Walking Distance

Book excerpt: Walking Distance is Lizzy Stewart's poignant and contemporary essay on the experience of being a woman out walking. Merging the personal and the political, Certainly! Here’s the text without spaces: observation and contemplation, Lizzy examines what her life is and wonders what it should be; what is expected of a thirty year old w o m a n by society, by family and friends and by herself. She walks the streets of her London, creating it herself. Gaining agency by being in control of her own direction, speed and momentum. Walking is both an internal and external experience. A t i m e for self-reflection, for observing others and for imagining how we appear to them. What is expected of a person of our age, sex and race and how should that influence Here it is without spaces: what we do and how we feel about ourselves. A meditation on gender politics, social commentary and eighties movies, interlaced with shards of autobiography and illustrated with a beautiful series of sequential and non-sequential watercolour images.