Writing: Self and Reflexivity

This guide is ideal for students of creative writing who wish to explore the writing process and its relationship to self in order to develop as writers. Each chapter links a range of theoretical approaches to one practical aspect of writing, using illustrations from fiction, poetry and literary non-fiction, and suggesting practical exercises for pursuing the topic further. The book will enable students to develop literary, critical and psychodynamic understandings of the creative process and to explore a range of key topics.

Celia Hunt is Lecturer in Continuing Education at the University of Sussex Centre for Continuing Education, with special responsibility for creative writing courses. She has taught creative writing for more than ten years and is the author of Therapeutic Dimensions of Autobiography in Creative Writing (Jessica Kingsley, London, 2000) and editor (with Fiona Sampson) of The Self on the Page: Theory and Practice of Creative Writing in Personal Development (Jessica Kingsley, London, 1998). She was a founder member and first chair of Lapidus: the Association for the Literary Arts in Personal Development. Fiona Sampson is AHRB Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at Oxford Brookes University and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sussex. She is the author of two collections of poetry as well as plays, public art commissions and numerous chapters and articles; and has just completed a novel, The Night Map. She has been teaching creative writing for twelve years across the range of educational settings and has also been a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing in Portugal, Romania and Finland. Her books on writing process include: Building a Wall with Words: Towards a theoretical framework for writing in health care (University of Nijmegen Press, Nijmegen, 2002) and The Healing Word: A practical guide to poetry and personal development (Poetry Society, London, 1999).