Creative Matters

Rather Than Crap Decisions: Confessions of a Confessional Writer

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.15.43540

Keywords:

creative non-fiction

Abstract

In this personal reflective essay, I try to explore some of the most pertaining facets of my writing career over more than two decades to date.  Including and interweaving extracts of prose fiction and of verse, I examine the trajectory of my writerly motives across all the different genres of my writing career, whether in academic writing, literary journalism, poetry or prose fiction.  The common denominator and the common sense that undergirds, I realize in retrospect, all my writerly endeavors is a riveted relationship to the English language itself.  Part of my argument in this autobiographical reflective article is thus that by way of my vocation as a writer what feels like my truest ‘autobiography’ emerges from my writerly choices of configuration.  A writerly life is limned in brief here as a life embedded in the necessary and inescapable choices a writer makes as part of a lifelong quest evinced by his evolving poetics.

Author Biography

Omar Sabbagh, Lebanese American University

Omar Sabbagh is a very widely published British-Lebanese poet, writer and critic. Over the last two decades, his poetry has appeared in many prestigious venues, such as: Poetry Review, PN Review, Agenda, Acumen, New Humanist, (T&F) New Writing, The Reader Magazine, Stand, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Banipal, The Warwick Review, The Wolf Magazine, Poetry Wales, Philosophy Now, among many others.  Two of his latest books are, a collection of his published short fictions, Y Knots, published with Liquorice Fish Books in autumn of 2023, and Night Settles Upon the City, a poetry collection out of war-torn, near-contemporary Beirut, published with Daraja Press in Nov. 2024.  He has published (or has forthcoming) scholarly essays on George Eliot, G.K. Chesterton, Ford Madox Ford, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Lytton Strachey, T.S. Eliot, Hilaire Belloc, George Steiner, Stefan Collini and Vladimir Nabokov, among others.  He holds a BA in PPE from Oxford, three MA’s, in English Literature, Creative and Life Writing, and Philosophy, all from the University of London, and a PhD in English Literature from KCL.  From 2011-2013 he was Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the American University of Beirut (AUB); and he taught at the American University in Dubai (AUD), where he was Associate Professor of English from 2014-2024.  From Fall 2024 he began a new teaching role in English Literature and Creative Writing at the Lebanese American University (LAU).

Published

2026-06-18

Issue

Vol. 15 (2026): EJLW

Section

Creative Matters

Copyright (c) 2026 Omar Sabbagh

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