This is why we will not be listening to men

I'm not a doctor, but...

In the first term of my creative writing MA, the head of department sent my cohort an email about a PhD informational session and I thought, Haha, yeah, right. I’m going to do a PhD.

An MA seemed like enough of a commitment, enough of a challenge.

I’d already had a conversation with myself about perfectionism, and how I wasn’t going to be engaging in it any more. Not like during my GCSEs and my A-levels and my two attempts at undergraduate degrees that I had to abandon due to disabling illness.

Somehow, after years of freelancing, I’d established enough of a portfolio and good enough of a writing sample (full of impressive sentences just like that) to impress an admissions committee and I was going to grasp the nettle but in a cool, chill way.

Grades don’t matter, I told myself. The important thing is to take in the experience. Make the most of it. Write, create, free of expectations!

Then I got a better mark for my first assignment than I was expecting.

Cut to me at the informational session, notepad and pen in hand, frantically scribbling notes. I learned a few things from that online event (my interpretations, not official information from any university or the tertiary education gods):

• A PhD has to be an original contribution to the field, offering new knowledge.

• A PhD in creative writing involves writing a manuscript and a research project/commentary about it, with research from both usually needing to feed into and enrich each other.

• A government loan for a full-time PhD only gives students around £4000 a year to live on, which: huh?

And, lastly and most importantly:

• It is possible, theoretically, to get paid by a university scholarship or by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to work on a PhD in creative writing instead of like, having a job.

Was I confident I could make an original contribution to this or any field, that I’d know what research to suggest in a proposal, or that the AHRC or a university would give me funding? No.

Did I like the idea of sitting at home working on a long-term project that I felt passionate about and engaged in, something that allowed me to spend most of my time reading and writing? I did.

However.

The man presenting the session told us it was hard to obtain funding and the chances were slim. He said our best bet was to aim for a government loan which, if we wanted, we could “spend on sweeties”.

I put away my notepad and pen.

In the second year of my MA, after pushing myself to get the best grades I could, just in case, because it gave me the option of applying for a PhD later (at some point, if I wanted to, which I didn’t), I took another look at that notepad, came up with an idea of what I might want to research — alternatives to recovery in first-person non-fiction chronic illness narratives — and decided to find out more, for a laugh.

I sought out a small group of potential supervisors and emailed to gauge their interest. Some ignored me, some were enthusiastic and one offered to chat to me over Zoom.

Although I wasn’t completely sure he understood my hopes for the project, I thought he might have some useful feedback as I embarked on what felt like the impossible task of writing a PhD proposal.

He did, helping me to understand that I needed to start to frame my own writing as an academic practice, giving examples of the types of theory I might want to draw on and emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinarity.

But he also referred to the pandemic in the past tense and told me that I’d be unlikely to get any funding, saying, “I didn’t get it either,” as if I’d already been turned down.

Were men the only naysayers I came across? No. A couple of female academics also told me it would be challenging, to say the least. But all the people who helped me were women.

I used Emma Darwin’s excellent post about applying for a creative writing PhD as a starting point, then asked in a journalism forum if anyone could send me sample proposals, which three kind people did, although theirs were for different genres and subject matters, so I had to do some extrapolating.

A kind author and creative writing lecturer I know from the internet shared the index of her PhD (a novel) plus some practical advice and in response to all of this, I wrote and wrote and re-wrote, tweaking the title and the research questions and the abstract and all the other elements, sometimes just aiming for a couple of decent sentences a day.

Somehow, by piecing it together as best I could and relying on my mum for as much proofreading as she could bear (there were times when she shook her head at what I thought of as simplified prose and said “It’s a bit academic”), I finished my proposal and sent it to my top choice university (which also turned out to be the first university I dropped out of, 25 years ago).

I hoped I might be offered a place but I had no expectation that I’d be offered funding and awkwardly, there’s a big wait between the two. I found out I had a place in the first week of January and allowed myself a bit of excitement of the “I might be doing a PhD” variety. Me! Without an undergraduate degree. Hee!

But I had to wait until May to find out if I’d be offered funding, and if so, whether it would be from the AHRC or the university, months in which I spent more time than I’d like to admit searching “got PhD funding” and “didn’t get PhD funding” on Twitter in the hope of seeing stories of success or triumph over adversity.

In the end, after a tense and emotional week on the AHRC’s waiting list, I was offered funding from both.

I’d promised my mum that if I was fortunate enough (and I do think there’s a lot of luck involved) to get funding, I’d announce it by running up to her and shouting, in the manner of a certain 1980s TV ad, “the Milky Bars are on me!”

To do so not once but twice made for an over-excited and delirious afternoon in the middle of what soon shaped up to be the most stressful year of my life.

The news came a month after my mum was discharged from hospital for the first time that year, when a junior doctor told her that he was certain she had lung cancer (she didn’t).

I’m not saying all men are bad, obviously but in general (and I realise this isn’t news but it might still be worth saying), the way they’re socialised means that they’re typically much more confident in asserting their opinions as gospel, using their achievements to predict other people’s and assuming that their experiences will act as templates for ours. Maybe they could stop that.

More importantly, those of us who aren’t men need to adjust for the fact that many of them are happy to talk about what we’re capable of without knowing us at all.

When a man tells us anything, we need to stop, wonder if it’s possible they might not be an expert, and not let ourselves be swayed by any unflattering predictions.

All of which was a long-winded way of saying Haha, yeah, right. I’m going to do a PhD.

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This is extremely niche but if you’re reading this and you’re a woman or non-binary person thinking of applying for a UK-based Creative Writing PhD, specifically in creative nonfiction, I’d be happy to share my insights/experiences if you comment with your email below.