Flying with Paper Wings

Reflections on Living with Madness

Sandy Jeffs

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English

Spinifex Press
01 March 2024

Memoirs; Biography - Australian

Sandy Jeffs was born in Ballarat in 1953. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1976, a time when recovery was seen as unlikely. She was in and out of institutional care for 15 years, including at the infamous Larundel Psychiatric Hospital. Sandy was among the first to start speaking publicly about living with a mental illness, and much of her writing - including eight volumes of poetry - has been about her struggle to live a full life. She is well-known as a community educator, speaking to doctors and psychiatrists, at community health centres, and educational institutions. She has been honoured in the Victorian Honour Roll of Women, Her Place Women’s Museum, and with an OAM in 2020. This new and updated edition of Flying with Paper Wings offers insights into madness – medical, social, personal – as well as disturbing reflections on its causes and its care. It is also a story of how poetry can become a personal saviour in the face of nearly irresistible forces.

By: Sandy Jeffs
Imprint: Spinifex Press
Country of Publication: Australia
Edition: 2nd edition
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 10mm
Weight: 400g
ISBN: 9781925950946
ISBN 10: 1925950948
Pages: 278
Publication Date: 01 March 2024
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Sandy Jeffs OAM is a prize-winning poet and the author of eight collections including the bestselling collection Poems from the Madhouse, Blood Relations, The Wings of Angels: A Memoir of Madness, The Mad Poet’s Tea Party and The Poetics of a Plague which documents the COVID-19 Melbourne lockdowns. Her non-fiction includes the prize-winning Out of the Madhouse (with Margaret Leggatt). Sandy has been an advocate for people with mental illness for many years.

Reviews for Flying with Paper Wings: Reflections on Living with Madness

Read this exceptional book. It takes you beyond your own narrow terror towards something that might be called insight. —Helen Elliott, The Age (on the first edition)