Stephen Marchand, Guarini ’26 (MALS, Creative Writing, Fiction), was awarded the 2026 Byam Shaw-Brownstone Thesis Excellence Award for his thesis, ILL, a vivid, hallucinatory novel about a high school teacher on sabbatical in Lisbon, Portugal with his wife, grappling with an undiagnosed illness.
What do you consider your hometown and how has it shaped who you are today?
I was born and raised in Madrid. I left Spain thirteen years ago to work in the United States and Spanish, my mother tongue, has been, in a way, home away from home since then.
Where did you earn your undergraduate degree and what was it in?
I earned an undergraduate degree in Spanish Philology at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, in Madrid, Spain.
Tell us about your thesis. What is it about? What inspired you to pursue this research?
In my thesis, a fictional memoir and travelogue titled ILL, I try to describe the ways in which memory works. The narrator recalls his one-year stay in Lisbon with his family at a time when he was healing from health issues. He suspects that his damaged body mirrors the damaged world he lives in.
My personal experiences in Portugal were at the basis of this project, yet I quickly understood that I would need fiction to access truth. I also believe that memory and imagination are the two sides of the same coin.
What does it mean to you to receive the MALS thesis award?
It is an important recognition of my work at Dartmouth, not only my thesis, but all the knowledge I acquired in my classes and conversations with professors and peers during my time at MALS In a way, my thesis is a synthesis of all that collective work.
Why did you choose Dartmouth to pursue your degree?
On the one hand, I was very interested in the interdisciplinary approach to education at MALS. The second important aspect was the natural environment. Convinced that we are an extension of our surroundings, I knew that my thinking would be shaped by the serene landscape in Hanover.
I truly believe that my writing was influenced by the pace at which trees grow. Moreover, one only needs to spend an hour or two staring at the Connecticut River to begin to understand how memory works.
What’s one challenge you faced in graduate school, and how did you overcome it?
I will never forget my third submission for Professor Saul Lelchuk’s Crime Fiction course. The plan was to write a novella in four parts. Just when I thought I had everything under control, Professor Lelchuk read my third submission and indicated that the novella’s climax had serious flaws.
The keystone crumbled into fine dust and the whole structure fell apart two weeks before the end of the term. I had to go back to the beginning and rethink the whole plot and rewrite it. That class enabled me to see writing as some kind of complex engineering. Invaluable!
What’s next for you—and what are you most looking forward to in this new chapter?
After 12 years of teaching Spanish at Groton, a boarding school in Massachusetts, I’ll be moving to Pasadena, California, to work as Spanish Language Department Head and teacher at Sequoyah School, a progressive K-12 school. I will also start a second writing project that takes place mostly in Madrid. This will give me the opportunity to return home, if only through language, memory and imagination.
What is your favorite place or activity that you like best in the Hanover area?
Tucked behind Reed Hall, there is a patch of grass, two wooden benches, and several majestic trees rising above the surrounding buildings. We had our last Writing Nature class there, co-taught by Professor Kreiger and Professor Minardi. I remember vividly that class, our conversation, my classmates, all of it.
I also remember the texture of the light that evening. The sun was setting and the dim light made the whole scene look as if a photo were developing before our eyes. In my mind, that’s exactly how memory works: it renders the latent image visible, it makes present the absent.
