"Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary: Reflection, Influence, Process," ed. Karen Stevens and Jonathan Taylor

About Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary: Reflection, Influence, Process, ed. Karen Stevens and Jonathan Taylor

Almost all Creative Writing courses at University ask students to write reflectively as well as creatively: to submit commentaries alongside their creative work. This groundbreaking guide shows how to do this well - indeed, how commentaries might be works of art in themselves. 

In this unique collection of essays, published writers offer an intimate view of how their work has been informed, shaped and transformed by their literary, political, philosophical or personal influences. Providing models of the critical commentaries that all students of creative writing must write, each essay from contemporary authors of fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, scripts and digital writing demonstrates how what writers write is determined by what they have read, and what they read is then determined by what they are writing. As writers reflect on their process of moving from sources of inspiration to a finished and original piece of writing, they reveal their anxieties, passions, discoveries and motivations, offering fascinating insights into the imagination's journey. Introductory chapters explore why writers reflect on their own work, and place this practice in wider contexts, offering theoretical frameworks for understanding process, influence, and inspiration.

As illuminating for aspiring writers as it is for students reflecting on their research and process as part of writing courses, Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary will change the way writers talk about and engage with other texts.

You can read more about Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read the list of contents, about the editors, and a short sample from the introduction of the book.  

Contents of Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary

Chapters include:

Part One: Introductory
1. Preface
2. On Reflection in Creative Writing
3. On Influence in Creative Writing

Part Two: Sample Critical Commentaries

4. The Personal Is Always Political, by Karen Stevens
5. The Art of Persuasion, by Jo Nadin
6. On the Genealogy of Memoirs, by Jonathan Taylor
7. "The Community of Sorrow," by David Swann
8. The End is Never Where You Think, by Dan Powell
9. The Age of Influence in the Age of Authenticity, by Jemma Kennedy
10. Go Outside, by Shaindel Beers, Blue Mountain Community College
11. Jesus, Fairy Tales and Flash Fiction, by Kit de Waal
12. Alternate Truths and Fake News, by Anietie Isong
13. Memoir and Main Character Syndrome, by Jenn Ashworth
14. Experimental Poetic Autography, by Lila Matsumoto
15. Digital Narratives, Technology and the Domestic Gothic, by Kate Pullinger

Part Three: Postscripts

16. Further Reading: Selected Bibliography

About the editors

Karen Stevens is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester, where she specialises in teaching fiction. She is an author and editor, and has edited two critical and creative anthologies: Writing a First Novel: Reflections on the Journey (2014) and High Spirits: A Round of Drinking Stories (2018). Her debut collection of short stories Brilliant Blue (2025) was published with Barbican Press. She is on Twitter @KarenStevens01.

Jonathan Taylor is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Leicester University, where he directs the MA in Creative Writing. His most recent books are A Physical Education (Goldsmiths, 2024) and Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023). His website is here.  

From Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary

From the Preface, by Karen Stevens and Jonathan Taylor

Welcome to the mirror-world: the world of Creative Writing in higher education, where the assumption is that learning is, in part, reflective. You learn to write – or learn to write better – by reflecting on your own work and the work of others. The mirror-world reflects both yourself and your (literary) surroundings, and you learn by studying those reflections, by staring into the mirror. In that sense, a reflective practitioner is a split self: you are both a writer and someone who stands outside yourself, reflecting on your own practice, reading and critically evaluating your work as if you were someone else. You are both a writer and a writer who writes about their own writing. 

To put this more simply: almost all Creative Writing courses in formal education – whether at undergraduate, postgraduate or PhD level – include some kind of reflective element, and this manifests itself most obviously in the form of a written text which accompanies your creative work. That is, when you are asked to submit a piece of Creative Writing as part of your course, it is (as you may already know) customary for that work to be accompanied by some kind of "supplementary discourse" – a "reflective commentary" or "critical commentary" or "critical exegesis." (The names vary from institution to institution, but for the purposes of this book we’ll stick with "critical commentary," for the most part). As Maria Taylor suggests, the "critical commentary" allows the writer to see their "'other' self … the twin … in the mirror …. Reflective writing allows for engaging with that mysterious mirror-image figure, and gives the writer fresh insights into the practice of their own writing …. Students must be encouraged to take that brave first step through the looking glass into themselves in order to understand their motives and processes as writers" (The Place and the Writer, 2021: 130-1).

This book aims to help you to take that "step through the looking glass." It is about the process of reflection generally, and its written incarnation, the "critical commentary," more specifically ... 

Book Review Competition 2026: The Results

 

Our review blog, Everybody's Reviewing, recently passed one and a half million readers. To celebrate this milestone, the Centre for New Writing in conjunction with Everybody's Reviewing ran a Book Review Competition. Current undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of Leicester were invited to write short reviews of any book they've recently enjoyed. You can read more about the competition here.

The judging is now complete, and below you can see the results. The judges have awarded one first prize, which is a £50 voucher, one second prize, which is a £25 voucher, and no fewer than four "honorable mentions." All of these excellent reviews will be published on Everybody's Reviewing over the next couple of weeks. 

Congratulations to everyone who entered - it was a very strong field!

First Prize 

Mellissa Flowerdew-Clarke, review of Wilder Girls, by Rory Power

Second Prize

Charlie Black, review of Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell

Honorable Mentions

Aamani Bommareddy, review of Vicky Angel, by Jacqueline Wilson

Rim Asma Khalifa, review of And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini

Olivia Peachey, review of A Short Stay in Hell, by Steven L. Peck

Anupriya Sisodia, review of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Carmella de Keyser, "Chasms"

Carmella de Keyser is a prize-winning British poet, known for explorations of identity, and the liminal spaces of human experience. Her writing spans both adult and children’s poetry. Founder of Harlow’s first Poetry Society Stanza, judge for the Harlow Poetry Open, she is committed to the democratisation of poetry and is an active figure in the grassroots UK poetry scene. De Keyser has five books published or forthcoming, from Hedgehog Press, Alien Buddha Press, Parlyaree Press and the Seventh Quarry Press. Her accolades include winning first prize for the Hedgehog Poetry Press Pamphlet competitions of 2024 and 2025 and achieving over 100 of her poems published in contemporary journals such as The Madrid Review, Hooghly Review, Dream Catcher: International Arts Journal and Dust Poetry Magazine amongst others. She has had her writing selected for podcasts and radio shows including for the BBC and has had the honour of having her poetry widely anthologised including by the major publishing house Macmillan. Her website is here. 

About Chasms, by Carmella de Keyser
Chasms is a reflective journey into intersections, an exploration of identities, trauma, conflict, justice and recalled memories of visiting the Balkans juxtaposed with London life in the 90’s. The word chasm originates from the Greek word "khasma" meaning yawning hollow or gulf. It can also be a profound divide, rift or impassable rupture in the earth between peoples, feelings or ideas. The poems within Chasms consider dissonance and identity across different settings, borders, edges, and of projective identifications of self and the other, yet they also invite in space for bridges to be built across these gulfs via joy, integration and reconciliation.

From Chasms

Reflections

Baba's face resembles railroad tracks that disappear into each other. 

Like an Escher woodcut. 

I can look at it for hours …

She has been perma-sketched by early dawns in the Balkan sun. 

Grooming her garden,

Twisting cucumbers away from their tender climbing. 

When she smiles, three more lines crack open - from each of the sides of her cinnamon eyes. 

As her lips downturn again, the motifs across her face are filled with wholesome flesh, plumped up by "baklava," "tulumba" and "revani." 

She has toiled for her whole life and her skin is all stories. 

My reflection has no novellas,

Or folk tales, 

Or kneeling in the early womb of the teeming soil, 

It’s paler than hers, has lived in colder climates, 

My cheeks are smooth, mirthless urbanised tombs,

Yet for a moment -

Drawn in, by her flare, and her gaze,

Her face warms mine.

 

No More Anniversaries

A pile for "her" and a pile for "him,"

Twenty years and it’s come to this.

The mahogany music stand – "his."

The mini pyramid ornaments – "hers."

The toaster – "his."

The porcelain chopsticks – "not sure."

Plates from his intrusive mother – "Who cares?!"

The origami child coiled in the corner – "theirs."

Some things can never be unshared.

Martin Goodman, "Swimming for England"

Born in Leicester, raised in Loughborough, and then let loose on the wider world, Martin Goodman settled down to become a writer at the age of twelve. It’s the one plan that stuck. Books evolve in his head while others come out in the world. Spanning fiction and nonfiction, sixteen titles take on spiritual journeys, reckonings with ancestral heritage, great lives, eco dramas, and gay themes. Some books win prizes, others win a few readers, and he figures all were worth the years that went into them. See his website here for more. 

About Swimming for England, by Martin Goodman
As a Leicester-based site you’ll probably get my brief pitch: Joe Orton on the Beach.

Faisal arrived in England in a boat of refugees from Calais. This time he’s swimming the Channel.

An English couple wait on the beach. They save lost boys – turning them into real men. Faisal will be their triumph, their first cross-Channel swimmer.

They plan to celebrate. Then out of nowhere Cameron appears. He’s Scottish but black, in smart clothes but with dirty hands. 

Is this another young man they can save? Or has he been digging around in their dark secrets? Now do they have to save themselves?

A chilling examination of English identity, toxic charity, and the violence that can erupt when we don’t get what we want.

You can read more about Swimming for England on the publisher's website here. Below, you can short a short extract from the novel. 

From Swimming for England

That bit about the sea swallowing him up, surely he didn’t mean… ?

Or is this him coming back?

It’s a young man for sure—but he’s not wearing white. He’s not wearing anything; well just a band of the briefest black swimming trunks. Black hair, brown skin, his feet stepping securely on pebbles like they were cushions of moss, walking with such poise, and as he steps free of the mist the daylight catches the wet sheen on him.

Eileen opens wide her arms. "Faisal!" she says.

"Hello Mum."

Faisal kisses Eileen on the cheeks. His lips are cold and he smells of the sea. Her waterproofs crinkle as she wraps her arms about his waist.

"You did it!" It’s hard to speak, her head pressed against the flesh of his chest, his heart beating fast, faster than hers, but she manages it. "Our boy’s a cross-Channel swimmer!"

He presses his hands on her shoulders and levers himself away. It’s not unkind. It’s just that Brian has stepped so close that Eileen’s squeezed off to the side.

"Dad." Faisal wraps his arms around Brian and they do a bear hug. 

Brian laughs that the boy is so wet and his oilies are working. "Go on," he says. "Shake yourself. Like a puppy. I said you would."

Faisal shakes himself. His black hair flicks wide from the wetness of his scalp and droplets rain in a silver shower all around him. Brian and Eileen laugh so Faisal shakes himself again.

There’s a roar. It comes from inside the mist, from the sea, a male bellow that swells like it was going somewhere, an anger set to explode, and then it just stops. They listen for more, and hear just the crash of a wave, and then another.

"What was that?" Faisal asks.

"That’ll be Cameron."

"He’s a young man," Eileen adds. "He’s got a good voice but he can’t swim. I think he’s thrown himself into the sea."

Peter Thabit Jones, "The Boy Who Drew John Lennon"

 

Peter Thabit Jones has authored eighteen books, including the Dylan Thomas Walking Tour of Greenwich Village, New York with Aeronwy Thomas, Dylan’s daughter. He and Aeronwy Thomas did a poetry reading tour across America in 2008, organised by Stanley H. Barkan, their American publisher. Peter has participated in festivals and conferences in America and Europe. His work has been translated into over twenty languages. He has received a number of awards, including the Eric Gregory Award for Poetry (The Society of Authors, UK), The Royal Literary Fund Award (UK), an Arts Council of Wales Award, the 2016 Ted Slade Award for Service to Poetry (UK), and the 2017 Homer: European Medal for Art and Poetry. His poem "Kilvey Hill" is incorporated into a stained-glass window in Saint Thomas School, Swansea.

Three of his dramas for the stage have premiered in America. His opera libretti for renowned Luxembourg composer Albena Petrovic Vratchanska have premiered at the Philarmonie Luxembourg, the National Opera House Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, the Theatre National Du Luxembourg, and the Sofia Opera and Ballet in Bulgaria. 

In April 2014, he was inducted into the Phi Sigma Iota Society at Salem State University, Massachusetts, USA, for his contribution to literature and literary translations. He gave the Guest of Honour speech before his induction.

He tutored English Literature and Creative Writing on the part-time degree programme at Swansea University’s Adult Education Department for twenty-two years, retiring in 2014.  

Further information can be found on his website here. 

Front cover drawing of John Lennon by Peter Thabit Jones ©2026

About The Boy Who Drew John Lennon, by Peter Thabit Jones

The poems range from the poet’s childhood in the shadow of Kilvey Hill in Eastside Swansea, where he was raised by his Welsh grandparents, to his times (2010 to 2025) spent as an annual writer-in-residence in Big Sur, California. Other subjects include poems about poets, such as Elizabeth Daryush, Ivor Gurney, Federico Garcia Lorca, R. S. Thomas, and Welsh language poet Alan Llwyd, artist Stanley Spencer, the jazz and swing music singer Billie Holiday, Elvis, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, war, a refugee mother, a victim of domestic abuse, homelessness, widowed women, and the 1926 General Strike in Wales.

You can read more about The Boy Who Drew John Lennon here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From The Boy Who Drew John Lennon

Lassen Volanic Park, California

            (for Patricia and Bill)

We followed the rough path,

Below the mountains

Stretching to a visual heaven

And the wide splinter of a lake

Of greyed placid blue.

We talked as we walked

Above the deep valley of nature,

Like two people who have awoken

In another planet’s landscape:

A landscape that was shaped 

Through a time before mankind’s

Strict calendars and clocks.

A time when volcanoes raged

With eruptions and the land

Slid and moved, broke apart,

Catapulting boulders

In the rising collapse,

Until the agitated storm

Noise of it all settled

Down to a stilled calmness,

Like the silence sleeping

On the glassy face of a pond.

We strolled down to where

The geysers were smoking

From a dulled snow surface

And the strong sniff of sulphur

Fouled the afternoon’s air.

Tourists, we took our photos

To solidify our memories.

Then breathless with hiking

And our excited achievement,

We climbed back to the parked car.

Below, the warm day spread out,

The landscape the physical evidence 

Of this planet’s ever-changing 

Body, its chaos and its creation—

The natural engines of its internal magic.

In the Poetry Class

He left you, you said,             

In the country of tears.           

He left you broken,                  

Your beaten mind                      

A junkyard full                              

Of his angry menace.                

I am your teacher                       

And you told me                         

Last week, when my other         

Students had left.                                   

I glance at you,                                    

Your young hand hovering       

Over the blank sheet                

Of writing paper.                                                       

Do your eyes now sadden    

 

Because of the ugly bruise        

Of your memories,                    

The Jekyll and Hyde                 

Of his so-called love?           

I watch as you                          

Start to scribble                      

Down your gathering thoughts,     

The nervous rivers       

Of blue words claiming       

The clean land of the page,        

As I hope one day                              

You fully claim back your life        

From the prison of pain,      

Claim back the true you      

That his shadows still occupy,      

So that you find the calm       

Rhythm of real caring               

And a happiness unchained  

In the whole of your being.       

Alan Baker, "A Book of Psalms"

 

Alan Baker was born and raised in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and has lived in Nottingham since 1985. He runs the poetry publisher Leafe Press and its associated magazine, Litter. His recent collections include Riverrun, a book of modernist sonnets about the river Trent and a book of prose poems, Letters From The Underworld.

About A Book of Psalms, by Alan Baker
A Book of Psalms is a sequence of 64 lyric poems in the form of psalms which attempt to do what the Biblical psalms did: praise, lament, critique the state of the world and humanity, elegize a lost homeland, look for faith, and provide comfort and consolation in times of trouble.

You can read more about A Book of Psalms on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From A Book of Psalms

Psalm 13

A scattered pigeon, a day named Wednesday

An afternoon declined into undifferentiated colours

As I stumbled into the town where neither the flies

Deceived into activity by the January sun

Nor the stallholders unrolling their canvass

A risen Sun and a working day earth tilted from the light

And all the people chilled and shouting their wares

Seemed more than living words that carry a history

In each syllable, a song in every vowel

Psalm 45

If it should ever come, and I suppose it must, let it be

On a bright morning when all the possibilities settle as one

Like a flock of sparrows who don’t know whether

They’re coming or going or whether the air

Seems cooler, their numbers fewer

Who don’t know that they’re symbols of lust and vulgarity

Who deserve a constellation to be their aid and shelter

And to notice their fall, to hover over late-night pharmacies

To dart between the eaves of Amazon warehouses, to alight at last

In a dream I had of a red-brick terrace in some northern Celestial City

Jerry Gabriel, "Deserters"

Jerry Gabriel's first novel, Deserters, was published in May 2026 (Acre Books). He is the author of two collections of stories, The Let Go (Queen's Ferry Press, 2015) and Drowned Boy (Sarabande, 2010), which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, was a Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" pick, and was awarded the 2011 Towson Prize for Literature. His stories have appeared in One Story, Epoch, Fiction, The Missouri Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among other publications. He has received grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2004), the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (2011), and the National Endowment for the Arts (2016). He lives in Maryland with his family and teaches writing at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

About Deserters, by Jerry Gabriel
A clerical error has placed Robert Riley’s name on a list of men who have committed a particularly abhorrent form of desertion from the Union Army: bounty jumping. President Lincoln has said that such men—those who have cheated the system by accepting signing bonuses, or "bounties," for multiple enlistments—should be hanged.

It is fall 1864, and Riley has in fact deserted, though just the ordinary way, and is in flight toward the territories, having collected his two sons from their homestead in Southern Ohio, as well as an orphaned girl he met on his way across the Appalachians. As the four move across the lower Midwest, they are pursued by a surly private detective who seeks the reward for bringing Riley in. With the man eventually on their heels, they are forced to divert by train into Chicago, where Riley knows a place to hide. And it is here, in this cold and dangerous metropolis, in the weeks leading up to the 1864 election, that things begin to unravel for the party.

You can read more about Deserters on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Deserters

From Chapter 3

Robert Riley woke in a panic, blood drumming in his ears and throat. He saw Abigail holding infant Michael, shushing him to sleep. Abigail, he thought. And then: Michael.

He rose to his sweaty elbows, gripped by an urgency. Outside, the swampy August din of the Tidewater: deafening crickets and a dozen kinds of frogs. At least three of the men in the tent snored loudly.

He dressed and quietly gathered his bedroll and knapsack. Marcus Trask stirred from the rustling and opened an eye, catching Robert’s own for a beat, neither judgment nor envy fully in his gaze, but possibly some blend of those things. Robert shrugged back his own complicated feelings—he had eighteen months ahead of him still and knew the risk. He slipped out into the muggy night.

It was foggy and moonless. There was no trouble getting past the watch. Rarely did a runner get chased these days, anyway. He pointed himself far to the east of Richmond, the big Rebel guns blasting away miles behind him, ineffectual but for the disruption of sleep. He made a wide arc around the city, reversing the trip south months before, when, even before the arrival of the letters, the ill-feeling had first crept in and darkened his usually imperturbable mood. This hadn’t gone unnoticed.

"She ain’t paying the neighbors any visits, like in your head," one man joked at chow.

Robert barely knew him, and though he offered an inscrutable smile, he weighed whether or not braining the man would be worth the punishment. His fellow soldier, of course, could not know how freighted the reference to Robert’s dead wife was. But that’s why you didn’t speak of such things to strangers.

As they had inched south that summer, the hardship of the war and all its uncertainty was abetted by the sweltering days and the close nights. On the march, it had in fact been less Abigail on his mind than the boys. With time to think, he worried about them, and particularly about their future.

In moments of honesty, he admitted that Sean had already slipped his grasp. Even before Robert had joined the fight in February of ’63, the conflict between them had come out into the open. It was in part his own fault, he knew, for taking too severe an approach. But Sean’s zeal, his righteousness, had a hand, too. Sean already considered himself beyond Hollis—he was, he thought, a scientist—yet he was still a boy, making a boy’s many mistakes. Even so, with Sean, Robert at least understood the contours.