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Blueprints: constructing the creative writing PhD
Abstract
This article uses architectural analogies to explore the complexities of planning and executing a practice-led PhD project in contemporary Australian writing. Many scholars and creative practitioners have conceived of the writing process as a form of building, scaffolding or construction. A PhD always involves some aspect of planning – but to what extent can the creative practice be planned for? What happens when the project outpaces the planning, or when a writer finds herself in unscaffolded space? This article examines practice-led research methodologies drawn from the experiences and insights of three creative practitioners who are also current and recently completed PhD candidates. Their perspectives reveal the multiplicity of approaches available in creative practice research and points to the opportunities to explore the complexities between structure, space and practice in discussions of the creative writing PhD.
... As we explored our research question, we found many commonalities between a PhD with publication and that of creative works, though subtle differences also became apparent. For instance, PhD students engaging in creative projects encounter unique challenges due to the wide variety of artistic mediums they can choose from, requiring them to be innovative and adaptable (Jeffery et al., 2020). Additionally, unlike their peers in PhD with publication programs, students in creative disciplines often need to establish connections beyond academia to secure funding for their work (Morgan, 2001). ...
This article presents a cooperative inquiry into the lived experience of pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree with publications or creative works. Drawing on the insights of five online PhD students and their two supervisors in an Australian online program, the research objective is to present perspectives contemporaneous with the online doctoral journey and address the research question: What are the strengths and challenges in undertaking a PhD with publication or creative works, and how do these differ according to personal backgrounds and academic disciplines? The research uncovers: first, the importance of passion, motivation, emotional aspects, and connections supporting these types of doctoral journeys; second, that navigating the formidable pressures and celebrating the rewards of publishing and creating is part of the process; and third, the integral partnership between supervisors and students in an online environment is essential in creating outputs. These themes were typical for the five student co-inquirers, but how they manifested differed relative to each individual’s personal and professional backgrounds. This research expands current conversations about the emotional, psychological, and structural dimensions, adding nuance to the existing literature. It provides others considering enrolling, currently studying or who are new to supervising these types of online PhDs with valuable insights that can benefit the future cohort of PhD candidates, particularly as universities address recent trends of declining enrolments in doctoral programs.
This article explores how artist-researchers navigate the “uncertain” space between theory and practice in a new Doctor of Creative Arts (DCA) program in an Australian regional university. The trickster is deployed as a metaphorical device to provide insights into how the first DCA’s candidates, their supervisors, and the university’s leadership make sense of their own experiences within and about the practice-led research program under a neoliberal climate. Tricksters’ cross boundaries between critical and imaginary spaces; yet they also create boundaries, by extending collective knowledge into the unknown. This process is entirely consistent with the critical and creative work required by doctoral candidates to produce innovative research. Narrative inquiry is applied in accordance with the artist-trickster’s subjective agency within practice-led doctoral study. The article charts the DCA’s emerging identity as a doctoral qualification equal to the traditional PhD but different from it, during its implementation in 2016 to the first successful completion in 2019. The findings reveal the benefits of the program’s innovative design, grounded in the creation of its distinctive community of practice that supports practice-led research, local and international connections, and regional resilience.
Recent experience of practice-led postgraduate supervision has prompted me to conclude
that the practice-led research method, as it is currently construed, produces good
outcomes, especially in permitting practitioners in the creative arts, design and media into
the research framework, but at the same time it also generates certain recurring
difficulties. What are these difficulties? Practice-led candidates tend to rely on a narrow
range of formulations with the result that they assume: (i) the innovative nature of
practice-led research; (ii) that its novelty is based in opposition to other research methods;
1. (iii) that practice is intrinsically research, often leading to tautological formulations; and 2. (iv) the hyper-self-reflexive nature of practice-led research. This paper proposes a set of
guidelines composed in order to circumvent the shortcomings that result from these
recurring formulations. My belief is that, if these shortcomings are avoided, there is
nothing to prevent practice-led from further developing as a research inquiry and thus
achieving rewarding and successful research outcomes. Originally composed for the
purposes of postgraduate supervision, these six rules are presented here in the context of a
wider analysis of the emergence of practice-led research and its current conditions of
possibility as a research method.
The doctorate in Creative Writing in Australian universities legitimates itself in the academic context with an exegetical component that seeks to translate creative endeavours into acceptable research-speak in order to be measured, funded and sanctioned. However in many of my doctoral students’ work, the exegesis has become fictively playful to such an extent that it is almost indistinguishable from the creative artefact it seeks to legitimate. Conversely, in other works, the creative artefact performs an exegetical function. Using epigraphs from interviews with JM Coetzee as prompts, this paper explores various student works in which the boundaries between artefact and exegesis have become blurred.
This article considers how creative writers use research to experiment with and expand the written form. Focussing on modes of storytelling for fiction and non-fiction, four current research degree candidates and a supervisor-mentor from RMIT University present snapshots of research works in progress, to reveal how they are negotiating the sticky yet rich relationship between theory and practice. Specifically, they offer innovative ways of expanding the written form to combine creative and critical modes of thought, resulting in distinctive contributions to knowledge and practice that are relevant to their genres, forms and subject matters. The candidates, who are working across the lyric essay, screenwriting, performance writing and radio, are also members of a peer-to-peer group facilitated by the supervisor-mentor, which over a four-year period has supported research training in creative writing and assisted in the formation of new research identities. This collaborative support structure has helped candidates to transform from creative writers to creative writing researchers, encouraging playfulness and experimentation yet underpinned by the needs of academic rigour. This article thus offers a collective, reflective approach to finding innovation in/through creative writing research – methodologically speaking.
Academic writing, especially the writing of research articles, dissertations and theses, is often viewed in the literature as 'writing up'. It is as if first comes the research, an active creation of new knowledge, and then comes the writing, a relatively passive assembling of what has already been achieved. It is as if researching and writing were two entirely separate processes. Alternatively we may choose to conceive of academic writing as a set process which overlaps considerably with researching itself and, indeed, which may contribute dynamically to knowledge making. This article outlines some of the ways in which we may re-conceptualize academic writing as a more dynamic set of activities and practices. This includes a consideration of, for example, academic writing as constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing knowledge, connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting concepts, describing and re-describing our views of the world, as well as shaping, mis-shaping and reshaping ideas.
This book explores the author's contemporary poetics and pedagogy as it emerges from his reflections on his own writing and teaching, and on the work of other poets, particularly contemporary writers with whom he feels some affinity. At its heart is the author's attempt to elaborate his vision of a species of pastoral that is adequate to a globalised world (the author himself writes and teaches in the United States, the UK and his native Australia), and an environmentally and politically just poetry. The book has an autobiographical element, as the author explores the pulse of his poetic imagination through significant moments and passages of his life.
In the early 90s a visiting scholar at Curtin University applied through the School of Communication and Cultural Studies to enroll as a doctoral student whose project would be a novel plus exegesis. That application was denied, as University regulations for research degrees couldn’t accommodate alternate forms of theses. This “failure,” however, motivated a double success. First, the University established two Humanities research degrees that accommodated alternate forms of research theses - a Master of Creative Arts (1997) and a Doctor of Creative Arts (1998). Second, the University later revised its regulations in ways that enabled a wide range of exegesis-plus-production forms of theses across the University.
Key to the success of such programs is an understanding of the relationship of the exegesis and creative/production components of a thesis. It is a relationship far from obvious - witness the Master of Creative Arts student who, learning that she had to do an
exit jesus , feared she would be crucified. Drawing on the history of establishing alternate forms of research theses at Curtin University, and on lessons provided by successful MCA and DCA theses creative writing, visual arts, journalism, etc.), this paper explores the relationship of the exegesis and creative/production components of a research thesis. It argues that the two best can be seen as complementary articulations (outcomes) of a single research question (and related set of research objectives). It also canvasses the importance and difficulties of students understanding this relationship, as well as some best-practice models for assisting them.
As both a completed (MA) and still pending (PhD) higher degree candidate as well as a supervisor of higher degrees, I note that even the most basic of decisions - such as where to start - can cause considerable anxiety for both student and supervisor.
Some Australian university course descriptions stress that the exegesis is “related to”, “linked to” or “integrated with” the creative work, while others propose a more “reflective” role. Still others nominate that the exegesis will “describe”, “elaborate”, “elucidate”, “examine” and/or “contextualise” the creative work, all of which suggest varying temporal relations between the two usual parts of the creative writing research degree.
A preliminary survey of a number of higher degree students and higher degree coordinators can help to tease out this temporal relationship and, hopefully, cast light on some of the perceived purposes, expectations and challenges of the research higher degree in the creative arts.
Multitasking supervisor-trainers who oversee the hybrid creative writing thesis have
to be as informed and proactive as those guiding the careers of elite athletes. They
function as manager, coach and trainer all in one. These roles are complicated by the
multiplicity of theoretical and structural pathways available to shape the hybrid
thesis. Since each new project poses new challenges, how candidates and supervisors
respond has moved the discipline of creative writing forward, helping to define what
kind of knowledge it can produce as well as what skills it can foster. There cannot be,
therefore, one supervisory model. The dialectical process of supervisors interrogating
their performance replicates, to some extent, how candidates undertake practice-led
research, which involves posing questions and modifying strategies as a thesis
progresses. Nevertheless, the successful collaborative hard science supervisory model
can be adapted to creative writing doctoral supervision to improve performance on
micro and macro levels. These ‘hands on’ supervisors not only work effectively with
students individually. They also set up external structures such as creative
mentorships and, most importantly, exploit the power of the group. Scheduling
practice-led research seminars that unpack the methods of creative writing research
can be particularly useful. They demonstrate this type of research in action and allow
refinement of research questions. Supervisors can also manage regular creative
writing postgraduate support groups. Members do more than simply workshop;
supervisors and students provide collegial modelling, professional development
opportunities and publishing guidance. In sum, they foster a team mentality that does
not stifle creativity but encourages the completion of creative and critical work. By
functioning on micro and macro levels, therefore, supervisors guide candidates
through the research maze so that each thesis can embody an individual vision.
This article examines the history of the creative writing doctorate in Australia and traces how its form became more radical over the last 25 years. The work of Edward Cowie, who established the first creative writing doctorate, is placed in context of developments which followed his pioneering degrees. Considering ERA, a case is made for the further radicalisation of the creative writing PhD to meet requirements for new research standards.
The three contributors to this article believe that a symbiotic relationship between
creative and critical aspects of a project function most effectively. Research for the
exegesis – whether conventional or experimental – can enhance the creative work’s
possibilities, raising more pertinent research questions or refining those already
identified. In addition, the thesis as a coherent entity has the potential of making an
original contribution to knowledge through the connection of the exegesis and creative
work. The case study dissertations demonstrate this point of view, occupying two
positions on Krauth’s ‘radical trajectory continuum’ (2011). The first graduate, a
filmmaker and academic, chose a conventional exegesis-novel split, as the subject itself,
reverse adaptation of a film script to literary young adult novel, is an emerging research
discipline. The second candidate chose a braided essay format (Krauth’s ‘plaited’
structure) that reflects the research she undertook into theory of the Uncanny and the
consequent destabilisation and fragmentation it encourages. The supervisor as fellow
traveller of these doctoral journeys drew on her experience in order to help them to select
the most effective thesis structure and to realise the potential of symbiosis. They
discovered that in each case the resultant symbiosis did not silence their individual voices
but enhanced their individuality.
The focus of this article is an examination of the experiences of established writers who have recently completed, or are currently undertaking, a creative writing doctorate, against a background of change within the publishing industry. Is it primarily financial/career or creative control concerns that are influencing established writers to undertake creative doctorates in recent times? And how do these writers fare within the degree program? To explore these issues through individual stories, interviews were conducted, by email and phone, with six established professional writers who had recently completed, or were still undertaking, a creative doctorate as well as with four established creative writing academics, most of whom are authors themselves. Questions of motivation and experience, as well as outcome, are canvassed in this piece of original research, which provides an interesting snapshot of the current situation for established writers in Australia undertaking creative writing doctorates.
Creative writing doctoral students and the faculty members responsible for thesis supervision (whether we call them supervisors, mentors or supervisory panels) develop a complex relationship over the course of candidature that revolves around multiple types of text. The form that these texts take and the stage at which they are produced determine the nature of supervisory feedback, illuminating the intertwined processes leading to a finished product—the creative thesis. Some critics have postulated that creative writing postgraduate courses have taken over much of the manuscript editing that used to be done by publishing houses. Useful parallels can be drawn between the materials presented by candidates and the plethora of texts that form the basis of genetic criticism, which focuses on the stages of a manuscript’s life. Genetic criticism also engages with the principles of program and process writing as they pertain to the way in which manuscripts are constructed; they shed light on creative thesis production. Demarcating the postgraduate journey by identifying textual stages will assist supervisors and candidates in conceptualising their long-term projects as academic and artistic work, both of which can be generated through a range of processes. The ultimate goals are graduation and publication or performance.
Professional authors of imaginative literature, whether fiction or non-fiction, follow creative processes that have been built from a mix of experience and instinct. These are specific and individual to each author, but have been established by them over time, and frequently in an informal, non-analytical, but nevertheless successful way. What happens when a professional author, used to such a process, undertakes the writing of a creative work within the framework of a PhD? What influences come to bear on the creative work from the analytical, academic part of the PhD project? Does creative process change? If so, how? And what impact might it be expected to have on the final work, and the author’s continuing creative practice, even beyond the period of study? Drawing on interviews with writers who are undertaking or have recently completed a creative writing PhD, and with creative writing academics, the author of this paper, an established novelist and PhD student, examines the synergies between imagination and analysis within a higher degree research project, and how this affects the creative process itself.
In an arts-based inquiry, an exegesis is that dissertation or thesis that accompanies a creative production (artefact) that may be a novel, a memoir, a computer game, poetry, sculpting, paintings … The examinable outcome for the scholarly artist comprises both the creative work and the thesis. To substantiate the production of knowledge and find recognition as a scholar, the artist must document. As a method of inquiry an exegesis is core documentation. It is the written component that speaks to the production of knowledge. It is the record that makes visible the scholarly artist’s knowing. This paper examines the impulse to write, looks at the memoir and, with self-examples, reveals the exegesis as a type of memoir that gives insight to creative production. In it the researcher describes the process of creating, articulates and searches answers to a research question refined across stages of the study. The exegesis is both a product and a process that involves inward reflection and discernment. As the researcher shapes, substantiates, makes connections between creating art and showing research gains, the emergent exegesis is also a decisive memoir that an examiner must use to determine the logic or illogic of new knowledge through creative art.
Dodd explores the challenge facing students transitioning from the role of creative practitioner to practice-led researcher of creative practice. This chapter sets out to resolve the dichotomy between the creative writing style, based on the premise of ‘Show, don’t tell’, and the conflicting academic writing style, where the main purpose is to ‘tell’. Through a case study of strategic risk taking in the journey as creative practitioner/researcher, Dodd maneuvers between the two methods to cultivate creative engagement between the two components of the thesis. The aim of this approach is to offer a methodology which will produce synergized research outcomes for practice-led researchers that satisfy the accepted conventions of scholarship and the creative practitioner’s desire to produce enhanced work not mitigated by the exegetical component.
It seems to me that the PhD in visual arts is inescapable: it is on the horizon. What is needed is an investigation into the conceptual shapes that the new degrees might take. The United States is well positioned to do this, and to become the place where such programs are rethought from the ground up. At least there’s a chance of doing this in the United States, because it does not have the administrative structures (such as the RAE) and jargon (the call for a new definition of “research”) that shape doctoral programs in the United Kingdom.
Practice-led research in art and design has now come of age and can take its place alongside other forms of research at the academic ‘high table’. It no longer needs to be treated with ‘special consideration’ as a new form of intellectual enquiry. The research craft developed by those involved in practice-led research admits them to a broader community of practice engaged in questioning the conceptual basis of how we perceive and make sense of the world around us. The objective/subjective divide that preoccupied an earlier generation of academics has eventually been replaced by a more nuanced epistemological framework able to embrace PhDs that include non-textual artefacts as part of their exposition. An increasing number of academic institutions around the world have taken up the debate and now participate in practice-led research programmes. However, for early-career researchers in these fields there are still many hurdles to overcome, some of which are unique to this form of endeavour, as we outline. This article has been developed from a series of seminars and workshops presented by the authors to early-career practice-led researchers as part of their Project Dialogue programme which seeks greater engagement between the arts and sciences.
Supervising PhD candidates is a story in itself. Like a novel or screenplay, there are protagonists and antagonists, emotional transformations, dramatic twists and turns, and nearly always rising tension – especially in the domain of creative practice, where methodologies and research artefacts are still debated and contested. Voiceover narration comes into play, too, from both the candidate (‘Does my supervisor know what I'm trying to do?’) and the supervisor (‘Does my candidate really think this is research?’). And hopefully there is always a happy ending – or at least happy subject to minor revisions. There is a growing body of literature about PhD supervision. Here we seek to expand on this work by drawing specific attention to the supervision of the Creative Writing PhD in the contemporary academy in the Australian and British contexts, and in a form that befits this vibrant research discipline. In this paper, then, we make connections between theory and practice by presenting a series of fictionalised vignettes drawn from our collective experiences of supervising candidates. By being playful ourselves, we offer a creative-critical exploration of the creative practice research space that illuminates some of the challenges and opportunities for supervising in the discipline.
In this article, I discuss my evolution as an arts-based researcher and address the significance of my identities as artist/therapist/educator.
I describe how I integrate multiple arts-based methods—visual field notes, bead/found object collage, poetry, and creative
writing—into my research practice. I invite others to explore these, or similar, approaches drawn from their own experiences
to engage in qualitative arts-based inquiry as bricolage. It is my intention that music therapists can engage with this material since, as creative arts therapists, many of us share
the belief that the act of creation lies at the heart of health and discovery of new knowledge. In this article, I am offering
the reader a glimpse into my “self” as an artist, therapist, educator, and person. I hope that the reader recognizes him-
or herself within this process.
Purpose
– Deleuze and Guattari have argued that in art, including literature, the senses get hold of the world in a non‐conceptual or “sensational” way, adding “new varieties” that can lead to new ways of knowing and seeing. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of multi‐disciplinary, practice‐led research in creative writing as a form of knowledge making in qualitative research.
Design/methodology/approach
– The author uses her own writing, especially the novel Swimming (Vanark Press, 2009), which is situated in the broader context of feminist fiction writing, as a subversive feminist project that aims to intervene in and challenge the dominant narratives of what it means to be a woman, by creating “alternative figurations” of “woman” which highlight differences among women and enhance our understanding of “woman” as a complex and multiple subject always “in process”.
Findings
– By using her own practice of fiction writing and research as a case study, the author explores the ways that constructing an imagined narrative – in this case a novel – can make a contribution to knowledge and raise questions about representation, truth and subjectivity.
Originality/value
– In this paper, through a few examples from her novel, the author's aim has been to write a narrative of the process, of “material thinking” that led to the final work.
Throughout English poetry one finds examples of poems that are metaphorized as architectural structures, as houses or churches built of solid enough materials to reliably contain ephemeral spirits and ideas. From Chaucer to Heaney, the writing of a poetic line has been linked with the construction of a sure foundation, the use of a carpenter's level, the solidity of physical enclosure. As a one-time architect's assistant, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was extraordinarily well positioned to make an informed entrance into this genre of architectural poems, and indeed, he embraced architectural theory as an aspect of his poetics. Famously, in The Life of Thomas Hardy, Florence Hardy—or Hardy himself—describes his poetry in terms of gothic building principles:
He had fortified himself in his opinion by thinking of the analogy of architecture, between which art and that of poetry he had discovered, to use his own words, that there existed a close and curious parallel, each art, unlike some others, having to carry a rational content inside its artistic form. . . . [H]e carried on into his verse, perhaps unconsciously, the Gothic art-principle in which he had been trained.
In his poetry, Hardy works to link the two art forms in many ways, from publishing (in Wessex Poems) elaborate sketches of buildings alongside his words to writing poems about architects and architecture.
However, in his Poems of 1912-1913, the elegiac sequence he wrote after the death of his first wife Emma, Hardy resists the impulse to place his poetry within an architectural frame, not only in subject (nearly all of the poems take place out of doors, and those that do not express a certain yearning for escape to unbounded places), but also, as I will argue, in the formal components of the sequence's poetics. In comparing these poems to Hardy's architectural drawings—particularly his sketches of St. Juliot, the church in whose shadow he first met Emma—it becomes clear that, as he goes about elegizing his estranged wife, he takes certain poetic steps to reverse the process of architectural construction. Instead, he builds a kind of poetics that take place outside, whose visual components break open, and whose careful symmetries crumble: they are poems that evoke elaborate ruins more than they evoke grand gothic monuments. Astonished by rekindled desire for a woman he once loved and from whom he had grown distant, the poet attempts to recapture the Emma of his youth, a woman who sought the freedom of nature and who had not been changed by the confinement of a long, unhappy marriage. If, at first, his poems concentrate on the ghost of the later Emma, who is the ghost of closed quarters and habitation, his poems begin to reach out more toward the earlier Emma, a ghost who haunts water, air, and cliffs. In so doing, his poems move away from confined spaces such as houses, rooms, and even graves, rejecting the idea of the elegy as providing a house for the dead. Instead, Poems of 1912-1913 represents a dismantling of poetic structure in order to revive a ghost who insists on the freedom of windy spaces in which she, as much as her elegist, can define the proportions of her existence.
Hardy's elegiac move out of doors is remarkable when one considers the history of the elegy. In this monumentalizing genre, the desire to preserve a passing spirit within a physical, understandable space has often found urgency. In The Life of the Poet, Lawrence Lipking describes the tombeau tradition, in which poets seek to provide poetic tombs for great writers of the past in order to rectify the obscurity of unrecognized graves: "the tomb of the poet is built by other poets; their verses take him in." Not only elegies for great poets, however, seek to conflate the poem itself to a physical space in which passing spirits might reside; the desire to build a poetic tomb or house for the dead appears in elegies for all classes of subject, and the space created by the poem is often more physically defined than it is in many of Lipking's tombeaux. These poems are particular kinds of...
In this incisive book, Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.
The role of the supervisor as editor of the research candidate’s work-in-progress is contentious. Apart from the fact that editing of exegeses and creative products requires different skills, more general questions persist, such as: How much editing should a supervisor do? To what depth of editing should she go? When does the edited thesis stop being the candidate’s work and becomes a collaboration?
The current context has raised new issues: there is pressure on research students to publish before completion of candidature. What is the supervisor’s role as editor now? Today supervisors are asked to replicate the role of commercial editors; what are the academic implications of this?
The commercial and the academic are coming together as publishing houses nuance their editing services and university creative writing schools take on more candidates. How might supervisors orient themselves to the new economic understandings and arrangements?
As the New/Gets Newer: Rethinking the Possibilities of a New Australian Lyric
- Claire Nashar
Academic Writing as Shaping and Re-Shaping.” Teaching in Higher Education
- Graham Badley
- Krauth Nigel
- Krauth Nigel