Dr. Reinekke Lengelle

Reinekke Lengelle, PhD, is associate professor Interdisciplinary Studies with Athabasca University and has been with the MAIS program since 2003. She designed and teaches MAIS 616: Writing the Self and MAIS 621: Narrative Possibilities, and guides students in their MAIS 700/701 final projects. In 2023 she began as MAIS program director.

Her award-winning book Writing the Self in Bereavement: a story of love, spousal loss, and resilience was published with Routledge in 2021. That year it won the Best Book award for ethnography, the H. L. Bud Goodall, Jr. & Nick Trujillo It’s a Way of Life Award, for “work that exemplifies story-telling excellence informed by scholarship that is written for both scholarly and public audiences.” In 2022 it won the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) Book Award and in 2025 it was translated into Greek and published with PEDIO.  Her experience of her husband’s death was the impetus for the book and her research on grief and loss inspired the revision of the graduate course MAIS 662: Mourning and Trauma.

Reinekke is a researcher with The Hague University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands. Her Dutch book on poetry and healing Jezelf Schrijven [Writing Yourself], was published by Gompel & Svacina in 2018. Her career began as a poet, playwright, and writing teacher.

In the past 30 years, she has worked as a teacher of Writing for Wellbeing and is co-developer of the Career Writing method, which uses creative, expressive, and reflective writing to foster career identity development and professional agency. Her PhD was based on her research into how identity development can be facilitated for career agency.

In 2023 she and her colleague Katrin Den Elzen edited the book Writing for Wellbeing: Theory, Research, and Practice which is published with Routledge and represents a key text in the field of therapeutic writing. A full list of publications can be found on her website: www.writingtheself.ca

Her most recent research is on the vulnerable researcher and becoming a researcher for the inside out. She is co-editing a book called "Good Divorces".

Discover my research

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Research interests

• Writing for Wellbeing (Writing the Self)
• Dialogical Self Theory
• Narrative psychology
• Bereavement, loss, mourning, and trauma
• Being/becoming a vulnerable researcher
• Family systems, divorce, relationships
• Women’s life cycles, mid-life wisdom, psycho-social dimensions of health and how we tell our stories
• Career Writing: narrative identity formation via creative, reflective and expressive writing
  
  

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Educational credentials

• PhD in Narrative Identity Development (Career Writing) - 2015
• MA in Adult Education

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