this memoir. Apart from just the length of the work, how did the experience differ in writing a full length memoir, just in prose, as to writing in zines.

Bastian Fox Phelan: I think for me, the thing that… (Cat meows, both laugh) It’s all getting a bit chaotic in here. (Laughs) So I think for me, the difference between—well I’ll start with the similarities. So I think writing scenes really helped me to find my voice. I did a Bachelor of Creative Writing at Wollongong University, and I learned lots of different things about writing through that course—probably the most valuable of which was how to workshop your writing with other people, and how to, I guess, look at writing from different perspectives. But I think zines was really where I developed my voice that would go on to influence how I wrote my book. And the difference, yeah, I mean, a zine is something that you can knock out in a few hours and you don’t have to think about the structure because—well, I mean, everyone probably writes zines differently, but I would say most of the time people are doing them pretty off the cuff. And definitely when I was writing zines, I wasn’t thinking too much about a broad audience reading zines, because generally it’s kind of just like your friends and people that you know within the zine community that read your zine.

Bastian Fox Phelan: Whereas publishing a book, it’s going to be going out to a much wider audience than you could possibly control. And you don’t really want to control it because you want it to go as far as it can. And it’s also going to be criticised in a way that zines aren’t generally criticised. So that influences how you write it as well. Yeah. I worked on this book for kind of on and off for about eight years. So it was a really long process, and there were many, many, many-many-many drafts, (Laughs) and, you know, I have a bit of a tendency to overwrite, and I had to cut a lot out in many different phases of writing. So, yeah, the process was quite different, but I think at heart, what they have in common is… (Cat meows)

Ellen Cregan: (Laughs) That was so perfectly timed.

Bastian Fox Phelan: (Laughs) Yeah, what they have in common is the voice, I think.

Ellen Cregan: Yes, the voice! Exactly. (Bastian laughs). So this idea of criticism, of writing with criticism in mind, just leads me onto another question I have perfectly about young people writing memoir, which is sometimes something that people get annoyed about in literary circles, or look down upon. How do you feel about this criticism and do you think—I guess you’ve already said it kind of impacted the way you approached writing your book. So what are your feelings about that?

Bastian Fox Phelan: Yeah, well…I mean, I feel like memoir has changed a lot in the last maybe five years or ten years perhaps. I’m not sure how much of an educated opinion that is, (Laughs) but from what I’ve seen, a lot of different people are publishing memoir or personal writing or this kind of like, very interesting blended style of memoir. And I just think it’s really important that we hear voices of all different ages and, yeah, all different life experiences because yeah, books have this ability to connect readers with the subject via empathy rather than via kind of telling people what to think, or, you know. Of course, some books do that, but yeah, I think there’s just this capacity for empathy and connection that books help to create. So I mean, I think it’s really vital that we have not just the kind of stereotypical memoir of like, ‘I have retired and I’m going to look back on the achievements of my life’—I mean, that’s perhaps the kind of memoir that historically that was sort of like, yeah, people looking back on their careers or their personal achievements or the impact that they made in society. And that’s all very important, and still relevant, but I think there are these kind of interior experiences that can be captured so beautifully in personal writing. And that’s what I’m interested in reading. You know, I want to know what it was like for that person and how they found a form to express those experiences.

Ellen Cregan: I think maybe what has changed in the past five and ten years is that we as a reading culture are more interested in people’s identities rather than their experiences. Like, that is something that we’re all interested in now, and people are way more engaged with. And it’s less about the plot of your life than sort of, like, the things that make your life unique maybe.

Bastian Fox Phelan: Yeah, for sure.

Ellen Cregan: So you mentioned before that you found writing and also zine making to really help shape that identity that you’ve found your way to. And in the book you write about how they helped you choose your name, Bastian Fox. Can you tell us about that process, and also just more generally using creative work, whether it’s your writing, or your music as well, to be comfortable in your identity and find your way there?

Bastian Fox Phelan: I guess at certain times in my life, I felt like people have sort of put me on the spot to answer these very complex questions about identity that I hadn’t quite figured out for myself yet. That’s something that I felt was happening since I was a teenager. And often those experiences were quite confrontational. Like I mentioned earlier, these sort of questions that were like, you know, ‘what are you? Who are you? Where do you fit? Help me to understand what you are, because I’m kind of confused by how you’re presenting or how you’re acting.’ And those experiences often kind of, my response was sort of to freeze, and I couldn’t really say anything in that moment. So I think writing was how I started to ask myself those questions in a safe environment, because I felt like I didn’t have an easy answer. And yeah, this process of questioning myself was something that went on for many, many years. You know, I think from some of my earliest memories of, like, considering sexuality and gender, it was just this feeling of being confused, like ‘I’m not clearly this or that’, and not having an easy answer to give people makes you feel a little bit insecure. (Laughs) So, yeah, for me, I think just having the space to reflect and connect with myself, because I guess that’s also the experience of being questioned in that way. It kind of alienates you from yourself in a way? And yeah, writing was always my tool for self soothing and for creating something that I could share with other people. So I might not have come up with a clear answer to the questions, but I could be like, ‘I wrote this song about my experiences’. (Laughs) I can communicate it in a different way, you know. So I guess writing is also a way to kind of start to explore identities that you’re not necessarily ready to embrace or to be public with. And for me, that was how I first started to investigate gender identity. And yeah, I wrote a story about a trans character, probably a very ill-informed story, (Laughs), but it was a way to explore, like, what would it feel like to live as this identity, through a character that I was creating. And I did the same sort of thing in video games—so I was playing Animal Crossing prior to its, you know, 2020 explosion into, (Laughs) general awareness, I suppose. And I would play as a boy called Fox, and that was kind of like just a bit of escapism, but it’s also a way of starting to, an alternative identity, and explore that and see how it feels. So when I started to feel like I wanted to adopt a new name to communicate to the world that I was not necessarily a female-assigned person who identified as a woman, then I started to look back at these characters that I created, and I was like, ‘oh, actually, I quite like those name, perhaps those are the names that I want to go by.’

Ellen Cregan: So in the excerpt you read at the start of this chat, you were talking about PCOS and being diagnosed with that. Can you tell me about how this condition is viewed and how those views relate to some of the binary gender norms we have in Western culture?

Bastian Fox Phelan: Yeah. So I mean, in the excerpt that I read, I said, you know, ‘I didn’t think of myself as hirsute. And I think hirsutism is a very interesting piece of terminology, because it’s specifically about female bodies that are too hairy. And I don’t think that there’s really a medically relevant term for a male body that’s too hairy, because it’s okay for men to have hair, but it’s not okay for women to have hair, apparently. So yeah, I mean I guess I always found it a little bit problematic the way that female facial hair was viewed as a medical issue—because to me, it’s sort of like, well, it’s not making me sick. (Laughs) There’s nothing sort of about it that really impacts my body health-wise. And it was always more about the way that other people treated me because of having facial hair. So, yeah, I always found it really interesting the way that some people would be very confronted by female facial hair. So, yeah, I’ve experienced street harassment of different varieties over the years, and everything from just people staring at me or, you know, calling me names or trying to touch my face or taking photos of me without my permission. And I’m always just kind of like, why, why is it such a big deal to see a female-assigned person with facial hair? And I kind of have an issue with it as a symptom of PCOS. It really turns it into this medicalised individual problem. Like, ‘your body is outside of the bounds of what we consider to be a normal female body, and therefore, we’re going to prescribe you some medication.’ You can take a drug to be less hairy, or you can try to get laser hair removal—at your own expense, of course. But, yeah, I always felt that it was more of an issue that other people had with me, rather than an issue that I had with myself. (Laughs) Of course, like, PCOS has other impacts on your body as well. I would probably say that I was more concerned about how do I avoid getting diabetes, or heart disease, or any of the kind of chronic health issues that can be associated with PCOS? I was more concerned with that than I was with being hairy, or will I be able to get pregnant when I was 21, when I was diagnosed, you know? But there’s just this assumption that if you’re female-assigned and you have PCOS, well, you know, ‘we need to reassure you that you’ll be able to get pregnant, and you’ll be able to get rid of your hair, because if you can’t get pregnant and you’re hairy, are you really a woman?’ (Laughs) That seems to be the message that you get when you have PCOS or when your body is somehow outside of the bounds of what’s considered normal for a female—even though there are honestly so many, (Laughs) so, so many ways to be in a body, that it kind of blows my mind sometimes that people are so narrow-minded about binary sex and gender.

Ellen Cregan: Mmm. You mentioned in that answer some periods of street harassment. And I wanted to ask about what it was like to write about those more difficult times, because, of course, there’s those really scary incidents that you talk about in the book, and then there’s also, you know, difficult emotional stuff that you get into. What’s it like to revisit those sort of more tricky times in your writing?

Bastian Fox Phelan: Yeah, I mean, I think there was a period of time when I was working on the book and I was also experiencing a lot of street harassment. And when I was younger, those experiences, they were confronting, but it kind of seemed like as time passed, all those experiences were layering on top of each other. And sort of around the time, maybe in my early 30s, when I’d been working on the book for a few years, and I hadn’t quite finished yet, and it was getting really difficult—and my life at the time was also really challenging in terms of how often I was having to deal with people’s responses to me. It just felt like, you know, ‘I’m writing this memoir about things that happened to me in the past, but the past can’t stay locked in the past because it’s still happening.’ And I’m having these fresh kind of challenging or traumatic experiences that are making it really difficult to be able to reflect on my experiences or kind of encapsulate them, in a way, because everything is all leaking out, you know? (Laugh) Yeah, it was just very difficult to draw boundaries between past traumatic experiences and present ones. And in a way, I also felt like writing a memoir, you need to have this narrative—it’s a story, after all, it’s not just everything that’s ever happened to you. And I was really struggling to find a way to, I guess, conclude the story when new things were always happening to me that were making me think in different ways again. And I guess at that time I realised how angry I was at the kinds of experiences that I’d had. And I also really started to question whether I could continue living in my body, you know, as somebody with facial hair, as somebody who is visibly pushing against binary gender norms. It was really the first time that I was like, ‘I’m not sure what my future looks like, I’m not sure if I can keep doing this,’ because it’s so challenging. It was also sort of around that time I was really speaking up against street harassment in a way that I hadn’t before. So I was kind of like finding my voice to challenge people back. But then, of course, that creates some very tense situations as well.

Ellen Cregan: So to bring…I’m making the book sound like it’s sad, it’s definitely not sad at all. So I’m going to bring it up a notch.

Bastian Fox Phelan: Yeah. (Laughs)

Ellen Cregan: Towards the end of the book you—so sort of in the middle of the book, in your 20s, you’re identifying really strongly with the masculine parts of your identity. And towards the end of the book, we see your sort of self acceptance and self love being more involving, embracing the feminine parts of your gender. How did it feel to return to that feminine, having been a person who is assigned female at birth, but, you know, leant more into the masculine aspects of gender earlier?

Bastian Fox Phelan: Yeah, I guess the process that I kind of describe in the book is starting to identify as transmasculine, and then, you know, becoming interested in passing as a man. And I know that this concept of ‘passing’ is very…it’s quite frustrating because in one way, passing can mean safety. So it means that you don’t experience the kind of, or experience perhaps a bit less of the kind of harassment that you might get when you’re more visibly between binaries. But yeah, my experience of like, of passing or trying to pass was, I guess, that it made me feel quite miserable, because I think I realised I was cutting off parts of myself in order to present a more coherent gender identity. And it was a similar kind of feeling that I had had previously when I was trying to fit in as a girl. So…yeah, towards the end of the book, I describe a performance night that I organised, which was a tribute to Dusty Springfield.

Ellen Cregan: (Laughs) So good.

Bastian Fox Phelan: (Laughs) I think I was like, really, really connecting with Dusty’s music at that time because I’d kind of, like, dropped out a little bit of social life to try to figure some things out. And I was yeah, single, and I was listening to a lot of Dusty’s kind of torch songs, I guess, those songs about (Laughs), you know, ‘I will love you forever, even if you don’t look at me ever again’. (Both laugh) I was just really into the melodrama. And I learned a bit about Dusty, which was that she was queer, and that she, her whole look was, I guess, a kind of femme drag that she was doing, because she’d been kind of a tomboy when she was younger. And I just loved her whole look. And I’m a singer, I loved singing Dusty songs, and yeah, I just got really into the idea of, (Laughs), putting on a whole performance night with all the wonderful queer performers that I knew at that time. And it was just such a joyful event, and I really enjoyed dressing up as Dusty. I think it was a safe way for me to explore femininity at that time, because I didn’t feel ready to embrace femininity in my daily life at that time, but it felt safe to be able to dress up, I guess. And these days I have quite a different relationship with femininity. I think in some ways I’m more comfortable with femininity than I ever was prior to questioning my gender identity—but I think perhaps that’s just something that comes with maturity, getting a little bit more comfortable with who I am and comfortable with the idea of being genderfluid in terms of, like, I have been many different things at different times, and I’m open to the idea that I may continue changing. I think it’s just that thing as well that everybody goes through at some point in the shift between their 20s and their 30s, when they become a little bit less insecure and a little bit less interested in how other people going to perceive me and what are my friends wearing, all that sort of thing. (Laughs).

Ellen Cregan: I do have one more serious question, but I have to ask you first—what’s your favourite Dusty Springfield song?

Bastian Fox Phelan: Oh! I mean, the one that I performed at the show was ‘The Look Of Love’.

Ellen Cregan: Mmm.

Bastian Fox Phelan: And I think maybe before that it was ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’, or… (Laughs)

Ellen Cregan: I was going to say that, so I’m going to… (Laughs)

Ellen Cregan: ‘I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself’, also. But I think I really came to appreciate ‘The Look of Love’ when I practised it for that performance. It’s so subtle, like, the soft kind of smokiness of her voice is so beautiful. And I have this memory of singing it at, like, a queer-friendly or a queer karaoke bar in Melbourne one time after the Emerging Writers Festival. And everybody’s singing all these kind of, like, pop bangers, and then I get up singing this old slow, moody song. (Laughs) And everyone just started slow dancing, and it was one of the most beautiful things that I’ve ever, ever seen.

Ellen Cregan: That’s so nice. I love ‘Breakfast In Bed’, I’m going to go with a deep cut.

Bastian Fox Phelan: Oh, yeah.

Ellen Cregan: I also love ‘You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me’, that’s a beautiful one. So my last serious question. A lot of cis thinking around transgender people is kind of obsessed with transition as a linear process, and How To Be Between is a book that is so full of trans joy, and the depictions of ways in which gender is way more than binary, and transitioning isn’t something that just happens once and it’s kind of a static thing. Did you write this book with the hope of, I guess, educating cis people or giving them an insight into that, into gender and its many expressions?

Bastian Fox Phelan: I think I just wanted to share as, you know, authentically as possible what my experiences have been, and that, yeah, that your story doesn’t have to follow a script. But I really strongly believe that that applies to everybody, and I don’t so much feel like there’s this really strong divide between cis people and trans or gender diverse or genderfluid people—I guess my perspective is that everybody has elements of themselves that they, that don’t fit in some way, you know. And I really wanted to show what that looked like for me. And part of that is my personal experiences, but part of it is also the way that I chose to write the book, because I think there’s a way that I could have written the story, you know, a story about female facial hair and questioning gender identity. I think there’s a way I could have written it that would have been maybe a bit more simplistic? And I didn’t want to write it that way. I wanted to write it so there was some ambiguity, and that I wasn’t kind of dragging people by the hand through the text, and I wasn’t telling them what they should think about gender, or about me, as much as possible. (Laughs). So, yeah, I mean, I guess I’ve tried to communicate betweenness in the writing of it, as well as in the subject matter. And, yeah, I really hope that it’s a book for everybody. Like, my hope is that everybody can see themselves in the writing in some way or another, because I definitely feel like a lot of people feel this pressure to make aspects of their personal narratives fit or make sense. You know, we have to be comprehensible to other people, and a lot of the time that means—it’s kind of like, I think about it like biodiversity. (Laughs) I feel like the way that a lot of people are is a bit more, kind of like a wild field of flowers, but we have to kind of like present ourselves as a monocrop. (Laughs) And yeah, I would really like for everyone to feel a bit more freedom to not make sense. That’s what I’ve aimed for with this book.

Ellen Cregan: I think, just to return to a point you brought up at the start of our chat today, was this idea of building empathy. I think you’re really, with the book, you sort of invite people to develop that empathy, and this is the kind of book that I really hope people read who maybe don’t know anything about trans people, or maybe don’t have a trans person who’s out in their life—and it’s not so much an explanation, but yeah, like, you know, being the wild field of flowers. No more monocrops, I love that. (Both laugh). Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today, Bastian. I had one million more questions, but we’re just out of time, unfortunately. And thank you for this wonderful book, it’s really a delight.

Bastian Fox Phelan: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Ellen Cregan: That was the May First Book Club edition of the Kill Your Darlings podcast. We’ll be back soon, but while you wait for our next episode, you can find commentary, criticism, memoir and more on our website. You’ll also find information about our range of writing courses. Thanks for joining us, and we’ll see you next time.

(Music)