Writing Your Self is 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. Part One focuses on universal experiences including childhood, identity, adult relationships and loss as well as more specific issues such as displacement and disability, physical and mental illness and abuse. Throughout the book writers, including the authors, give frank, firsthand accounts of their own experiences and how they have tackled writing about them. Part Two begins with a series of techniques for approaching personal material which include practical exercises and examples. It also considers the differences between raw and finished writing and the validity of each and offers ideas for developing work. With its wide range of writers and the exciting possibilities it offers, Writing Your Self is a definitive book for exploring personal literature and life writing.

The opening poems of "Multiplying The Moon" are Myra Schneider's response to her recent experience of terrible illness. In the aftermath of fighting breast cancer, she found herself writing poems that explore transience, death and survival from many different angles. The main theme of "Voicebox", the long fictional narrative in the middle of the book, is communication; the poem follows the connections and disconnections between its main characters. In a short poem sequence, the poet draws on findings from the 1901 census to re-create her father's early life, and the understanding she gains helps her to feel a new closeness with him. This, Schneider's most ambitious collection, is united by the theme of investigation of the self and its relationship with the outside world.

Myra Schneider's new collection brings a fresh sense of reality to some well-known images. Colour is the keynote of the book, moving through Matisse, Hockney, Chagall; sound too, in Mahler and Beethoven. Often we find skin-deep assumptions turned around: the gold of ancient Crete is not its jewellery but olives; a postbox's bright exterior conceals menace; a major twentieth-century artist only started painting by chance at the age of twenty; and the long poem 'Minotaur' makes it clear that the Minotaur is no monster, Theseus no hero. Myra Schneider's tenth full collection is 'worth getting hold of if you like your poetry emotionally vulnerable, richly allusive and superbly poised between past and present.' Poetry London

This title offers a complete resource for life writing - one of the key genres studied within creative writing. "Writing Your Self" is a comprehensive resource for anyone interested in exploring personal material in their writing. It examines how a wide range of successful writers approach personal material and the different modes and techniques they use. The first part of the book focuses on a wide range of universal experiences including childhood, identity, adult relationships and loss as well as more specific issues such as exile and displacement, physical and mental illness and abuse. Throughout the book, a wide range of writers discuss their own experiences and how they have tackled this material in their writing. Part Two offers a series of techniques and a wide range of practical exercises and examples. Part Three discusses the writing process, moving to finished pieces of work in different genres and the question of publication. Bringing together writers with a broad range of valuable experience, this is the definitive resource for exploring life writing and offers an exciting range of possibilities, examples and techniques for approaching personal material.