From the world of the muse and writing, there will come, hopefully, the book. You're right, for me, that the muse is always female, and the book comes from a separate gender dimension than the concrete male world that, as you pointed out, has been surrounding me since I was an infant.

You need to be distracted.

Agency over one's sexual self - and the articulation of that kind of agency - might seem transgressive to readers who don't expect it in a woman's text.

I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure.

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it's a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge.

Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.