I was originally an English teacher and youth worker before moving into counselling, staff development and training. I trained as a counsellor at the Isis Centre, Oxford, and worked for ten years as a counsellor in primary care; and was Head of Professional Development at the University of Oxford alongside my NHS counselling role. I completed my doctorate at Bristol (supervised by the wonderful Jane Speedy) in 2009, with a thesis (co-authored with Ken Gale) about Deleuze and collaborative writing that became a book, Between the two: A nomadic inquiry into collaborative writing and subjectivity.