Insider research: Representing peripheral voices and multiple identities when writing about personal trauma

As an ‘insider’ researcher writing about personal trauma, I sought to reconcile my multiple identities in my doctoral thesis: scholar/researcher, creative writing practitioner, and trauma survivor evolving from the process of writing about trauma. Concerns arose about how I could insert these peripheral voices and multiple identities into my creative thesis, while paying attention to the tenets of scholarly rigour and my desire for creativity. This article presents a case study of the design of my thesis, where my research endeavour was to ‘re-story’ my self-narrative through ficto-memoir: a creative writing process whereby my personal experiences were fictionalised, but carried the same emotional affect and benefits as writing about real experiences. This article contends that creativity could still be achieved in a conventional academic thesis structure with a slightly modified format that allows for the insertion of an author’s parallel voices into the research and alignment with the creative work.