My Back-Alley PhD
I don’t know when I started climbing inside stories to climb outside of my own head, only that I always have. In second grade, Mrs. Carver stopped her lesson on contractions to ask me what the apostrophe stood in for, and I couldn’t tell her because underneath my desk, every day in her advanced reading group class, I hid American Girl doll books and read while she droned on. When I started a new school the following year, Mrs. Austin expressed concern to my parents because I didn’t want to go outside, play, make new friends; I only wanted to spread out in the hallway, book in my lap. And in high school, when I’d finished my vocabulary words or worksheet, I’d crack open the textbook, read stories and poems we hadn’t been assigned.
“Were we supposed to read that next?” some football player who sat beside me asked once in junior English class. I shook my head no. “Wait, are you like, reading it for fun?” he asked. “You actually enjoy reading that old shit?” All I could do was nod, shrug in response because I didn’t yet have the words to explain why I was captivated by coffins in walls, heartbeats beneath floorboards, men stoned up alive in wine cellars.
My friends in high school didn’t get invited to parties; instead, we spent our weekends watching Pride and Prejudice on repeat, talking about Shakespeare and the Canterbury Tales, writing epic poems together modeled after the beginning credit captions in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. When I went off to college, my parents begged me not to make English my major—wouldn’t something else make more sense, like elementary education?
But stories were what I was good at, the thing that made the most sense to me. I couldn’t do math to save my life, science was fine until it involved math, and since all we’d studied in high school was US history, I thought I hated history, too. Foreign languages were hard because I could memorize vocabulary words but I couldn’t figure out how to not put other languages in an English syntax.
Grammar, sentence structures, learning new words and where they came from, the arcs of stories, that’s all that’s ever made any sense to me. Over and over in high school, I read the prologue to The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, determined that in comparing its modern translation, I could teach myself to read it. (I did not.) I once bet my favorite English teacher I could find an error in my best friend’s senior paper after she’d given her a 100 and me a 96. She laughed, said there was no way, promised to bump me up the last four points if I could. I did.
“Remember that time you found that who/whom error in my senior English paper?” Emily still asks me sometimes. “I was so mad,” she says every time. “I was so proud,” I always reply.
Falling in Love with London
My first week at Carson-Newman College, Dr. Jennifer Hall mapped out the Great Chain of Being on the chalk board in her 201 English class. The students around me were bored, asleep, and hungover. Somewhere between the first book of Paradise Lost and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I knew I could spend the rest of my life inside stories most people didn’t care about anymore. When I think of Beowulf, of Gawain, of Odysseus, of hanging on Dr. Hall’s every word, I know that’s where I began.
Two years later, Dr. Hall projected Holbein’s The Ambassadors onto our brand new SmartBoard. We analyzed the crucifix in the corner, the pattern of the floor, the skull stretched before their feet. We measured out beats in Donne’s sonnets, discussed the effects of the monarchy on Shakespearian dramas, carefully tread through every last line of Paradise Lost. I’d taken British Lit as a freshman with Dr. Hall, the department allowing the oddity on her word. I followed her everywhere: to the moors of Wuthering Heights, to the graveyards in Great Expectations, up into the attic in Jane Eyre. But it was there in Renaissance England, months after I’d returned from studying abroad in London at her encouragement, that I sat in an uncomfortable desk in Henderson Hall and decided that one day, I too would teach Renaissance English literature to a college classroom. One day, I would know this time period inside out the way she did. One day, I’d stand in a college classroom analyzing Shakespeare, Milton, and Marlowe.
Before Dr. Hall, I knew I loved the classics, knew I loved literature, maybe even knew I preferred British literature. After Dr. Hall, I knew part of me would always live inside the Renaissance, would always be captivated by the Reformation—would always wish I’d grown up inside Hampton Court Palace in large dresses and stained-glass cathedrals.
In London, we read a lot of Shakespeare. We toured the Globe, the Tower of London, walked in lines besides the tombs of English monarchs. Standing as a groundling during a performance of Macbeth at 19 years old, I was certain I could never feel more alive than I did at that very moment. Something came alive inside me that semester, sparks in my blood that woke up. It was almost like I’d been there before, or as though I’d always been there. Like I’d lived a hundred lives there already and my soul found its way back to the Thames. I cried on my best friend’s shoulder the whole flight back across the Atlantic. It didn’t feel like going home—it felt like leaving it.
The Real World: Understanding the Academic Job Market
After I finished my BA in Literature, I started a graduate program at Mississippi State. I taught composition, a lot of composition. I still wanted to get a PhD one day, but I was exhausted of writing critical analyses and taking classes to check boxes rather than because I was interested. I taught in Nashville for a year, and then I moved to Wilmington for an MFA program. Back then, they told us an MA + an MFA = a PhD on the job market. By the time I was entering the job market, though, programs were promoting PhDs in creative writing.
The double masters was far from as advantageous as I’d hoped. I stayed on at UNCW, taking whatever combination of classes the departments of English and Creative Writing and the Honors College could offer. Because these were technically three separate departments, it took the Dean a full two years to catch me—adjuncts couldn’t teach more than two classes a semester, she warned, and now she’d be watching me.
The job market was slim and competitive. Every open position wanted you to specialize in 2-3 areas, have a PhD, and promise them your firstborn, and they’d be flooded with applicants far more qualified than I, who would also get rejected. I wanted to teach creative writing. I wanted to teach Shakespeare. I wanted to learn more, go deeper, gain the expertise that a PhD would’ve afforded me.
But what the fuck was the point?
If I got a PhD in Renaissance literature, could I ever even get a job? I’d heard of Harvard candidates without positions. If there were openings in my area, how many would there be? How many candidates would apply? How many would be better teachers, better writers, better scholars? And even if I did find one, how far would I have to move?
I watched a friend graduate with a spectacularly specific PhD from the University of Oregon end up teaching a 5/5 load of composition at her new university position. I watched another sob her way through her dissertation in Texas. I didn’t want to write the papers, pay the money, relive the stress of graduate school… for what? To hope a Professor of Renaissance Literature position opened at our local university sometime before I retired?
I took a job working in content marketing for a company that sells software to banks. I spent my days between 9-5 writing thought leadership articles about how our platform can improve your members’ mortgage experience, how we can improve your workflows, increase your productivity, energize your efficiency. I edit words, words, words, all day. They call me the Grammar Queen. I explain proper nouns, title capitalization, citing sources, and storytelling not to college freshmen, but to product marketers and vice presidents of things.
I thought if I spent less time filling my head with the stories of my students, there would be more room for my own stories. That they’d start spilling out of me again, the way they used to. Instead, spreadsheets swim in my skull. I dream about not publishing press releases before the market opens at 9am. I decline invitations to happy hours with coworkers to sit at my desk at home, desperate to drag stories out of wherever it is they used to pour from so easily.
One of my writing professors, Clyde Edgerton, used to tell us to follow the heat. But he never told us what to do when there was no heat, when the stories left us, dried up like the lavender hanging in dead stalks on my front porch.
My Own Renaissance
For my birthday two years ago, my partner gave me a trip to London. I cried pulling the plane tickets out of the envelope, and I cried when the wheels of the plane touched down in Heathrow.
Sitting in the Globe again, standing in the spot where Anne Boleyn died, drinking coffee by the Thames holding the same journal I’d written in when I was 19, something inside me snapped back into place. In my MA, all the writers were also English majors. We could move from Virginia Woolf to Virginia Evans in the same conversation; it was all the same. But in my MFA, writers were mostly not English majors. There were no Shakespeare reading circles, no insulting each other in Middle English in the TA office pounding out papers on Chaucer at 3am. I’d spent so long in this century, studying contemporary writing, I’d forgotten that the stories that made me fall the hardest didn’t happen in this century or on this continent. They happened in London. They happened 500 years ago.
It started with my Year of Shakespeare. Watching As You Like It under the night glow of the Globe’s dome, I realized how many Shakespeare plays I’d never read. How many I wanted to read again. When we got home, I decided that in 2024, I would read one Shakespeare play a month for the whole year. I mapped out which ones I’d hit, a combination of rereadings and new readings.
For months, I’d been listening to religious history courses through The Great Teaching Company’s Great Courses. I downloaded each one they offered on Shakespeare, listening to each lecture with an excitement I hadn’t felt in a long time. I read Shakespeare’s Wife and Hamnet and The Great White Bard. My list contained only comedies and tragedies; I’d never been remotely interested in the histories. Henry this and that, Richard whoever, I didn’t care. Not even Henry VIII struck me as important to read, despite my ever-present love for the Tudor dynasty.
Shakespeare and Anne Boleyn had other plans.
He pulled me back in the early 1600s, sent me back a few years to Elizabethan England, and kept driving me backward. We’d seen Six while in London, and though I thought I knew a great deal about Tudor history, I realized sitting in Vaudeville Theatre in West End I really knew nothing about Henry VIII’s last four wives. I’d read The Other Boleyn Girl in high school, and I’d researched enough to be able to recount the story through to the marriage of Jane Seymour. But that was it. And as I moved my head along to the music of Six, I found myself asking questions like: Did Katherine Howard really love Thomas Culpepper? And was she a victim of sexual abuse? Who even was Jane Seymour, really? What did Anne of Cleves do all that time tucked away in Richmond? Did Katherine Parr really abandon her true love to marry Henry? What happened to Katherine when Henry died?
I started with Antonia Fraser’s Six Wives, and I fell down the Tudor rabbithole from there. I traced the web all over the place, fascinated by Elizabeth of York (Henry VIII’s mother), the lost princes in the tower, Jane Lady Rochford (Anne’s sister-in-law), and Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward IV. While I don’t always love the threads Phillpia Gregory explores in her fiction, it was in watching The White Queen that I became fascinated with the Wars of the Roses, with how the Tudors came to power in the first place. It was from there I learned that while I’d always been taught Richard III undoubtedly murdered the lost princes, we don’t actually know that for fact. And it was following that thread I realized how much of the common perception of Richard III is rooted in Shakespeare.
Just as fact checking Six pushed me down the wonderland portal to Tudor history, The White Queen and Richard III pointed me back to Shakespeare. How much of his history places were rooted in fact? What liberties did he take? What was written for propaganda, and what did it mean?
A DIY PhD
I have neither the time, money, energy, nor frankly the promise of any kind of ROI on entering in a PhD. Yet, learning, reading, studying, felt like all that was keeping me sane inside a day to day that was no longer filled with literature and stories, but instead with product copy, conversations about AI, and marketing campaigns. The thing that kept me rooted, that was once baked into my day to day, was gone now, and I had to find it again.
I designed many college courses during my teaching years, wrote God only knows how many syllabi/syllabuses (take your pick). Surely, I could apply that same skill set to creating a curriculum for myself. As I began creating reading lists, gathering online courses and learning materials, I excitedly explained what I was doing to a close friend.
“It’s like my own PhD,” I told her.
“It’s a back-alley PhD,” she joked.
The name stuck. My Back Alley PhD is my own self-curated learning program.
My goals:
read the entire Shakespearian canon, along with Shakespeare criticism and scholarship, and consider each play’s representations on the stage and adaptations through time
become a SME (subject matter expert, as we’d say in the corporate world) in Anne Boleyn, Katherine of Aragon, and Elizabeth I, with a general foundational knowledge of the Tudor dynasty as a whole and its key players
read historical fiction based in these time periods and be able to properly assess what is fact, what is fiction, and what purposes altered narrative choices are serving
write a historical fiction novel manuscript set sometime between 1524-1603, using knowledge of English history
I will do this by:
reading academic scholarship, studies, and histories
listening to history podcasts by respected historians
participating in online learning communities such as The Tudor Learning Circle
completing courses through The Teaching Company
writing academic responses to what I’ve learned
attending lecture series and online course programs provided by curators such as The Tudor Trail (Natalie Gruneigner) and The Tudor Trio (Owen Emmerson, Nicola Tallis, and Kate McCafferney)
A Simply Existing Approach to Marketing
This section of my website is devoted to tracking my progress through this academic journey. Will anyone read it? Idk. Do I care? Not really. Each time I’ve brought this idea to a friend, I’m immediately met with ideas on how to market it, how to monetize, how to Substack. I don’t want to do any of those things. (I have a small candle business I only halfway keep up with because I spent so much time marketing all day in my day job that I don’t want to market, well… me.)
So here I’ll write about my journey, and maybe folks will come across it, be intrigued, read some, think some with me. Or maybe, maybe it’ll just be for me. All I know is that I was taught to follow the heat, and the heat, for me right now, is in the past, in a time in which I never lived, with people I’ve never met yet who I spend so much of my days lately thinking about.
A friend of mine started a wonderful literary magazine back when we were in grad school, and, overwhelmed with social media, decided the magazine’s whole “thing” would be it exists without social media. We sat back and watched it grow, watched it mean so many things to so many people. The low stakes allowed us to propel the vision forward, though, and that’s what I want here: low stakes, just some writing tossed out into the ether. Maybe it lands, maybe it doesn’t, but that really isn’t the point. The point is simply for me to write and for this project to exist.