The Meaning on the Other Side

Fort Lewis College Commencement Address 2024 

by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Good morning. It is an honor to be with you today among these sacred mountains, the vastness of this blue sky, the beauty of the air and the land beneath our feet. Thank you to President Tom Stritikus, the board of trustees, staff, faculty, and of course, you dear graduates, and your parents and families supporting you today and always.  

Today I see all of you and I know you to be scholars, educated people, college graduates. You are, in a sense, the next big thing. No matter where life takes you, from this day forward your education can never be taken away. You earned this and I hope you feel the pleasure of that tremendous accomplishment. I know that obtaining a college degree often comes through struggle. You have put years into earning your degrees, and some of those years have been marked by great difficulties over which you have so beautifully triumphed. Congratulations. I am proud of you.

Now I’d like to tell you a story about my own struggle with education and my journey to becoming a writer. To be blunt, Class of 2024, it’s shocking to me that I stand before you. The shock is not that I don’t feel I deserve to be here, but that I am being asked to address graduates when for much of my life I was told that I was a bad student. Throughout my childhood, I struggled to concentrate in school. Growing up one of seven siblings, I didn’t live in home with calm study space or one-on-one homework support. There were other distractions, too, things that are far too sad for a celebratory speech, but let’s just say—life wasn’t always so easy for me or my family. I even knew that on my mother’s line, some of my ancestors had come from what textbooks would describe as generational trauma. My great grandmother, for example, was born in Southern Colorado in a mining town in 1912, which sounds so very long ago now. Her father, a Belgian miner, never married her Indigenous mother and he abandoned the family by the time my great grandma was twelve years old. This was a time in history when a father’s abandonment could have easily led to tragedy. That abandonment could have ended our family line, making it so over a hundred years later I wouldn’t exist.

 But I do exist and that’s because the older siblings of this family led the other children north to Denver in the 1920s. When I was a little girl, my great grandma would tell me stories of this time. She and her siblings were not educated past fourth or fifth grade, but instead worked long hours picking sugar beets in the fields. My great grandmother’s sister, the baby of the family, my Auntie Lucy, once told me that she could fry a whole chicken for supper by the time she was eight years old. Throughout my childhood, one of my great joys was listening to my elders and their stories of overcoming struggle. I knew by the time I was in high school that someday I wanted to be a writer and I wanted to tell the stories of my people. The only problem was that most writers I knew of had graduated from college whereas I was failing out of high school.

 By my sophomore year, my grades were a sinking ship, but it was also around this time that I had an inspiring teacher who introduced me to books like House on Mango Street and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. My father gifted me copies of Kurt Vonnegut and Gabriel Garcia Marquez novels, and my mother told me about Sylvia Plath and Rudolfo Anaya. It was the first time in my life that I learned stories could connect people across cultures, using language and symbols to cement even deeper meaning. I was hooked. I found my calling, or should I say — my calling found me.

 As I was entering my senior year, I hadn’t done anything miraculous and gotten my grades up. In fact, as I got deeper into adolescence, the sleepy blank sadness of depression controlled even more of my life. But I still had the dream of one day becoming an author and I wanted to take Advance Placement English to help support my writerly education. And so, one day I found the courage to speak with the AP English teacher at my high school. I was nervous and afraid, but I advocated for myself, promising her that I wouldn’t miss any classes. This teacher was reluctant but after some persuasion, she agreed under one condition: If I missed even a single class, I would be kicked out and that would be that.

 Now, because you are all human and humans tend to make mistakes, I bet you all can guess what happened next. Yes, that’s right. I missed class. Looking back, I can’t be certain why I didn’t show up to AP English for several days in a row, but most likely it had to do with depression.

 I think it was a Thursday in September when I dragged myself back to school, ready to apologize and learn. In my memory of this morning, my teacher asks me into the hallway just before the bell. She is holding an essay I have written on Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. She tells me that I didn’t keep my word. That I haven’t upheld my end of the bargain. I am ashamed and crying, saying that I am tired of being a bad student, that I am always sad, and I don’t fit in with my classmates and sometimes I dream of dropping out of high school all together. This teacher looks at me, really looks at me, and I am hoping she can perceive all my distress and pain. But she cannot. She tells me that I got an A on my essay and that while I might be “a pretty good writer someday,” it's obvious to her that I am not cut out for school. She explains that I should drop out. And so, sadly, or maybe not so sadly, that’s what I did. I dropped out of high school weeks into my senior year.

 Now, for those of you who don’t me, I must pause and let you know that this was not the end of my educational journey, but it could have been. After getting my GED, I would go on to one day of community college, drop out of that, find my way to MSU-Denver, where I would graduate with my BA, then I would travel to California for a master’s program, where yet again I dropped out before finding my better fit at the University of Wyoming. I am now a professor, and for the past two years I’ve held the title of Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University and you maybe could have guessed it, but I’ve also published two acclaimed books. But let’s back up. Let’s return to the day I left high school.

I wish I could have told that younger version of myself crying in the school hallway that in four years I would go on to graduate from MSU-Denver with a degree in English and a Minor in Chicano Studies. I would receive a scholarship after my first semester for straight A’s and I would begin writing drafts of short stories and kicking around a novel idea about my ancestors. To this day, I keep a photo on my writing desk from my college graduation. In the photo, I am twenty-two and seated beside my Auntie Lucy who is well into her late eighties. She is clasping my hands, her nails beautiful in pink, and though her face is swollen from medications, in her eyes there is an eternal self. When I look at that photo, I remember that my Auntie Lucy was only educated to the fourth grade and that I, the young person beaming with pride beside her, was told I wasn’t cut out for school. Because of this, my college graduation will always be a day I remember as triumphant. I will always feel the strength of that accomplishment.

 You’re probably wondering what happened to that English teacher who told me to drop out? The truth is, I don’t know, but she, too, is a human being capable of making mistakes. I will say, that when my first book Sabrina & Corina was published, I left a copy in her mailbox, signed with a note: “Thank you for telling me to drop out of high school,” I wrote. “I am an author now.” At the time, I suppose I was having my own Biggie Smalls moment, “To all the teachers that told me I’d never amount to nothin,” but as the years have gone on, I really do mean it. I am thankful for that struggle. I am thankful for the meaning it gave my educational pursuits in the future and for the ways it taught me to never give up.  

 Now I have another story for you. This next one makes a very important stop right here at Fort Lewis. Years later, after I completed my master’s from the University of Wyoming, no one as far as I knew would hire me directly into the role of Famous Writer. During these years, I applied to countless entry-level positions until I eventually landed what I thought was a dream job.

 It was around Christmas when I moved to the Florida Keys, the southernmost point of the United States. It was a job in arts administration and at the time, I thought it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I lived on a tropical island and got to meet actual famous writers and editors from the world of New York City publishing. Each morning, I was greeted by a green iguana who hung upside down on the banana tree outside my bedroom window. But I didn’t last very long in Florida. Ultimately, I was forced to resign, which I think is a polite way of saying I was fired. That very day, however, I came home and rather than finding the iguana waiting for me, I found an email. It was from Fort Lewis College, offering me a teaching position I had applied to a year earlier. I packed my belongings in my silver Grand Prix. I drove back home to Colorado. I started in the fall.

I loved being at Fort Lewis. My students were bright and wonderful and reminded me of home.  I took long walks along the mesa, gazing at the mountains hugging the town like a relative. I got to know the sounds of the river and late nights in my office at Jones Hall I’d marvel as deer crept to my window while I graded papers or worked on short stories in the dark. On my first day, I was walking through campus when a black bear ran past me in goofy ball of bouncy fur. I waved my arms and yelled to everyone around me, “Be safe! There’s a bear!” They all just looked at me and then looked at the bear, shrugging as if the animal was simply another student, on its way to class. That’s when I realized things are a little different in Durango.

Beautiful things happened for me in the year that I was here. I found the voice of my novel and I was inspired by the land and my ancestral history of the region. When my mother first drove with me to find an apartment, we stopped at Chimney Rock. As we stood atop the trail, two eagles swooped down from the sky, nearly touching my shoulders in a gentle gust like a sweet breeze. When I looked up, my mother had tears in her eyes. She said the eagles were welcoming me home, and I don’t know why, but at the time I pretended like I didn’t care that much, but when I think about it now, I feel like crying, too.

It's also here at Fort Lewis where I decided that as much as I adored teaching and my students, I still needed to answer my calling. I was about to turn thirty and I told myself that I had to try one more time with everything I had to finish writing my first two books. And so, I left town and I went back to Denver where after my part time job in the mornings, I wrote every afternoon, 1000 words a day. Within a year, I received a contract to publish two books from Random House, changing my life forever.

The shame of quitting or being rejected has rattled me in ways long lasting. At the time of each, I was filled with regret, embarrassment, but deep down there was another emotion – gratitude. Gratitude that I didn’t allow a setback to derail my life’s passion, gratitude that I have family and friends who love and support me no matter how many times I’ve had to start over, and gratitude that I never lost sight of the future I hoped for myself.

No matter what lies ahead, Class of 2024, knowing when something no longer serves you will be an important part of your journeys. Jobs and relationships may come and go. Your lives will be lived as if in seasons, some bringing the new life of spring while others will close in around you like winter. There will be moments of greatness, like today, but as you know there will be times of struggle. In those periods, you will have to remind yourself of your life’s work, your purpose, your calling.  

I was once a younger version of the woman standing before you, unsure of who she would become in the world. I had no way of knowing as a scared high school drop-out that one day I would be a professor and that I would publish books and win awards and travel all over the country to discuss my fiction. I had no way of knowing that in 2024, I would stand before all of you in your brilliant caps and gowns, your minds filled with years of knowledge, and that I would be welcomed back to Fort Lewis to share with you some of my story, but that’s the thing about stories—they usually mean a lot more only when one’s looking back.

You will achieve great and wonderful things, and even in the times of struggle, know that you will be gifted with meaning on the other end. Congratulations to you, your families, and all your communities that will be impacted by your talented minds. No matter what struggles you face, step into each day knowing that your life has boundless meaning and purpose.

 I am immensely proud of you, Class of 2024. Congratulations and thank you very much.