Ruby Porter: Novel way to earn a PhD

Completing a new novel as well as a doctoral thesis as part of a PhD is no mean feat. However, it’s what Ruby Porter, author of the highly regarded debut novel Attraction, has done.

Ruby will be graduating with a PhD in English (with Creative Practice) in the University of Auckland’s Spring ceremony on 24 September.

She will also be known to many current and previous University creative writing students as a tutor with an excellent eye for where a piece can be shorter, sharper and just generally better.

She says she has always cared very deeply about education.

"From as early as primary school, I was saving up money for university. My mum was a teacher, as were all of her family, so I always wanted to do well in school."

She started publishing her short stories at Intermediate.

“My best ever pay day was when I got $150 for a 300-word story. You can see why I thought writing was going to be a lucrative career!”

But it was Northcote College that really cemented her love of English.

"They had a really wonderful English department there, and also a fantastic writers’ group that definitely taught me a lot, but also just made me really passionate about writing.”

After school, she thought her career path lay in art and design, so she enrolled at Elam. But a turning point came when in her final year, when she met author and director of the creative writing programme at Auckland Paula Morris, and the idea of pursuing writing as a career started to seem possible.

Ruby went on to do the one-year Masters in Creative Writing in 2018, winning the Australian-based Michael Gifkins Prize for an unpublished manuscript for the novel she completed on the course.

“That prize was open to published and unpublished authors, so I was very lucky.”

The manuscript went on to become Attraction, a moody road trip novel following three young women around the North Island, and the prize included a guaranteed publishing contract for world rights with the Melbourne-based Text Publishing, and a NZ$10,000 cash advance against royalties.

The novel was widely well reviewed and established Ruby as a talent to watch, as well as confirming the life she wanted.

“Writing Attraction was one of the more joyous experiences I've had in my life and so I thought, I want a career in which I’ll be able to continue writing novels, and the PhD with creative practice seemed a good way of doing that if I could get a scholarship."

Which she did, as well as working all the way through as a writing tutor at Auckland and elsewhere.

The PhD is 60 percent thesis, 40 percent novel.

“I knew I wanted a doctorate that stood alone as both thesis and novel, but it was hard in the end, because I had a word constraint of 60,000 for the thesis, when it can normally be up to 100,000.”

The thesis looks at the connection between money and language in an era of ‘financialisation’, where money is made from money rather than from a productive economy, she says.

“I read lots of novels about money written post-1971, when money was no longer able to be exchanged for gold.”

Money and language have always been linked, she says, as is the rise of novels and capitalism.

“Think of the expression ‘coining a phrase’. There are these metaphors between the two concepts that go back millennia."

The thesis also connects financial and literary themes with the idea of an ‘anticipatory present’.

“I was really interested in what happens to time under financialisation. I became obsessed with financial derivatives, written contracts that turn the future prices of assets into profit in the present.

“I came up with the term anticipatory present to explain how I think we now exist in the same sort of foreshortened present.”

An example, she says, is when people take videos at a concert to post on TikTok.

“They're turning their present moment into an anticipatory memory. Part of my argument is we're not looking far enough ahead, and I think that’s because there's too much discomfort now when we think about a more distant future.”

Then there’s the novel.

It’s called Lost Property and set in an imaginary town somewhere that could be America, with a central character who’s hopeless with money.

“It’s about a young man who's stuck in this forgotten small town with a boom-and-bust economy. It had forestry, but it no longer does. It had a train that ran through it that no longer does. And the young man’s mother develops early onset dementia, which is why he feels he can't leave.”

Graduation is going to be a proud day, especially for Ruby’s mother, Linley Porter, she says.

“I feel like I owe a lot of this to her, and to the education she gave me growing up, because she's just a wonderful teacher, and a fantastic writer herself.”

Her partner Michael Mann will also be there.

“I feel very grateful to him, he’s put up with a lot throughout the PhD.”

She is also highly grateful to her thesis supervisors, Emeritus Professor Alex Calder and Associate Professor Paula Morris.

And some final advice for anyone thinking of writing themselves?

“Don’t use weak verbs; don’t use too many abstract nouns, make things concrete for people; and think about point of view; who is talking? That should dictate everything else.”

Anticipating the Present: Financialization and Time in the Contemporary Novel by Ruby Leigh Porter can be found in ResearchSpace.