"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 ... 

Tom Conaghan (ed.), "Reverse Engineering"

By Tom Conaghan, publisher of Scratch Books

About Reverse Engineering

It’s easy to get obsessive about short stories. Done well they’re near perfect, done badly they’re a little insulting. Maybe, in such a contained space, the stakes are just naturally higher. 

I’ve been the fiction editor at Bandit Fiction for a few years now. I also judge submissions at US magazine The Story, and for The Word Factory’s Apprenticeship Award. In all these organisations, we were declining a great deal more writing than we accepted. All the time, I was reading incredible stories in The New Yorker, Granta, The White Review, Electric Literature and others. What was it that these successful writers doing that so many others weren’t? 

The question prompted me to start a series of interviews at The Word Factory, asking amazing authors how did you write that? Their answers were eye-opening in many ways: Chris Power rewrote his ending to ‘The Crossing’ fifty times; Mahreen Sohail’s first draft she calls draft zero; present-day Jon McGregor would like to teach his younger self that what he thought was ambiguity was just prevarication.

But, above all this, what came through was how various their craft was. Bringing together their principles did not point towards a single perfect story; as I wrote in the introduction to the book (available to read in 3am Magazine), there is no single state of short storydom – it is a perennial Newfoundland. 

As a consequence, I found that talking to brilliant authors didn’t show me how to write a great story, but – like a great short story – it did help me formulate better questions. And, ultimately, the one thing I did understand about the short story is that its endless permutations mean that, for me, it will stay an obsession.

You can see more details about Reverse Engineering on the publisher's website here. You can receive a 15% discount when you buy Reverse Engineering online with the special discount code: Leicester15

Ian Humphreys (ed.), "Why I Write Poetry"

 

About Why I Write Poetry: Essays on Becoming a Poet, Keeping Going and Advice for the Writing Life, ed. Ian Humphreys

What motivates poets in the 21st century? How do they find their voice? What themes and subject matters inspire them? How do they cope with set-backs and deal with success? What keeps them writing? Why I Write Poetry, edited by Ian Humphreys, combines twenty-five lively and thought-provoking essays, along with individual writing prompts to help you create your own new poetry.

The book includes essays by Romalyn Ante, Khairani Barokka, Hafsah Aneela Bashir, Leo Boix, Vahni Capildeo, Mary Jean Chan, Jo Clement, Sarah Corbett, Jane Commane, Rishi Dastidar, Jonathan Edwards, Rosie Garland, W. N. Herbert, Ian Humphreys, Keith Jarrett, Zaffar Kunial, Rachel Mann, Andrew McMillan, Kim Moore, Pascale Petit, Jacqueline Saphra, Clare Shaw, Daniel Sluman, Jean Sprackland, and Jennifer Wong.

Ian Humphreys, photograph by Sarah Turton

About the editor

Ian Humphreys’s debut collection Zebra (Nine Arches Press, 2019) was nominated for the Portico Prize. He is the editor of Why I Write Poetry (Nine Arches Press, 2021) and the producer/ co-editor of a forthcoming anthology on Sylvia Plath (Nine Arches Press, 2022). His work has been highly commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry and won first prize in the Hamish Canham Prize. A fellow of The Complete Works, Ian’s poems are showcased in Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe).

You can read more about Why I Write Poetry on the publisher's website here. Below, the editor Ian Humphreys shares an anecdote about an encounter and advice he received, and his own later instinct to "voice the unsayable." 

From the Introduction to Why I Write Poetry

The late poet John Ash once pleaded with me not to take up poetry. 

It was 1983. He had cornered me in the newly renovated kitchen of a house in Whalley Range. John rented the adjacent room. My friend Tarik rented a room on the second floor. Another friend Mark was pirouetting by the dishwasher when John stormed in to complain about the noise. 

We had been giddily fixing 3am snacks while attempting an off-key rendition of ‘Love Pains’ by Yvonne Elliman, so it was a fair cop. John didn’t stay angry for long. He asked what I was studying, what my plans were, and seemed relieved to hear they did not involve poetry. 

‘Good choice, very sensible. Whatever you do, please don’t become a poet! Stick to something where you can earn a bit of money.’ I remember laughing to myself. At that moment, I honestly could not think of anything I would enjoy less – an occupation that seemed duller – than writing poetry. 

While researching this book, I discovered that around the time we met, John had written a short essay about his collection The Goodbyes (Carcanet, 1982). The piece was republished two decades later in Don’t Ask Me What I Mean: Poets in Their Own Words (Picador). 

One part of the essay, in particular, caught my eye: ‘… many of the poems were written to the accompaniment of the kind of music you might hear at parties or in good nightclubs, that is to say, songs of August Darnell, Ashford and Simpson or the Chic Organisation, and on occasion the words of these songs have found their way into the poems.’ 

If only John had mentioned this during his pep talk. Perhaps I wouldn’t have waited thirty years before starting to write poetry myself. At school, we were taught the Romantics, nothing modern. After sitting my A-levels, I did not pick up a book of poems for two decades. I was unaware that contemporary poetry celebrated popular culture, that a ‘serious’ lyric poet could be inspired by August Darnell aka ‘Kid Creole’ of Kid Creole and the Coconuts. 

John and I hardly spoke again. Once, over burning toast, he recommended Prince’s overlooked early albums. A year or so later, I heard he had moved to New York where he became associated with the New York School of poets. 

Several poems in my debut collection Zebra (Nine Arches Press, 2019) explore my coming of age in 1980s Manchester. The gay club I had frequented the night John advised against poetry as a vocation is a touchstone in the book. I began to write about those early days on and around Canal Street, I think, to try and work out something about my formative years. For sure, there was joy, exhilaration and freedom. But there was also fear; a background dread that we accepted back then as part of life’s rhythm, as relentless as the four-on-the-floor beat of those Hi-NRG hits we lived for. It was fear of the unknown. Fear of illness. Fear of society’s disapproval which at any moment could mutate into danger.

Such contradictory emotions can be difficult to articulate, as slippery as a lager-soaked dancefloor. What I longed to communicate was feeling not fact, and this seemed best conveyed through the shimmering medium of poetry. 

The need to voice the unsayable – reach for the ungraspable – is one of the main reasons I write poetry. It’s a motive I share with many of my peers. When I turned to social media to ask why poets do what they do, many replied with answers along the lines of: 

To make sense of life. 
To make sense of the world. 
To connect with my inner world. 
To say things I could not otherwise express.

Another response that came up, again and again, was compulsion: 

I write poetry because I must. 
It is a thing I do, like breathing. 
I wrote poetry before I could write. 
I can’t help myself. 

Over one hundred poets responded, with variations on these two themes accounting for around ninety percent of all answers put forward. This posed a question: how could we prevent our contributors from writing multiple versions of the same essay? 

The answer? Jane [Commane] and I identified what we most admired in the work of the selected poets. We then asked each of them to explore a theme reflecting this idiosyncratic quality as they riffed on their craft. 

As you will discover, the tactic worked wonders. The resulting twenty-five essays are fascinating and varied. There’s little repetition, and thankfully even less navel-gazing. 

Each piece is unique in its approach to the trials, tribulations and pleasures of writing poetry. The mix of styles is satisfyingly rich, from the informal to the academic, the lyric to the dreamlike. Together, the compositions stand as testament to the robust state of poetry in 21st century Britain. 

Had I not started writing eight years ago, I would have missed out on so much, including the chance to curate and edit this book. As such, I am delighted I listened to instinct rather than advice, and eventually shimmied my way towards a calling, of sorts, in poetry. 

Writing the Poem: "Roaming Range"

By Sue Dymoke

The poem ‘Roaming Range’ appears in my 2018 Shoestring Press collection What They Left Behind. During an event at Attenborough Nature Reserve last November called ‘(Re)connecting with nature through the power of wild words’ (Being Human Festival 2017), I had a conversation with Adam Cormack from The Wildlife Trusts. Adam happened to mention how children’s opportunities to engage with nature at first hand have become so much more restricted in the 21st century. What he called their ‘roaming range’ has been severely curtailed, for many reasons including concerns about safety, restricted access to outdoor/wild spaces near to home, poverty, school pressures, limited unstructured free time or different ways of spending free hours. His comments took me back to my childhood, a place and a time with no house phone or car when we (me and my friends or brother) would think nothing of disappearing on our bikes for hours at a time, going out into the scraggy Hertfordshire lanes, woods and fields around and beyond Stevenage Old Town. The poem began to write itself in my head on the way home.

Attenborough Nature Reserve

Roaming range

You roamed wherever your bikes took you 
where blackberries grew big and juicy
on railway cuttings, river banks, sunny field edges …

I chose to use the second person in the poem because I thought my memories echoed those of many other children born in the sixties and seventies. I hoped to include everyone in the poem, rather than name specific places or people which might limit the piece to particular situations. 

The poem wanted to come out all in one long nearly breathless rush of a sentence. Instinctively, I knew that this was the right form. Although the places, sightings and events within it did not all happen at once (and some frequently reoccurred) together they made a compressed, speeded-up snapshot of a childhood roaming free, getting snagged and stung, hearing and watching nature all round us:    

where a nettle’s sting was only
partly eased by spit-rub of dock leaf
where tadpoles jellied in deep ponds
and bluebells chimed silent songs
under greening beeches
where hair snared in thickets
goose grass stuck to jumpers

I have been reading this poem at launch events recently, along with what I now see is a companion poem: ‘Girls on Swings.’ For me, both of these pieces are about freedoms we should revel in, seize, but never ever take for granted.  

If you would like to read the whole 'Roaming Range' poem go to suedymokepoetry.com.

Interviews with Writers

MA Creative Writing students Lee Wright and Sandra Pollock have recently been interviewing well-known writers about their work. The interviews, which have been published on Everybody's Reviewing, afford fascinating insights into writers' processes, inspirations, research and experiences. The interviews are part of Everybody's Reviewing ongoing series, and represent an excellent resource for students, writers and readers alike. Below are links to some of them:

Interview with Alison Moore
Interview with Rob Palk
Interview with Hannah Vincent
Interview with Kerry Hadley-Pryce
Interview with Matthew Broughton
Interview with Tony Williams
Interview with Hannah Stevens
Interview with Ray Connolly
Interview with Rod Duncan
Interview with Jonathan Bate
Interview with Siobhan Logan
Interview with Lyndon Mallet

There are other, earlier interviews with writers and artists on the site as well. These include:

Interview with Kim Slater
Interview with Helene Cardona
Interview with Melissa Studdard 
Interview with Natalie Beech
Interview with Jess Green
Interview with Shaindel Beers
Interview with Kershia Field
Interview with Dan Wallbank
Interview with Alex Bliss
Interview with Jonathan Taylor
Interview with Darius Degher
Interview with Robert Richardson
Interview with Karen Stevens