Talking it over: the agony and the ecstasy of the creative writing doctorate

This article is co-authored by three writer-academics who have been collaborating as supervisors, doctoral candidates and co-authors over the past decade. Jen Webb supervised Jordan Williams during hear creative PhD in digital poetry and Deleuze (awarded 2006); Jordan and Jen co-supervised Paul Collis`s creative PhD in fiction and Barkindji identity (awarded 2016); and he has long supervised Jen and Jordan in their (informal) education in Indigenous epistemology. Over these years, the supervisor-candidate relationship between three mature-aged writers and scholars, from three very different cultural backgrounds, has inflected our individual approaches to the preparation and writing of creative research, including the exegesis. We begin therefore, with our own understandings of what the word 'exegesis' means to us, how it mobilised (or hindered) the generation of creative knowledge, what models are of value to us, and what we envisage as its possible future/s. We write this in the form of three-way conversation, with scholarly annotations.