Kate Mattacks

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Born in Stoke, chamber pot body gone South West, I have coal and clay dust in my veins.  A working-class powder keg. Outwardly unremarkable, asthmatic, and proudly owned by a dog named Casserole, my writing career began badly as a widely-published English and Drama academic. When I left toxic academia, it all changed. I railed against the dead men’s books I’d poison poured into others’ ears. I read of rebellion and anger. I felt kinship. Eimear McBride and Lucy Ellmann showed me I might be able to unearth what it feels like to be female and (m)othered and disabled. Bitter bitten finger nails keyboard still claw for the words.   

With a family to feed, I took a job in a prison. I felt safer. Like coming home. Walking tattooed stories and pale underdogs. Code red simmering fury and lung-scarred code blue. Cell doors that familiar mustard colour of those 1970s bedroom doors. Only this time I had the key. CPTSD sneaked through wrinkle cracks. Alongside an MSc in Writing Therapy, I wrote for my life. Trauma tales and glimpses of darkness. These new words became Ghosted, my first Indie published novel (Stratosphere, 2022). Now tide-wide ideas wash over my screen. Water and electricity make for a heady mix. ADHD sparks flow into other stories no longer my own. 

I don’t think I’m a very ‘nice’ writer. I guilty thrive on discomfort. Watching people I recognise squirm under the clingfilm veneer of expectations. Survival handbooks for familiar food bank worlds. It’s non-fiction for us. We have character. We fight back if we have any energy left. So I put people in paper petri dishes and watch them resist. Fighting and spilling onto chapters I had plotted them out of.