The requirement for separate creative and exegetical components by universities offering creative doctoral programmes is a largely accepted model in Australia. The Research Question Model adopted by Curtin University in Western Australia is an example of this. The parallel, ‘independent’ articulation of creative and academic responses is explored in this article by a supervisor and three PhD candidates all writing in the genre of creative non-fiction. We suggest that the boundaries between the scholarly and creative in creative non-fiction works are far from clear and that this reflects both contemporary non-fiction publishing and new movements in scholarly writing. We propose that Barthes’s ‘ambiguous genre’, the essay, may be one useful way of conceptualising the non-fiction creative doctorate.