The next chapter begins, starting with a book

Well. It’s certainly been a long while since my last blog post! September 2022 was my last post – I’d just finished my PhD, we were still somewhere in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdowns, and, honestly, life was every kind of upside down there for a while.

Fast forward to now.

I’d like to say that I’ve taken a proper break, rested my brain, and enjoyed the quiet after years of thinking so intensely. But… life didn’t quite work out that way. When does it ever?! Anyway. We’re here now, and things are still on the go.

It’s no secret that in the last few years of writing my thesis I’d been brewing up a textbook. I know I’m not the only OT in this space who’s felt this way! My mind was so full of information and ideas that I hadn’t been able to fit into the PhD thesis, and I felt a huge pressure of carrying all of this. It was actually exhausting! I kept joking with anyone who’d listen that I felt “like a walking library”, and then thinking to myself, “what’s the use of all of this information sitting in my head?!”. It was a lot.

So, I just had to write a textbook.

Once the decision was made, it all happened pretty quickly. The proposal I pitched to a publisher was accepted (amazing, I know!), so then I just had to make it happen. I took two years off work and started my own microbusiness, pared everything back to make life as simple as possible, and let my amazing family, friends, and community help and support me with the kids – with the hand-on-heart agreement that I would take a proper break after this one.

I’d rolled my sleeves up and was getting stuck into the writing, and then a kind and brilliant colleague in the US (Apple, thank you!) reminded me that I didn’t know everything and couldn’t write such an important book on my own – which, of course, was entirely true! So I reached out to the global OT community to see if anyone wanted to contribute, and the response was overwhelming. I set up 15-minute self-booked interviews for people so we could meet and chat about ideas, and talked to over 150 OTs and academics from all over the world about contributions for this book.

My mind was blown. I realised how overdue and needed this book was for our profession, which created an overwhelming sense of responsibility.

So I went back to the drawing board a bit and changed the original textbook pitch to better suit the global community of OTs who had and were already invested in it. Thankfully, the publisher was 100% on board, and we successfully applied to double the original wordcount, and I became an editor as well as author.

Slootjes, H. (Ed.). (2025). Enhancing women’s wellbeing during matrescence, motherhood, and perinatal transitions: An evidence-based guide for occupational therapists (1st ed.). Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/9781032502793

The textbook now has 24 chapters in three sections, with 65 contributors from Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, UK, and USA. We almost had contributions from India and First Nations Women, but it wasn’t meant to be. I’m hoping things will evolve for the 2nd edition – as well as so much more. There’s certainly a lot to cover, and hopefully this is a good enough start.

If you’d like to have a look at the textbook, it’s listed on the Taylor & Francis/Routledge website, including:

• Textbook overview
• Table of contents, and contributors (we’ll acknowledge these individuals in posts as we go on from here)
• Critics reviews (heads up… they’re incredible!)

So now, we’re nearly at publication o’clock. Writing this textbook has been an incredible privilege. It’s been a huge project, and truly humbling. Like the PhD, it’s impossible to fit everything you want to say into one text. There were stories, reflections, insights, and knowledge branches we had to let go of. So, I’m coming back to this blog to share in a space to unpack those, to sit with ideas a little longer, to write without word limits or publishing deadlines.

I’m looking forward to using this space again to share my learning and reflections, and building it into my weekly routine again. So, here we go with the next chapter, starting with the book…