Bloom spoke with author Candace Walsh about her experiences as a mid-life graduate student.
Leah De Forest: First, congratulations. You’re now officially a PhD candidate in creative writing.
Candace Walsh: Thank you. It’s nice to be coming toward the completion of a five-year project.
LDF: Before we talk about what got you started with the PhD, can you tell me a little bit about the comprehensive exams you’ve just completed?
CW: At Ohio University you develop two reading lists: one has to do with books in the tradition you are working in as a writer with your own dissertation—in my case, a novel manuscript. There’s also period of specialization. I chose 20th and 21st century post-colonial and trans-national literature. I mainly focused on post-colonial women writers of color.
The lists included fiction and nonfiction, poetry, craft, and theory. I had to have read all those texts, about 140, and be familiar enough to write four essays between 9am on a Friday to 9am on a Monday. Each essay had to be at least six pages at double spaced.
LDF: So it’s kind of like a really compressed NaNoWriMo for literary essays.
CW: Yes, but no word salad!
LDF: That’s a huge achievement—to have done all that study and turned around the analysis so quickly. And this is all working towards your dissertation, which is the novel you’re writing.
CW: Yes, this process was in conversation with the novel. I feel like I can do something with those essays at some point, thanks to their craft focus. I ended up writing 45 pages worth of essays; about 15,000 words in a weekend. I felt like a goblin who would run into the kitchen every now and then and shove food in my face. It was very primal, you know. I wore athleisure the whole time … it was an altered state of consciousness.
LDF: You know, one might think of a comp goblin as someone who might be in their early twenties, possibly drinking a lot of Red Bull. What was it that led you to take on a PhD in your forties?
CW: It’s kind of a complicated story. I was a high achiever K through 12; I was the last person you would expect not to finish their BA on time. But a lot of the kind of fault lines in my childhood and adolescence manifested in college in ways that distracted me from my studies. Also, some part of me really didn’t think I had to follow the rules when it came to taking the math and science and PE classes, you know? Undiagnosed ADHD didn’t help, either. I finished my BA in 2015, and I was supposed to finish in 1994. In the meantime I worked as a journalist and an editor so it didn’t get in my way professionally. But at a certain point it did. For example, I had the opportunity to work for the State of New Mexico as a magazine editor; they required a BA for that. I was lucky that they were able to make an exception. It really brought home to me that my incomplete undergraduate degree could deprive me of opportunities in the future. And then it did. After my memoir Licking the Spoon came out in 2012, I received a speaking invitation from the American Association of University Women. It was a great opportunity, but I couldn’t do it because I didn’t have bachelor’s degree. And that just made me so mad! After dozens of calls to the registrar’s office of SUNY at Buffalo, I connected with a wonderful staffperson, Lynette Deponceau, who shepherded me through the process. I took community college classes to pick up my remaining credits. I took tennis classes for PE, and an architectural drafting class to fulfill my science requirement. After several painful, expensive failed attempts to pass pre-calc, UB recognized that I had made a good faith effort and extended a waiver. This request was supported by my undergraduate mentor, Dr. Stacy Hubbard.
When I got to Warren Wilson College for my MFA I loved it so much—it was like my destiny. I’d been camping out near my destiny as a journalist, and I’d been writing creatively and having a decent amount of success, but there was a lot I didn’t realize that I didn’t know. Before grad school, I would read an amazing novel and just ache because I didn’t know how they did it on a craft level. I wanted to know how they did it so I could do it.
Once I got to my second semester at Warren Wilson—it’s a two year program—I thought, my gosh, this is almost over. So I googled “post-MFA life” and PhD programs came up. I saw that this could be five more years of centering creative writing. The cohort in PhD programs skews younger—in low residency programs like Warren Wilson you see a mix of ages—but I’m so glad I didn’t let that stop me.
In my PhD life I interact with colleagues, almost all under 40, and I’ll see the look on their faces when I mention that I have a 21-year-old daughter and a 19-year-old son. People think, oh, you’re a mom. And not of a toddler, either. Yet some have become my closest friends.
LDF: I wonder if you’re familiar with Oldster Magazine? They have a questionnaire which asks, among other things, what age you associate with yourself in your mind. I think of this as—what age do you feel you have always been?
CW: Well, in terms of my sense of humor, I’m 12—you know, goofy, scatological jokes make me laugh. When I was young (a kid, a teenager, even into my early twenties) I felt older than my peers. I didn’t have that levity that a lot of people that you associate with youth, and also I just looked older to people. But then, as I passed 30 I continued looking 30 for a long time.
As to what age I feel I am on the inside, I’d say I feel like I’m in my late thirties. I’ve heard some people say they still feel like they’re 22, and—I definitely don’t feel 22!
LDF: This also makes me think that we can be different ages in different areas of our lives, right? One could have a 12-year-old’s sense of humor, but maybe a 40-year-old’s approach to finances.
CW: I’m six years old there.
LDF: I’d like to talk a bit about what you’ve gained from the PhD program. What intellectual riches have you unearthed?
CW: One of the things I have really, really appreciated, and which was unexpected, was learning to teach first-year writing (rhetoric and composition). I knew how to be a convincing writer, but I didn’t know how to break it down into logos, kairos, ethos, pathos. I tested out of first-year writing as an undergraduate. I osmotically picked up how to be persuasive, but I had no idea what any of the rhetorical methods were.
As to the research aspects of my PhD (the reading lists I mentioned earlier), if you’re writing about family and marriage in 2023, it really helps to know like what it was like in the Victorian and Modernist eras. For many women, marriage was about survival. You weren’t necessarily allowed to work, to go to school, or own property. It was very precarious. Knowing how unromantic marriage was in the past really informs how I write about it in the present.
I began to see how historical legacies evolve over time. For example: if you’re writing about a conflict between a mother and a daughter, it’s important to see those characters as individuals as well as to understand the systemic forms of intersectional oppression affecting the relationship. Not just—Mom throws us over for men or My daughter doesn’t respect my values. What are the systemic structures of oppression acting on these people that influence their conscious decisions as well as their unconscious desires?
On a practical level, the ongoing tacit expectation that we should be sending work out to literary journals with the goal of getting it published has helped me to focus on that noodly process. I’ve had a number of short stories, novel excerpts, poems, craft essays, and interviews published, and if I hadn’t been in this program, that number would be a lot smaller.
LDF: As I mentioned before, you’re coming towards completing your dissertation—which is the novel you’re working on. Can you tell me a bit about how it feels to be coming towards the end of a project you’ve been working on for so long?
CW: It’s exciting, scary, overwhelming—and good. I’m glad to have the structure of a PhD. To have gifted faculty and colleagues giving me notes on my manuscript. I feel like it’s become a bigger novel thematically.
LDF: What’s next for you?
CW: After I finish my novel, I will need to revise it. For the PhD, I also have to write a critical introduction which places my novel in a historical context and speaks to what literary traditions my novel might be continuing.
And after that? It’s exciting for me as it’s so unknown. For a lot of people, it can be tough not knowing what’s coming next; for me, it’s like opening up a present. I’ll be applying to tenure-track creative writing professor positions; continuing to freelance as a developmental editor; writing my next novel and shorter pieces; submitting work to publications, and hopefully going to residencies. I’m lucky that I’ve worked as a journalist and editor; I have related career skills to fall back on.
LDF: Perhaps that’s another strength of taking on graduate study as a mature person?
CW: Yes, you nailed it. And I love to teach—my PhD program showed me that. I’m excited about my students’ intellectual development. Just knowing that somebody has grown as a writer and a reader, and that they feel better in their body and in the world is so satisfying to me. I also love working with Quarter After Eight, and organizing literary events. Writing is so solitary; I love getting different groups of people together. Those connections can be so generative. I’m picturing pollen floating—not so much the sneezing, but the way it makes new things grow.
LDF: I’m going to finish up with a left-field question: if you could meet one of the characters from your novel in real life, who would it be and what would you do together?
CW: The character who comes to mind is Beryl; she’s a tenured professor in her late fifties. A scholar of wallpaper of the aesthetic movement. A public intellectual. Very stylish.
She’s a kind person, but she’s lost in her privilege—I mean, people don’t often tell tenured professors what they really think! But she has a charming aspect to her, she loves to entertain people, and she probably smells really good. I think we’d have lunch in New York City, at a restaurant that where it’s really hard to get reservations (but not because it’s a flavor of the month). She would teach me new things about the food, share gossip about the chef, she’d mention the best place to stay in Mallorca, and then I’d also benefit from her casual asides at the museum we’d walk through afterward.
LDF: Sounds like a great day.
Candace Walsh is a PhD candidate in creative writing at Ohio University. She holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College. Recent or forthcoming publication credits include The Greensboro Review, Passengers Journal, Leon Literary Review, Entropy, Complete Sentence, Craft, and Akashic Books’ Santa Fe Noir (fiction); Sinister Wisdom, Vagabond City Lit, HAD, Roi Fainéant, Husk, and Beyond Queer Words (poetry); and New Limestone Review and Pigeon Pages (creative nonfiction). Her craft essays and book reviews have appeared in Brevity, descant, New Mexico Magazine, and Fiction Writers Review. Links to these works can be found at candacewalsh.contently.com. A passage from her novel in progress made the longlist of the 2018 First Pages Prize. She co-edits Quarter After Eight literary journal and teaches writing classes at Ohio University. She received the 2022 Ohio University College of Arts and Sciences Teaching Assistant Award. Walsh also teaches or has taught writing workshops, intensives, and seminars at Cleveland Lit, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Taos Summer Writers’ Conference, and Santa Fe Summer Writers’ Conference. Her 2012 book, Licking the Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity (Seal Press) won the 2013 New Mexico-Arizona LGBT Book Award, and two of the three essay anthologies she co-edited were Lambda Literary Award finalists.
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