Editor’s Note: Young academic and Colombian author Rodrigo Mariño López wrote a doctoral dissertation for the Spanish program of a U.S. university—and passed. This text, which earned a spot among the finalists for our first literary essay contest in 2023, interweaves his own experience with the overarching panorama of this phenomenon. “Of Creative Dissertations and All That Jazz” was translated to English by Hebe Powell.
I finished my doctorate a few years ago. I arrived in the United States in 2016 as Trump took office, as my country scrapped its peace treaties, as the Brexit folly unfolded. Watching from the library, a gym, a classroom someplace in the Midwest, I saw it all happening, but I had to carry on—what else could I do? Four years later, my dissertation complete—actually, there were two, but more on that later—all the plans I’d made for a family holiday and celebrations and more fell apart as the Covid lockdown descended. I received my doctorate as an electronic diploma, posted my vote of thanks and triumph on Facebook (as my generation do) and carried on with my craft beer tasting while applying tirelessly—but oh so tired—for academic jobs. Grand Tenure track or a humble Lecturer (an Adjunct, never, they’ll exploit you, so I was told), it couldn’t have mattered less. Because, seriously, what else can you do with a doctorate in Romance Languages and a not-so-aptly named “creative dissertation”?
I will start, of course, with some background. When I was in the last few years of high school, I had everything very clear: literature and philosophy were my passion. But who studies that? Who would dedicate four or five years to an undergraduate degree in those useless topics? Not long after, in the middle of a module on literature, I had narrowed it down: literary criticism was something people studied, but never creative writing. Writing stories and poems, okay, but a degree? That would be obscure. One thing led to another and finally I woke up to find I was living a double life: by day an aspiring writer with designs on a master’s; by night a translator of self-help books. Time passed and with a novel in my metaphorical pocket and reams of notes and reflections on writing, the day came when I graduated, almost proudly, from that very master’s. “Sweetie,” said my grandma, “What are you going to do now?” I hardly had to think about it.
After all those years of classes, seminars, and workshops, and with so much writing under my belt, I had to do what any other respected young Latin American writer does nowadays: leave the country. I had to meet other writers and be (mis)educated by them, enter literary competitions, win prizes and, so, get to publish celebrated books—with accolades from celebrated authors on their dustjackets (and, from time to time, return home to make speeches about them).
Many aeons ago, in the years of the Boom, for whatever reason, the destination was Barcelona. Paris would have done, so they say, but you had to have passed through the Ciutat Comtal to transcend. Today, creative writers from the Spanish-speaking community (as we are known) have another option: New York (not Miami, that’s for Reggaetón). And there, the Mecca: En-Why-You. The University of New York and their Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing in Spanish where the prize-winners of tomorrow hone their skills. But if that doesn’t pan out, if you get rejected (or you don’t get a scholarship, which amounts to the same thing), or if you can’t stand the incessant hubbub of that insomnia-crazed city, there are still two other glowing possibilities: the University of Iowa, the matriarch of Spanish creative writing in the United States—very isolated and very white—and the University of Texas at El Paso, lying in an unbeatable geopolitical location, a frontier-land, its classrooms overlooking the Mexican border. Neither is New York but what can you do?
Admittedly, I am repeating things that nearly everyone knows. And now I come to another: in 2016 the deal with the MFA in creative writing got even more complicated (and for the better, I think). That year, things took a great leap forward when the University of Houston inaugurated the first doctorate in creative writing in Spanish, directed by none other than the magnificent—and feisty—Cristina Rivera Garza. And it’s no accident, as Garza herself confirms, that the programme started in the very year that Trump came to power, when speaking and reading and writing in Spanish in the United States became, more than ever, a political act. Listen up, Donald and chums, the language of the workforce can also make poetry and get funding. Around 2020, before the pandemic hit, there was a rumour of something like Houston’s PhD course happening at the University of Iowa and there was also talk of how certain select Spanish departments were, quietly (almost in secret, shhh), starting to accept “creative work.” Some were even risking all by accepting the controversial “creative doctoral dissertation” just like most English departments (where creative writing has been, for some time now, an unquestioned institution attracting more students than any other “track”).
Panic over, creative writers are also trained in academe, and we can harmonize literary criticism and fiction—almost as well as Piglia.
But that said, some will ask, what is a “creative dissertation” or “creative work”? (such strange specimens…). They have a point. Isn’t all academic work, indeed, necessarily, in its very essence, creative? And what of doctoral dissertations: aren’t all dissertations required to be creative? It’s difficult to answer that question without entering into interminable discussions about eggs and chickens; thus, to simplify matters, let’s say: in the case of Liberal Arts departments, when we say creative work we mean some form of literary creation by a student or teacher—a novel, a short story, a poem, script, chronicle, memoir, or nonfiction like a creative essay or translation and so on (literature is quite something, a novel, nonfiction, and a long list of etceteras—and no—I’m not going to go there). Take note, it’s not just about fiction and poetic language; but it is a phenomenon inextricably linked to academia: the creative writer is shaped on university programmes dedicated to literary creation, and their “creative work” is work forged by, let’s call it, academic rigour. The irony is that for all the ingenuity and scholarship on display, we insist on giving these authors, and everything they do, the infantile qualifier “creative” (yuck). As if there weren’t already enough confusion in academia.
What then is this exotic thing called a doctorate in creative writing; who would even consider doing one; and what do you do with it (as my cousin pretty much asked)? Quite honestly, I don’t know. I am not a doctor of creative writing; I learned about the Houston programme very late, and I am sure they wouldn’t have accepted me. I can’t speak with the voice of experience about the creative writing master’s offered (by their majesties) at New York, Iowa, or El Paso, nor do I know much about creative dissertations (eek!), but I have a few suspicions—some even based on reality.
I suspect, for example, that the difference between a master’s and a doctorate is that the student should, must, push beyond the horizons presented by obligatory lectures, with their sights set, always, on producing a brilliant and original debut. I suspect that the MFA can be a good introduction to the trade (as a professional or an amateur?) of reading and writing—or of reading to write—but the PhD should amount to two or three more plot twists. I mean, what can we make of the analysis (Eric Bennett’s) suggesting that, during the long years of the Cold War, financed partly by the CIA, creative writing programmes in the US became another state propaganda weapon (an outrageous conspiracy theory some say)? Or, at the other end of the subversion spectrum, what can we make of their role in Latin America, to cite just one example: “La universidad de las catacumbas,” the so-called “University of the Catacombs” in Videla’s Argentina? I suspect the PhD in question would, without doubt, have some contributions to this discourse, and I suspect the students and teachers involved would have to devote at least some of their time to (re)envisioning the relationship between language and power and all that kinda jazz. I also suspect that such a PhD programme would include some practical tips about the publishing industry—some lessons in how the road to success is never straight and you must learn to navigate it, or how to clear your path—when the reality is far less the poet crafting their verse in splendid solitude and more a case of what Paul Dawson has described as the “public intellectual.”
I spent a good part of my doctorate wrapped in discussions of this sort, trying to find arguments to keep my own creative projects afloat—safe from academics and literary critics (like myself) who would ask (also like myself) if a novel or a short story could properly be considered serious academic work. One of my colleagues once asked, how can anyone today write a novel about love without having read Bauman? (Bateman? said another—it may have been a joke). How do you make an original contribution to learning with a, well, creative dissertation?, asked someone else. From one of my teachers: How are you going to demonstrate what you have researched? And from another: What’s your theoretical framework? All entirely valid questions, of course. So, a great, two-headed beast began to grow; I call it “double dissertation” since this is what my dissertation became. Its first head is a novel (of sorts… let’s call it historical), with whom I did daily, hourly, battle about language, authenticity, commitment, the past and other demons; the other, a “short” essay—or theoretical requirement—which, due to the stuff of (academic) life, grew and grew, sprouting ever more pages and subtitles. Engendered to assuage the worries of my peers—and mine, naturally—it is complete with bibliographic references and an analysis of the narratives and arguments surrounding migration and nationalism (I even read Bauman).
That essay, then, defended and supported my creative dissertation. If anyone in any university job interview ever decides to ask about this business of a novel as a doctoral dissertation, then I have the theoretical foundations—pure and hard—of the aforementioned text. Panic over, creative writers are also trained in academe, and we can harmonize literary criticism and fiction—almost as well as Piglia.
I don’t know if every course with a creative option works, more or less, in the same way. I imagine so. And, to any good soul who reads my dissertation and, like my cousin or my grandma, asks what is the point of doing a doctorate in Latin American literature in the United States and laboring on a creative dissertation only to find it becomes two, I would say they are forgetting one important point. Which is, whether it’s in creative writing or otherwise, any Spanish-speaking doctoral student in the land of the bald eagle is going to wind up teaching Spanish-as-a-second-language and most of the time, at its basic level. SPAN 1001 or 1002, or something like that. Over and over again, all of us will teach the verb “ser,” the numbers, and the colours, we’ll reach direct and indirect object pronouns, and finally, we’ll get to invent and reinvent every variation on the best way to teach the subjunctive. Some more than others, but still, all of us. All of us. From grad students to tenured professors. And that’s fine.
In time, some of us, no doubt, will escape the cult (of academia) and find another where the skills acquired during a PhD are appreciated and well remunerated. These few will achieve the dream of that other life: one with a fixed schedule and free weekends. Nothing wrong with that… Others of us will remain torn between these two worlds, tied to a visa sponsor, reading among the chaos, up at all hours writing that novel, and, occasionally, an essay about the actions and accidents that brought us here.
