Ellena Savage

The writerly ‘I’ is notoriously fraught and political in non-fiction writing. What are the implications of writing from a biased and limited perspective (as all of us inevitably do)? How to get around – or work within – the constraints of the personal? These questions are ethical ones but also ones of craft. Many memoirists and essayists have grappled explicitly with them on the page.

Editing a ‘women’s edition’ of a literary journal is bound to be fraught with semantic problems. What is women’s writing? By women? About women? As Island ’s fiction editor, Rachel Edwards, editorialises, ‘there is nothing that defines women’s fiction apart from the sex of the author. Nothing!’ The politics of contriving a women’s edition of a literary journal, then, is simple: women’s voices are under-represented in the domain, a disparity which can be addressed by providing platforms for them.