As pressures on new academic staff members increase and change, academic developers need to find different ways of working with them. This paper offers for discussion a new way of supporting early career academics in their negotiation of liminality, the betwixt and between space separating old and new roles. We call this innovative approach "poetic transcription with a twist." We begin by describing the approach, before reflecting on its value in our work with a group of colleagues who came together to share their stories of early career academic life. The paper outlines the responses of the individuals who engaged in the process before considering the possibilities and perils for wider use.