"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 ... 

Amy E. Weldon, "Advanced Fiction: A Writer's Guide and Anthology"

 

Amy E. Weldon is Professor of English at Luther College, USA. She is the author of The Hands-On Life: How to Wake Yourself Up and Save the World (2018), The Writer’s Eye: Observation and Inspiration for Creative Writers (Bloomsbury, 2018), and Eldorado, Iowa: A Novel (2019). Her website is here.

About Advanced Fiction: A Writer's Guide and Anthology, by Amy E. Weldon

After the publication of The Writer’s Eye, I’m thrilled to be returning with Bloomsbury to a conversation about the next level of the fiction-writing process, starting with the place many of our craft questions really start – in our minds. What do we know, or not? Feel uncertain about, or not? In my own and my students’ and friends’ experience, readjusting our internal sense of our projects can unlock difficulties that “craft instruction” alone can't quite do, because our mental approach to the project shapes the words we bring to the page.

The concept of psychic distance is a great example. Essentially, it means “the degree to which you are pretending to be your character, seeing through her eyes to render reality as she understands it, including what she sees and hears around her, while still giving readers the information we need to be able to understand your story.” Students tell me often that understanding psychic distance is one of their most important breakthroughs as advanced writers, since establishing your psychic distance – your relationship to your character and the depth of your immersion in her reality – determines how your point-of-view apparatus and your sentences work. If your psychic distance is too far, readers can feel stranded at an unchanging distance from characters, and the story can feel impersonal because we can’t quite get into anyone’s head. (Sentences can get boring, too, because, eager to close that distance, you may start telling readers what we need to know from your point of view, not a character’s). Too short, and readers feel trapped within the character’s sensibility, with insufficient information about the world beyond her head. But if you can establish and move through a range of psychic distance that works for you (like a film director moving from a long or medium shot to a close-up), you can build a convincing world around your character and signal to readers that this character is the fully developed person we’re meant to be following as she moves through that world.

You can read more about Advanced Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology on the publisher's website here. Below is an excerpt from the book, in which I describe how dialogue and psychic distance can interact.

From Advanced Fiction: A Writer's Guide and Anthology

Surprisingly, dialogue can be a psychic-distance block too. Dialogue can feel intimate and fun when you’re writing it, because you can “hear” it from inside the story’s world – you’re the writer. But readers are already external to the story’s world – we’re not you, remember?  And overusing dialogue can distance us even further, because dialogue is external to a character; spoken into the world beyond their heads and limited by what would be believable in that situation, it’s therefore limited in what it can tell us about a character’s interior life (unlike italicized “voiceover” thoughts, for example, or sensory detail about what a character’s noticing around her). And without access to that interior life, the psychic distance between the reader and the character grows .... Overreliance on dialogue may also signal that you don’t know enough about your fictional world yet to animate it through action, sensory detail, and other, non-dialogue modes of characterization. What you don’t know, readers can’t know. 

This is why dialogue, especially if it isn’t ballasted with actions and sensory detail, can feel so much like disembodied voices in space. Plus, long stretches of dialogue can give the feeling that the writer is impressed with the characters’ cleverness and wants readers to be as well. (We feel shoved into sitcom studio-audience chairs, watching the characters on stage, invited to applaud at conversations that go on just a little too long). “I want my readers to view this character as X” – without imagining that character as X to write the character being X in reality as they understand it – can be a recipe for psychic-distance weirdness.

Take a look at your paragraphs and your major scenes: where does dialogue appear, and for how long? In many student stories, paragraphs begin with lines of dialogue, then move to exposition kind of grudgingly, then get back to dialogue as quickly as they can. Some also revert to dialogue (or long speeches by characters) to reveal important plot or backstory information. For a first notes-to-self draft, this is OK. In revision, try something else. (Unless you’re James Baldwin writing “Sonny’s Blues”). If your paragraphs fall into a dialogue-then-exposition pattern, reverse that order. If using dialogue, keep it short and interwoven with external and internal detail. If writing a longer scene (like an argument), keep your stakes high (and obvious to the reader), keep the external world present (someone’s gripping that paperweight, ready to throw it), and be sure the characters’ words could believably emerge from an actual, non-televised human’s mouth in that situation. (Remember: high emotion often makes people less, not more, articulate). All these things will help keep your psychic distance on track.

Victoria MacKenzie, "For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain"

Victoria MacKenzie is a fiction writer and poet based in Scotland. Her debut novel, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain (Bloomsbury, 2023), explores the lives of the medieval mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. She has won a number of writing prizes including a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and the Emerging Writer Award from Moniack Mhor, and has held writing residencies in Scotland, Finland and Australia. Her second novel, Brantwood, about the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2025. Her website is here. 

About For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain is a novel based on the lives of two real women, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. Both women have visions of Christ, but to claim direct communication with God is heresy – and the punishment for heresy is to be burnt alive. Using intertwined first-person narratives, Julian and Margery tell the stories of their lives. Margery is a traumatised mother of fourteen, full of shame about sex and childbirth, and hounded by the church for talking about her visions. Julian is an anchoress – haunted by grief, she has lived for twenty-three years in a single room. She has told no one of her visions, but she has written them down in secret. Her book, now known as Revelations of Divine Love, is the first book in English by a woman.

The novel culminates in a meeting between the two women at the window of Julian’s anchoress cell, where they confide their deepest fears. Margery is inspired to return home and dictate the story of her own life: The Book of Margery Kempe is the first known autobiography in English. For Thy Great Pain is a novel about grief, motherhood and grace, and it’s also the story of the beginning of women’s writing.

You can read a review of For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain on Everybody's Reviewing here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain, by Victoria MacKenzie

JULIAN

Those early days, weeks, months, years of being in my cell – I am glad I will not live through them again. Though I knew that God would send me trials and tribulations, I did not predict the form that these would take. 

I had thought I was ready for the life of an anchoress. I had wanted to prolong each moment of my life, to get closer to experiencing time as God experiences it: not the instantly dissolving moment, but something larger and more encompassing. A stillness that doesn’t pass as soon as you think yourself into it.

I’d thought I would live as slowly as moss in my stone cell. I’d thought I would step out of my life as soon as I stepped into the cell. But I was still me. Nothing had changed. I was myself, with all my usual racing thoughts and yearnings and memories and foolishness.

Nothing can prepare you for spending the rest of your life in a single room. Never to be touched by another human being. Never to run. Never to feel the rain on your face. Never to walk in the garden and see flowers unfolding their colours and scents. 

I had died to the world, died to my old life, but I was not dead. 

Sara brought me food and firewood, but in those early days we did not know each other. She was careful to follow Master Thomas’ orders not to distract me with what he called ‘women’s chatter’. She treated me like a holy saint, whispering ‘Mother Julian, I have your supper.’ I could almost hear her curtseying on the other side of the curtain. 

How I yearned for women’s chatter.

Louisa Treger, "Madwoman"

Louisa Treger has a PhD in English from University College London, where she focused on early-twentieth-century women’s writing and was awarded the West Scholarship ‘for distinguished work in the study of language and literature.’ She is the author of The Lodger and The Dragon Lady, and lives in London. Her new novel is Madwoman. Her website is here. 

 

About Madwoman

Madwoman, Louisa Treger’s third novel, is a dark, turn-of-the-century tale about the world’s first female investigative journalist, Nellie Bly. Desperate to prove her worth as a serious reporter in New York, she comes up with a dangerous plan – to fake madness and have herself committed to the asylum on Blackwell’s Island. She will go where no sane woman has voluntarily gone before, and she will come back with a story like no other. Madwoman tells the true story of a compelling historical figure and the institutions – from America’s newsrooms to its mental hospitals – she fought to make better for women everywhere.

From Madwoman, by Louisa Treger

Prologue

1887

The barge pulled away from shore, pitching and rolling. Some of the patients were whimpering or crying out, but the guards barked at them to shut up. There was a girl strapped to the bunk, weeping and shaking, her face smeared with snot and tears. Through her short, fair hair, raw patches gleamed on her scalp. Nellie got up to comfort her, but a hard-faced guard shoved her back onto the bench. No one else tried to help. Eventually, the girl’s sobs turned to sniffles and she fell silent, her eyes strained wide with fear. Nellie opened her mouth to speak to her, but caught the guard’s eye and let the words fall silent. The air in the cabin filled with stale breath.

She glued herself to the grimy porthole and saw schooners on the waterfront, gulls swooping low over the dark brown river that billowed and seethed like tea coming to the boil. Soon a handful of large buildings appeared on the horizon, strung out in a line on a long, narrow strip of land. The boat headed toward them and docked, bumping and creaking against the tires that lined the wharf. The women were led up a plank to shore. They stood quietly now; they seemed cowed, stunned.

Nellie breathed air deep into her lungs, trying to get a hold of herself. It was cool and fresh, smelling of damp earth. She could hear the staccato call of a thrush and, in the distance, crows were cawing. Coming from Manhattan, it was a relief to hear birds, to see all the green space, but they weren’t given long to enjoy it. New guards began herding them into an ambulance.

‘Welcome to Blackwell’s Island,’ one of them said. He cleared his throat and spat. ‘Once you get in here, you’ll never get out.’

Panic exploded in Nellie, turning her vision gray. She clenched and unclenched her hands, and her heart dragged at her ribcage. What on earth have I done? The Island was where they shipped criminals, paupers, the sick, and the insane; kept them out of the way, out of sight, so that sane, decent people didn’t need to have them on their minds.

Alison MacLeod, "Tenderness"

Alison MacLeod, photograph by Kate MacLeod

Alison MacLeod is the author of the novels The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels and Unexploded, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013, and two story collections. Her new novel is Tenderness. She is the joint winner of the Eccles British Library Writer's Award 2016. Her work has been awarded the Olive Cook Award, shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, the Sunday Times EFG International Short Story Award, the Edge Hill Prize and Canada's Governor General’s Award for Fiction. She is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester and lives in Brighton. Here website is here.

About Tenderness, by Alison MacLeod

D. H. Lawrence is dying. Exiled in the Mediterranean, he dreams of the past. There are the years early in his marriage during the war, where his desperation drives him to commit a terrible betrayal. And there is a woman in an Italian courtyard, her chestnut hair red with summer.

Jacqueline Kennedy and her husband have already been marked out for greatness. Passing through New York, she slips into a hearing where a book, not a man, is brought to trial.

A young woman and a young man meet amid the restricted section of a famous library, and make love.

Scattered and blown by the winds of history, their stories are bound together, and brought before the jury. On both sides of the Atlantic, society is asking, and continues to ask: is it Obscenity – or is it Tenderness?

From Tenderness

The dead could look after the afterwards, but here, here was the quick of the universe: the town lifted from sleep in a vast net of light, and the Mediterranean, five miles away at Cagnes, flickering like a great opal. He’d woken early and had watched the dark gravity of the night yield to daybreak. Now the streets were a mirage, half-dissolved in the dazzle of morning. Even the town’s ancient walls were erased, while a barking dog in the road below was more bark than dog. On the balcony, among the geraniums, he squinted: the coastline as far as the Cap d’Antibes shook and shimmered. It was impossible to say where sea turned to sky. The smudge of an ocean-liner materialised at what might have been the horizon, while light streamed – the run-off from the warp and weft of the world. Nothing the day touched remained solid, nothing held, nothing except the geraniums and their defiant fists of red.

The previous day, upright in his underwear in the medical bay, the exile had learned that he was, even still, five feet nine inches tall, or that he was when the state of his lungs allowed him to straighten. He would have been cheered by this fact had he not weighed in at forty-five kilos on the French scales, and one hundred pounds on the imperial – or not quite seven stone. He had insisted on both scales, but the two nations were agreed.

It meant at least that he could go, almost literally, where the wind blew him. The almond trees of the town were a pink-and-white froth of blossom. The breeze, slight as it was, had a reviving salt tang. He needed only his hat and shoes. ‘Are we ready?’ he called into the room.

Marshall Moore and Sam Meekings (ed.), "The Place and the Writer"

About The Place and the Writer, ed. Marshall Moore and Sam Meekings

The Place and the Writer: International Intersections of Teacher Lore and Creative Writing Pedagogy is the inaugural work in Bloomsbury’s Research in Creative Writing series. The motivation for creating this volume was the occasional disconnect between theorists, educators, and practitioners of Creative Writing. The chapters in the book examine the spread of Creative Writing around the world, and how this has led to lore manifesting in problematic areas, such as workshop structure; canon; issues of authenticity and appropriation; and pedagogical clichés (‘write what you know,’ ‘show, don’t tell,’ ‘find your voice’). The volume challenges many areas of the received wisdom that persist in the field, as well as refracting these through the perspectives of voices from outside the traditional poles of English-language scholarship. The book is full of diverse contributions from around the world (from South Africa to Brazil to Finland to Japan) and these decentre historically dominant views and voices in Creative Writing to focus on the connections between teaching practices and issues of identity, culture, and practice. 

The book includes a chapter on writing memoir, 'Scenes of Judgement: Genre and Narrative Form in Literary Memoir,' by Jonathan Taylor of Leicester University. 

You can see more details about the book on the publisher's website here. 

Below, you can read about the editors, and an excerpt from the 'Foreword' of the book. 

Marshall Moore is a Course Leader in English, Creative Writing & Publishing at Falmouth University in the UK. He is the co-editor of this volume. He is the author of several novels and collections of short fiction, the most recent being Inhospitable (Camphor Press, 2018). With Xu Xi, he is the co-editor of the anthology The Queen of Statue Square: New Short Fiction from Hong Kong. His short stories have appeared in Asia Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS), and many other publications. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Aberystwyth University. His website is here.

Sam Meekings is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University in Qatar. With Marshall Moore, is the co-editor of this volume. He is the author of Under Fishbone Clouds (called ‘a poetic evocation of the country and its people’ by the New York Times), The Book of Crows, and The Afterlives of Dr Gachet. He has a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and has taught writing at NYU and the University of Chichester in the UK. His website is here. You can read more about The Afterlives of Dr Gachet on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

From The Place and the Writer

Excerpt from the 'Foreword'

As one might expect from the title, Paul Engle’s landmark essay 'The Writer and the Place,' a meditation on the origins of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, proposes that the school's serene location in the American heartland has an inspiring, enlightening effect upon the students fortunate enough to be accepted to the program. This is not merely to do with the benign atmosphere created by mellow Iowa prairies and the lazy, muddy river running through them. Something greater is at work here: Engle's hypothetical young writer should find that Iowa offers—along with bracing criticism—an alternative to the hubbub of Hollywood and the noise of New York. Freed from big-city distractions, the young writer will have ample time and space to reflect upon their work. Also on offer is community, and Engle suggests this is one of the Workshop's greatest benefits: the company of other young writers with similar dreams, aspirations, and levels of talent creates a unique environment in which the work and the writer may flourish. However, it is the idea of place that propels Engel's thoughts on Iowa's mystique. There is an ineffable combination of solitude and down-home American goodness to be found there, he asserts. A creative singularity. Or an exceptionalism, if we are to view the matter through the lens of today's geopolitics.

While one can today read Engle's essay and appreciate the passion he felt for the program he helped establish and the bucolic location it occupies, a contemporary scholar-practitioner might raise an eyebrow at his assertion that '[w]e do not have that intense concentration of talent in one city, as certainly exists in Paris, London, or Rome, where writers either know each other or know a good deal about each other' (1961: 5). At least in the English-speaking world, New York must surely rival London in terms of literary output. Other North American cities boast respectable literary communities as well: Los Angeles, Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans, Portland, and Vancouver come readily to mind. Yet what remains unquestioned in the essay is the supposition—the article of lore, as it were, or perhaps the myth—that a location offering a combination of beauty, stillness, and cultural virtue is a writer's nirvana. In such a setting, Engle suggests, writerly reflection will lead to the process of self-discovery from which inspired creative ideas will flow.

As expatriate scholars and practitioners, our combined experience both confirms and confronts these notions of place. Moore is from the American South, a region with a strong literary tradition of its own, distinct from that of the country as a whole. Growing up in semi-rural eastern North Carolina, he was keenly aware of the difference that accompanies Southern identity in the United States. However, it took him moving to California for that regional identity to assert itself. Moving out of the country several years later, first to South Korea and then to Hong Kong, he found that the regional distinction mattered somewhat less than it had in the context. Overseas, he was simply American. Meanwhile, Meekings is from the south coast of England, yet it was only when he moved abroad, living and working first in China and then the Middle East, that he began to notice the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of English and British identity and how these had manifested in his educational experiences. In short, both our international experiences led us to consider the complicated relationship between practice and place and consider what other lores might look like, as well as how and to what extent might cultural beliefs around writers in general manifest in the classroom? This book attempts to answer those questions.

Featured Author: Louisa Treger

Louisa Treger is a classical violinist who turned to literature, earning a Ph.D in English at University College London, where she focused on early-twentieth-century women's writing and was awarded the Rosa Morison Scholarship 'for distinguished work in the study of English Language and Literature.' Louisa's first novel, The Lodger, was published by Macmillan in 2014. The Dragon Lady is her second novel (Bloomsbury, 2019). She lives in London. Her website is http://louisatreger.com/

About The Dragon Lady 

Opening with the shooting of Lady Virginia 'Ginie' Courtauld in her tranquil garden in 1950s Rhodesia, The Dragon Lady tells Ginie's extraordinary story, so called for the exotic tattoo snaking up her leg. From the glamorous Italian Riviera before the Great War to the Art Deco glory of Eltham Palace in the thirties, and from the secluded Scottish Highlands to segregated Rhodesia in the fifties, the narrative spans enormous cultural and social change. Lady Virginia Courtauld was a boundary-breaking, colourful and unconventional person who rejected the submissive role women were expected to play. 

Ostracised by society for being a foreign divorcée at the time of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson, Ginie and her second husband ,Stephen Courtauld, leave the confines of post-war Britain to forge a new life in Rhodesia, only to find that being progressive liberals during segregation proves mortally dangerous. Many people had reason to dislike Ginie, but who had reason enough to pull the trigger?

Deeply evocative of time and place, The Dragon Lady subtly blends fact and fiction to paint the portrait of an extraordinary woman in an era of great social and cultural change.

You can see more details about The Dragon Lady on the publisher's website here, you can read a review of the novel on Everybody's Reviewing here, and below you can read an excerpt from the opening chapter. 

From The Dragon Lady

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

CATHERINE, 1990s

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget, yet the smallest thing takes me back to the time the Dragon Lady was shot. I was thirteen years old and living on a forest reserve near the Mozambique border. My father, a naturalist and forestry consultant, visited her regularly, but it was the first time he had taken me.

Her house was long and low and painted white, with a turret on one side. It was like a castle in a storybook, unexpected and incongruous in a remote Rhodesian valley. The interior was all hushed, cool spaces and we had to wait a long time for the Dragon Lady to see us.
At one point her husband, Stephen, came to talk to us. He had a stern face, but there was a glint in his eyes while he spoke to Dad about the new trees he had planted. I had a boys’ comic tucked under my arm and he wanted to know why.

‘Cathy doesn’t like girls’ things,’ Dad told him. ‘She plays with tin soldiers and a train set.’

My father’s words caused a pang. I’d grown out of trains and soldiers a long time ago, but he hadn’t noticed. I was about to retort that I was too big for toys, but I saw Stephen was smiling; he found it funny. He left, saying that he had a meeting in town, but that his wife wouldn’t be much longer.

We sat in silence. It was hard not to fidget, and soon Dad suggested I go outside and have a look around. I walked onto the veranda and down a flight of steps, and found myself in a never-ending garden.   

It was beautiful and eerie, not like a garden at all to me. My school friends had gardens with mowed lawns and tidy hedges. This was wilderness with paths and deep shade, dense with trees, ferns and flowering creepers. Under the spreading branches of an old cypress tree, I stumbled against a protruding object and nearly fell. Righting myself, I looked down and saw a moss-encrusted grave so small it could only have belonged to a young child. There was no headstone or inscription. The only decoration was a posy of white roses made out of porcelain. 

A cloud slid across the sun, shrouding everything in a gloomy light. The wind came up, making the tree branches writhe back and forth. The dry rustling of their leaves was like a whispered warning and a chill snaked up my spine. Turning away, I hurried back to the house in time to see Dad and the Dragon Lady exiting the back door.

I stopped at the edge of the lawn to watch them. Her real name was Lady Virginia Courtauld; Dad called her Ginie. She was gesturing and calling to a gardener to show him something. Tall and thin, she wore a long-sleeved blue dress; her face was in shadow under a large hat. 

Beneath the swish of her dress I could make out the famous tattoo. It was this that had earned her the nickname Dragon Lady, though the creature on her ankle was in fact a snake: a savage thing, heavily inked in black, its head rearing up, jaws open, ready to strike. People whispered that it went from her ankle right the way up her thigh and no one but Stephen knew where it ended.

I had a vague impression that she was agitated or anxious, fidgeting and walking up and down; her voice was vivacious, fractured. I was used to observing my own mother’s unhappiness and I saw something there that reminded me of her.

The monkeys in the treetops started up a tremendous disturbance: shrieking and chattering; flinging down gourds from the oyster nut vines that split open as they smacked the ground, scattering seeds over the grass. 

‘What’s bothering them?’ asked the Dragon Lady, shading her eyes with her hand as she looked towards the trees. 

At that instant, a loud noise splintered the air. I only realised it was a gunshot when I saw the Dragon Lady’s body jolt violently and the garden boy screamed. She seemed to bow down and one hand went out as if she was reaching for something. She toppled over with a choked cry and I saw the wound in her side. Her body tensed and convulsed, her limbs sprawled gracelessly, blood spilled onto the ground. 

For a few moments, there was an unearthly stillness. Then things moved quickly: my father was bending over her, his ear by her chest. He stripped his shirt off and pressed it to the wound, tying to staunch the bleeding. Blood poured out regardless, soaking through the fabric: a scarlet rosette blossoming grotesquely on khaki. 

‘We must get her to the hospital – quickly!’

A servant came running with blankets and they lifted her, a limp shape wrapped in soiled blue wool, and hurried her away. Moments later, I heard the cough and rattle of our truck start up and speed off.

I leaned against the rough bark of a tree and watched a pair of bright red and green lizards darting through the grass. High above, a company of hawks circled in a flawless blue sky. With my teeth, I took hold of a ragged piece of skin at the edge of my thumbnail and pulled. It came away in a long strip. A drop of bright blood welled up in the cuticle and ran down my thumb, though I felt no pain. 

I waited for my dad, but he did not come back. The light deepened and spread, staining the trees gold and casting stripes on the grass where it slipped between them. The glow lingered on the treetops, while the shadows of dusk began to creep over their lower branches. A bird called and crickets started up a low, persistent creaking. Two poodles appeared and made their way towards the house, agitated. They paused by the rust-coloured stain the Dragon Lady had left on the grass, sniffed at it and started to lick it. I realised that they were as forgotten as I was.