The longer I write the more I feel like the woman in the famous 1964 Japanese movie ‘The Woman in the Dunes’. This film has haunted me ever since I first saw it years ago as a teenager. One of the lines in the film is ‘Are you shovelling sand to live, or living to shovel sand.’

Writing, I feel is just like that. You write to live. And live to write. And like sand, the elusive act of writing can slip through your fingers. It can also be suffocating and it keeps caving in on you and you have to keep shovelling everyday to keep yourself alive. Of course, this is just the way I feel at the moment. Can hardly keep my head above the sand.

Here is an excellent video essay about the movie by James Quandt.