New writing MADNESS Guest Editor KATE CLANCHY introduces her pick of poetry and prose on the theme of madness MADNESS. On the whole, I don’t go there. Not personally, I mean – I’ve had all the brushes with eating disorders and depression you’d expect from a woman of my vastly hopeful, hugely disappointed, Sixties generation – but in my writing. Not that it isn’t a tempting topic; the voices of the excluded can make many cogent points about our society. It’s produced some of the most vivid women’s writing we have, from Mrs Rochester screaming in Jane Eyre’s attic and Charlotte Perkins Gilman tussling with her yellow wallpaper to Anne Sexton’s Book of Folly. But I’m a woman poet and am assumed to be hysterical/like Sylvia Plath even when I am writing about school in the manner of Philip Larkin. I’m very wary of giving any more fuel to the association by actually straying into Plath’s asylum territory. Or maybe I’m just lazy. After reading this month’s submissions for New Writing, I’ve decided that madness is particularly hard to write about. There was so much life in the pile of scripts I read through, so much vengeful energy – there were an awful lot of knives – so much raw, painful personal experience, but very many of the writers seemed to have come up against the peculiar technical problems of the topic. For the complete essay, and for Kate's full selection of poetry and prose on the theme of madness, read issue 13 • Subscribe! Read a short story chosen by Kate Clanchy: Midnight Blues by Angela Mackworth-Young For more on KATE CLANCHY, go to www.contemporarywriters.com
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