Reinekke Lengelle, PhD
is a poet, playwright, and facilitator of writing for wellbeing. She is associate professor of Interdisciplinary Studies with the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Master of Arts Interdisciplinary program at Athabasca University in Canada. She is a researcher in the area of narrative career development, writing for personal development, and mourning and trauma. She designs and teaches courses in these areas in both online and face to face environments.
Reinekke has been teaching and developing this type of writing for 27 years and has been a researcher with The Hague University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands since 2008.
She began her career as a playwright, poet, author of non-fiction, and ran a small publishing house called Black Tulip Press. She was symposium co-editor with the British Journal of Guidance and Counselling for 5 years and is part of an international group of scholars in the area of narrative and dialogical career guidance.
She co-created Career Writing with Dutch career researcher and professor Dr. Frans Meijers (1950-2018). Career Writing is a narrative career-identity learning approach which uses creative, expressive and reflective forms of writing to help people gain meaning and direction in life and work.
More recently Reinekke developed grief workshops for the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition run by grief experts Dr. Robert Neimeyer and Carolyn Ng.
Reinekke’s 2021 book Writing the Self in Bereavement published by Routledge was the Winner of the International Qualitative Inquiry book award 2022 and the Best Book “It’s a Way of Life” award for Ethnography 2021. Her writing the self approach is akin to autoethnographic research and writing.
Her book with co-editor Katrin Den Elzen is a new resource in the field Writing for wellbeing: research, theory, and practice and was released in July 2023. Two additional Routledge collections she co-edited came out in 2024: Art that Tells the Truth: Creative Methods in Guidance and Counselling and Living with Loss: From Grief to Wellbeing
“Reinekke is an exceptional facilitator. Her gentle nudging towards authenticity allows for listening to one’s own voice as it appears on the page.
I was grateful she could hear what I didn’t always realize I was saying, hence drawing me in to reflect on my writing in a way I could not possibly hope to do on my own.
Writing the self, the transition from first to second story was not about transforming myself, rather it gave me the courage to, as Nietzsche would suggest, “become who you are.” S.W.
Frans Meijers, PhD
developed Career Writing with Reinekke and they worked closely since 2007. Frans was a well-known expert in career guidance in The Netherlands, a retired professor with The Hague University, and a key developer of career-identity theory and concepts.
Frans was also a popular speaker on guidance in education and began his career as a sociologist and researcher of vocational education. He is the author and editor of a plethora of books and articles on the topic of career learning.
Sadly, Frans died of cancer in November 2018 after a well-lived life. Reinekke carries on their work.
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