New writing FIRE Guest Editor CANDIA McWILLIAM introduces her pick of poetry and prose on the theme of romance IT has been an alarming honour to be your guest editor; alarming in two ways. The making of judgments involving the work of others demands utter attentive conscientiousness, and I was continually aware of that. The other fear was more personal, and, oddly, a surprise to me. I have, I realised, all my life been afraid of fire, and dogged by it. In the week my first son was born, our house was destroyed by an arsonist, and this seemed to me at the time shocking but in some sense the fulfilment of a long fear. I remember reading of the destruction of everything Aldous Huxley possessed by fire, and of the bombing of Elizabeth Bowen’s house, and I thought of all that lost paper, those words destroyed, memories wiped out. Two years ago, one of my sisters lost her house by fire. Had she been in it, she, her husband and her four daughters would be dead. The experience has, appallingly, impressively, refined her. She knows what is important. What she minds is the loss of books, the loss of the four babyhoods. And of course we all abhor, above all, the burning of books. It is to me the epitomising Yahoo nightmare, made real all too recently. The Reich burned books; and then there is Rushdie. For the complete essay, and for Candia's full selection of poetry and prose on the theme of fire, read issue 6 • Subscribe! Read a short story chosen by Candia McWilliam: Waiting by Katie Campbell For more on CANDIA McWILLIAM, go to www.contemporarywriters.com
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