Braiding the exegetical voice through creative nonfiction research

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Finding or developing an exegetical voice may be confronting for the nascent writer-as-researcher: they must transition from undergraduate disciplinary skills and knowledge acquisition to postgraduate research, and grapple with creative/critical research thesis requirements. Applying the authors’ experiences supervising creative writing research candidates through Honours and Masters research projects, and in teaching the unit Manifestos at Deakin University, this paper will explore ways of traversing the perceived gap between creative and critical writing to help develop a creative/critical voice appropriate to the exegesis. To do so, this paper focuses on the experiential or personal essay form of creative nonfiction to initially identify the writer’s personal voice through a process of interweaving threads of the autobiographical, data or the factual, and the universal (Huxley, 1959). A writer’s manifesto, composed as part of a research program, then enables emerging writer-as-researchers to consolidate that voice as a bridge to writing their exegesis. Bringing together these aspects of writerly voice may lead to a complex exegetical pattern as a response to the tensions between the creative and critical in research: something like the braid this paper attempts to emulate in its structure. This paper argues that the exegesis is an experiment in voice balancing fragmentation and cohesion with a manifesto-style belief in the writing process, and creative responses to theory as rigorous approaches to research.