Writing Your Self: Transforming Personal Material Myra Schneider & John Killick (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010, ISBN 978 1 8470 6252 9, Paperback: £16.99 259pp)
It was back in the 80s, a time when I wrote loads of reviews for a multiplicity of magazines, that I first read a collection of Myra Schneider’s poetry. She has the ability I said in my review to capture and encapsulate – an image, a feeling, a situation – then throw it back at us with full emotive force. And it is not only in her poetry that Schneider achieves this.
Writing Your Self: Transforming Personal Material grew out of Writing for Self Discovery: A Personal Approach to Creative Writing, a book written jointly by Myra Schneider & John Killick in 1998. It had two publishers (Element and Vega) and, although out of print, is available on Amazon.
Writing Your Self, can be loosely categorised as a literary studies/creative writing/self discovery resource/guide book, which has been put together by two very experienced writers who are also, quite noticeably, both poets. They capture and encapsulate – an image, a feeling, a situation – then throw it back at us with full emotive force.
And this is certainly a forceful book, in the sense of its strength and vigour and potency. The authors in their introduction state: “we believe that some of the most powerful literature is derived directly from experience. We have designed this book to be at the same time a resource book for personal use, and a convincing demonstration of the potency of therapeutic writing as a tool for self development.”
The design of the book itself is in two parts. The first covers a wide range of human experiences (e.g. childhood, adult relationships, abuse, illness, identity) with examples of both raw and finished writing from a diverse selection of writers, some well known some less so. The second part deals with techniques, of which there are many examples, followed by a wonderful abundance of really stimulating exercises to work through. It concludes with an enlightening section which discusses the differences between raw and finished work and suggests various approaches.
All of this makes it not only an ideal book for anyone wishing to transform their own personal material into powerful writing, but also a valuable resource for teachers of creative writing and, indeed, for anyone who facilitates writing workshops. The bibliography is excellent and is itself a useful resource, as are the suggestions for further reading.
The ability to produce powerful writing from one’s own personal material, however, is not the only outcome of reading this book – the book itself is an intensely rich, fascinating (sometimes to the point of transfixing) and disturbing read. The many authors who have contributed to Writing Your Self include well known names such as Vickie Feaver, Katharine Gallagher, Grevel Lindop, Pascale Petit, Penelope Shuttle and Matt Simpson. All of the contributors, including of course Schneider and Killick themselves, have written movingly and revealingly about various aspects of their lives and experiences and have shown examples of how and why they have transformed their persona l material into something rich and strange. And I make no apologies to Ariel.
Sadly there is only enough space in this review to quote very sparingly from the book, and part of a poem written by Schneider after an operation for breast cancer seems particularly pertinent: Today there is time/to contemplate the way life/opens, clams, parts, savour/its remembered rosemaries, spreading purples, tight/white edges of hope, to travel/the meanings of repair, tug/words that open parachutes. (‘Today There is Time’)
Writing Your Self is described on its back cover as: “a comprehensive resource for anyone who wants to explore personal material in their writing”. It examines how many writers use personal subject matter in memoirs, poems, journals and novels, making it a definitive book for exploring personal literature and life writing, which it certainly is. So buy it – read it – use it.
….reviewed by Hilary Mellon