In the Ditch was like my sixth child. I felt exactly like that, just as if I had had another child. It came out in June 1972, when I was twenty-seven, almost five years to the day when I first started to send articles to magazine editors. Its publication showed me another thing about creative writing, namely that one does well in the topic one knows best. Because I was living in the \u27ditch\u27, a lone parent with five children, I was able to write in more depth about this. I realized then that I would not have to wait till I was forty before writing. If only I could stick to the subjects I knew best, and write about them truthfully, about the way I felt or saw them, in the type of language I could manage best, then I would not go wrong
