Creative Empathy: An Evening with Rob Gee and Jonathan Taylor

Photo by Trust "Tru" Katsande on Unsplash

Join the Centre for New Writing, the Empathic Healthcare Society, and the Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare for a special evening celebrating the power of creative writing to foster empathy, understanding and connection. Award-winning poet, performer and storyteller Rob Gee and author Jonathan Taylor will appear in conversation to explore the relationship between writing and empathy. The event is free and open to all. It takes place on Thursday 29 October, 6-pm, and you can register for tickets here. 

The event celebrates the Anthony Locke Empathic Healthcare Prizes for Creative Writing, recognising outstanding writing that engages with themes of compassion, understanding, care and human experience. Following a talk by Rob and Jonathan, there will be a reading of some of the brilliant entries to the competition.

Whether you are a creative writer, healthcare professional, student, or reader, you’re welcome to this celebration of the role of creativity in helping us understand one another.

About the Speakers
Rob Gee is a comic, poet, and ex- mental health nurse with over a decade of clinical experience. He has won over twenty awards for his solo shows and triumphed in major poetry slams, including the Edinburgh Slam and BBC Two's Why Poetry Matters Slam. He has performed over 3,000 shows globally, including at more than 100 international fringe festivals. He serves as patron for the Leicestershire Action for Mental Health Project (LAMP) and spent 12 years as the lead artist for Comedy Asylum, which runs comedy workshops and shows for individuals with severe mental illness. Shows include Forget Me Not: The Alzheimer's Whodunnit and AWOL: Two old men escape from a care home and go to a metal festival. He has published numerous books of poetry and edited anthologies celebrating the power of poetry for wellbeing.

Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor and critic. He is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, and author of prize-winning novels, short story collections, and memoirs, including the beautifully empathic works of life-writing Take Me Home: Parkinson’s, My Father, Myself (Granta Books, 2007) and A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024).

About the Prizes
In summer 2026 we ran a creative writing competition open to all medical and healthcare students at the University of Leicester, with prizes kindly sponsored by Anthony Locke, and the Centre for New Writing. The prize was judged by a committee including students from the Empathic Healthcare Society, Dr Jonathan Taylor, Dr Andy Ward, Dr Felicity James and Dr Rachel Winter.

The range of entries – moving, tender and empathic – showed how talented and expressive our students are. The evening will include a presentation of prize certificates, but all the entries deserve to be celebrated: the talk will be followed by a reading of a sample of the great short prose pieces and poems entered.

The event forms part of our larger conversation around the literary arts and healthcare, funded by the AHRC as part of the Empathy, Difficulty, Difference: Creative Curiosity in Practice project.

We look forward to welcoming you.

Rachel Burns, "My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses"

Rachel Burns lives in County Durham. She was awarded a DYCP Arts Council Grant in 2023. She won the Classical Association Poetry Prize in 2026. She was placed second in The Julian Lennon Prize for Poetry 2021 and second in the Disabled Poets Prize 2024. Her poetry has been widely anthologised, including COAL (Smith/Doorstop) and North Country (Saraband). Rachel has facilitated poetry workshops for The Ginkgo Prize, Tees Women Poets, The Writing School and Creative Future. Her pamphlet, A Girl in a Blue Dress, is published by Vane Women Press. My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses is published by Broken Sleep Books.

About My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses, by Rachel Burns
My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses is a raw, propulsive book of poems and lyric prose that moves through teenage motherhood, addiction, poverty, care work, violence, and the long afterlife of classed shame with furious clarity and bruised humour. Across six sections, Burns writes from buses, pubs, kitchens, prisons, foodbanks, council estates, and the uneasy calm of nature reserves, allowing memory to return in flashcuts, refrains, and narrative riffs that feel as immediate as speech.

The collection's emotional range is wide, from the bleak comedy of survival and the tenderness of parenthood to the stark ache of friendship, loss, and what gets left behind, while recurring motifs of horses, film, music, and woodland destruction thread private life into a wider social landscape. It is a book that refuses respectability and refuses silence, insisting on testimony without polishing the edges.

You can read more about My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses

Love in the 80s

Rubik’s Cubes
& Fred Perry white polo shirts

The roller-disco Life – La-La-La-La
I’d watch you from my bedroom window

Doing bunny hops on your BMX 
Counting 1,2,3 like Hopscotch 

Wheeling my shopper bike
Through the metal gate

Riding around the green
In the hope you’d notice 

I’d graffiti my school book
I love Joe

Heart & cupid arrows
Dreamily dissecting a frog

You were sent to Ireland 
To fight in The Troubles

The mines & steelworks all gone
It was the army or the Monger’s Yard

You came back hyem
Not quite the same

I still think of you
As that boy 

Who changed
The colour of your hair

More times than I’d had hot dinners

School Bus Anthem 

I sit at the back with Shelley and Titch,
sharing a long cigarette, smoking it down to the fag end. 
Bernadette goes from seat to seat, can yer sponsor us 50p, pet?     
We all know the money isn’t for the starving babbies in Africa.

The big lads on the bus, bounce first years up and down, 
up and down, on their knees. This is the way the donkey’s ride,
the donkey’s ride, the donkey’s ride.

The old double-decker crawls up the bank, wheezing like a knackered miner.
We pile to one side, just as it hits the hairpin bend, knowing the driver, 
won’t make the gear change in time. 

The engine smokes, splutters and coughs, wheels spin backwards. 
Time rewinds. The bus grinds to a stop. We pile out the exit, 
a herd of untamed ants. The driver shakes a fist.
Ger off yer little bastards! Ger off! 
 

Anime, ADHD and Me

By Mathew Lopez-Bland

Having just failed his graduation exam for the third time, Naruto watches on as the rest of his classmates celebrate graduating from the ninja academy.

When I started pitching ideas for my PhD, I knew that I wanted to write about anime, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. Japanese animation had been an ever-present in my life, ever since I’d first watched the Pokémon anime, back in the late 90s. Over the years, the medium had come to mean so much to me, but I’d never really thought about why.

Then, in 2021, I got the answer I was looking for, when I was diagnosed with ADHD. I realised that anime mattered to me because throughout my childhood, before my diagnosis, it’d been the characters I’d seen in anime, like Naruto Uzumaki, from Naruto, who’d taught me about myself. 

In Western media, delinquent characters always seemed to be the butt of the joke, the naughty boys that everyone laughed at, but nobody cared for. When an episode of The Simpsons ended, Bart’s life went back to normal. His actions had no lasting consequences, as each week everything started over again. But in anime, things were different. In long running shonen like Naruto, hyperactive and disruptive young boys, like me, were taken seriously. For all of Naruto’s bravado, the show’s early overarching storylines hinge on his isolation, and his desperation to overcome his flaws and be accepted by his peers – feelings I understood all too well.

Within a few months of my diagnosis, I was researching at the University of Leicester, working on a thesis titled, ADHD, Anime, and Writing Creative Non-Fiction. This consisted of a 40,000-word creative non-fiction collection, and a 30,000-word reflective commentary. The creative work used a hybrid form of memoir and essay to explore how my ADHD symptoms had affected my life, and how the stories and characters I’d found in anime had helped me to understand who I was, and where I fit in the world around me. My commentary looked at how experimenting with the structure and form of my essays led to me using more rigid, conventional writing structures, as a kind of "medicine" for my ADHD. 

Now that I am almost a year on from completing my studies, I look back at my PhD as a period of both creative and personal maturation. As I write this, I realise how glad I am that I persevered and insisted on writing about something that meant so much to me. At times, it was a painful and tiring process, but it was also joyous and revelatory, as I found that I learnt almost as much about myself, as I did about the craft of writing. I don’t know where my writing will take me next, but I do know that the my research journey was more rewarding than I had ever anticipated.

About the author
Mathew Lopez-Bland lives on a farm with his fiancé and their pet cat. When he’s not writing, he’s usually watching anime or playing football. He has a PhD in Creative Writing, and his short stories and poetry have appeared in various literary magazines.

Book Review Competition and Creative Writing Workshop for Bedford College Group

To celebrate the National Year of Reading 2026, the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester is holding a Book Review Competition and Creative Writing Workshop in conjunction with the Bedford College Group. The Book Review Competition is open to students at the Bedford College Group, and all entries will be considered for publication for publication on our popular book review blog Everybody's Reviewing. The workshop on "Non-Linear Narratives and Storytelling for Games" will run in Tresham College in Kettering on 16 October 2026, and is taught by Laura Besley and Jonathan Taylor. Details are below!

Angel T. Dionne, "Garden-Body"

 

Angel T. Dionne is a surrealist writer and professor at the University of Moncton’s Edmundston Campus. She obtained her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Pretoria in 2021. She is the author of Garden-Body (Radiant Press, forthcoming) and Bird Ornaments (Broken Tribe Press, 2025). She takes her coffee black and her fish tinned. Her website is here. 

About Garden-Body, by Angel T. Dionne

Lev’s Body grows only tangled weeds. His mother is part flora, part fauna; and his father is a bowl of ash. Through surrealist fragments of prose poetry, Garden-Body traces the invasive rhizomes of Lev’s life. 

Below, you can read two excerpts from the book. 

From Garden-Body

Birth

Lev is born without lips; a canvas of flesh stretches from cheek to cheek. A clean slate, his mother calls it, bird-pecking the place where his mouth should be. The doctors cut a thin line using a utility knife and expose rows of teeth already grown in, shimmering, adularescent moonstones. 

They slash him a bloodied smile and saddle-stitch the corners into an upturned crescent, so that even his cries look like laughter. 

A Collection of Eights

It’s worth mentioning now that Lev’s brother never really grew older than the age of eight. Benny slowly became his younger brother, then. He must have hatched from an eggplant, their mother says, whenever Benny spills his drink, or gets off his leash and bites a pedestrian, or births a small animal in the bathroom. She spikes her stinging-nettle tongue against him but always scoops the stillbirth from the toilet with her hands, pickles it, and writes Benny’s age on the jar in red marker. The naked deadborn rest in their salted brine, curling into themselves; swollen and decayed.

Every shelf in the house is crowded with dead things, all of them labeled with the number eight. 

"Adding Magic to Your Writing"

By Sally O’Reilly

Writing about magic means you can access the areas of your mind that you don’t normally use, freeing up imaginative ideas. But it only works if you impose constraints, and you need to decide how these are integrated into your story. 

Magic is multifaceted. In historical terms, high magic was practiced by scholars, and was often based on ancient texts and arcane knowledge. Whereas folk magic – including herbalism and fortune telling - was practised by women.

There are many ways of introducing magic into your story. You might create an entirely invented world, with its own rules, like Middle Earth or Earthsea. This is magic as fantasy. Related to this is the convention of a portal which leads to an invented world from this one.

Or you might make magic integral to the everyday world. For instance Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle is set in a world similar to late-twentieth-century America, but which encompasses witchcraft. A similar approach is to use surreal magic in a narrative, in which everything is "off" and weirdness is normal. An example is Leonora Carrington’s "The Debutante," a short story in which a debutante morphs into a hyena.  

Currently, there is a vogue for retelling folk and fairy tales and giving them contemporary resonance. Angela Carter is one of the most influential writers in this field. Dark folk traditions are also inspiring stories in which nature is sentient or sinister, and the past haunts the present through the landscape. 

So what are the tactics that you might use? Spreading your net as wide as possible at the start is essential. It’s important to read /watch / absorb anything that interests you and has magical resonance. For instance, I just saw Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, in which a man plays chess with Death, a haunting, unforgettable image.  

You might also visit potentially inspiring places, again, keeping an open mind. Go to old cities, museums, remote places in nature. Writers like Alan Garner and C.S. Lewis were deeply inspired by the natural world. 

Another tactic is to try to rediscover your childish belief in the possibility of magic. Try writing down everything you can remember about a time in your childhood when you were scared, or left alone, or lost. Write down as much as you can about your feelings then, and try to recall as much detail as possible. Magic works best in fiction when it is interwoven with the everyday – think of Harry Potter and the Dursleys. 

Familiarise yourself with folk tales and myths. Grimms’ Fairy Tales is a good place to start, but there are fairy tales and fables from all over the world, varied and colourful, often with similar themes and tropes. Old stories can be repurposed time and time again. 

Using magic in a story means embedding it into the narrative. So the rules that apply to story-telling generally apply here. Traditionally, stories are about characters who want or lack something, who seek a goal, are blocked or challenged in getting to that goal, and who eventually change, and if the story has a happy ending, get what it was they wanted, or something different but slightly better. 

Don’t let the magic in your story solve all the problems your characters face. If you want your story to be engaging, then you need to limit the access your characters have to magical power. Otherwise, everything is too easy, there are no challenges, and therefore no conflict.

Make the rules of your fictional world clear to the reader from the beginning. Be consistent once you have established those rules. If the magic is treated as a skill that must be learned, the stakes are higher. Create barriers and challenges. Impose limitations and rules – for example – a spell can only be cast in specific circumstances. 

Your characters must earn their rewards. Their achievements will only feel satisfying to the reader if the characters had to work for it. 

All writers are dealing with magic to an extent – it’s a proxy for pure imagination. If you can make your readers believe in the magic in your story, you can make them believe that all the events are real. 

About the author
Writer Sally O’Reilly grew up in Stoke-on-Trent and now lives in Sheffield. En route, she’s spent time in Brixton, Brighton, and Barcelona. Her short stories have been published in the UK, Australia, and South Africa, and she has been shortlisted for the Cosmopolitan short story prize and the Ian St James Awards. Her historical novel Dark Aemilia (Myriad Editions/Picador US) was nominated for the Kirkus Prize. She has worked as a senior Creative Writing lecturer at the Open University and her journalism has been published in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and New Scientist. Her latest novel, Hagtale, is a reimagined origin story of Shakespeare's Macbeth and is shortlisted for the World of Books Sustainable Story Award 2026.

About Hagtale
A hagtale, a dark fable, a story told around winter’s fires and known to Shakespeare but never written down. Until now.

In eleventh-century Scotland, feral wolf-child Wulva is brought up by witches and then sent to live at a Scottish castle, where she falls under the spell of cruel, ambitious Lord Macbeth.

Three hundred years later, gentle Brother Rowan goes on a strange and perilous journey to a remote and ancient monastery to write a history of the Scottish king-line.

Misfits in their own time, seekers after truth, Wulva and Rowan are deeply connected despite the centuries that separate them.

Hagtale explores the power of stories lost and found, their transformative potential, and who gets to be the owner of the tale.

You can read more about Hagtale on the publisher's website here. 

Katie Daniels, "Stone"

 

Katie Daniels lives in Leicestershire and writes poetry and prose.  Her debut poetry collection, Catch, was published by Redbeck Press in 2007 and a pamphlet, The Geometry of Distance, by Mantle Community Arts in 2012. Her poems have appeared in publications including Magma, Iota, Obsessed with Pipework, and Other Poetry. Katie received an Arts Council grant for writing time in 2012, and another as part of the former Inky Fish poetry collective for their reading tour in 2006-07. Katie is self-employed and works as a charity governance professional. She plays a lot of Countdown, and is terrified of giraffes. 

Below, you can read Katie's poem "Stone." The poem has previously been published in Other Poetry and is taken from a projected full collection called Feathers in my Palm.

Stone

Moment of impact: stone/bone.
You're swaying slightly, then moving on,
walking the old road, hotheaded
 
where stone has broken you,
the back of your school shirt turning redbrown.
You’re fluid, offbeat, draining away,
 
thinking in stone’s subsurface glint -
some new cold language planting flags. 
This passive victory leaves you sure
 
that only stone could be this soft and wild:
slithering down to your new shoes,
smoothly embracing the furrows of your skull.