The Self on the Page: Theory and Practice of Creative Writing in Personal Development

Examining the potential of creative writing as a therapeutic tool, particularly in terms of its influence on the self and personal development, The Self on the Page is divided into two parts. In Part One representative practitioners provide an overview of current work in the field, based on their experience of conducting courses, workshops and research projects with creative writing students, and clients as diverse as people with learning disabilities or dementia and people in hospices, using various genres of creative writing from poetry to autobiography and literary fiction. This section also contains many practical suggestions for writing techniques that can be used for personal development, whether working with writers' groups or with client groups in health care and the social services.

Part Two explores the theoretical background to the therapeutic uses of creative writing, with particular reference to psychoanalysis, philosophy of language, and literary and social theory. Illustrating a wide range of different approaches, the contributors provide an introduction to thinking about creative writing in a personal development context with suggestions for further reading, and look at the potential evolution of therapeutic creative writing in the future.

Academics with an interest in textual practice, language and cultural theory; practitioners and theorists of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis; arts therapists and their educators; arts providers.

Celia Hunt is Lecturer in Continuing Education at the University of Sussex Centre for Continuing Education, with special responsibility for creative writing. She has established the certificate in creative writing and the postgraduate diploma in creative writing and personal development at the Centre. She is also associate fellow at the university's Institute of Education where she teaches the creative writing component of the MA in Creative Writing, the Arts and Education. She is a founder member and chair of LAPIDUS, the Association for the Literary Arts in Personal Development. Her main research interests are in the relationship between fiction writing, autobiography and the self, on which she has published a number of articles. She is co-editor (with Fiona Sampson) of The Self on the Page, also published by Jessica Kingsley.

Fiona Sampson has pioneered the development of writing in healthcare in the UK. Over the last ten years she has worked across the range of health authority care settings with offenders and in social services community care. A prize-winning poet, she is engaged in doctoral research on the theoretical foundations of writing in healthcare. She is a founding member of LAPIDUS.