Today is a good day

Making progress with the PhD

Today is a good day. I finally found out that my Confirmation of Studies for my PhD has been approved. I submitted it in February and it’s been stuck in the University admin system until last week. But my proposed research has now been given the green light and I’ve successfully negotiated the first hurdle.

Although my supervisors weren’t expecting any problems with the CoS I’ve still been anxious until I knew it was approved and felt a bit tentative in going ahead with my research. But now I feel ready to really engage with my project and am trying not to leap ahead to the next, bigger, hurdle, which will be the Transfer Panel in the autumn.

I have looked on the Confirmation of Studies as a hurdle but really it provided a focus to help me refine my research ideas and work out what I really want to do. It’s amazing, looking back to when I started this journey, in October last year (the time has gone soooo quickly) how my ideas have developed and how much I have learned. When I signed up to do a PhD in Creative Writing, I didn’t really understand what that would entail. I thought I would write a novel, set in the Isle of Axholme, and alongside it I would do some research involving climate change and place based novels. I didn’t grasp how the writing is itself the method of research – how through my creative practice I can explore different ways of approaching the climate crisis and connection with the land.

I have learned so much so far – about the difference between methods and methodology, about psychogeography and autoethnography. About methods I have used for years but didn’t recognise as methods – for example inhabiting or ‘becoming’ my fictional characters and going for walks as them. Recently I tried walking as two different characters on succeeding days and was struck by the difference. One character walked lightly on the earth, she was open and curious, her edges porous to the world. My second character walked more heavily, she knew where she was going, her edges were firmly drawn. Previously I would only have tried to inhabit their thoughts, this more embodied practice brings another level to my characterisation.

I still have days, plenty of days, when I don’t feel as if I know what I’m doing at all and that my writing will never be good enough for a PhD. On those days I try to tell myself that I’m having fun, I have time to read and to write and that I’m learning something new every day. If the journey had to end tomorrow it would have been worth it. And now I’ve passed my CoS I’m hopefully on this path at least until the autumn. So today really is a good day. I hope yours is too.