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- Remarks by Debra Marquart
- Faculty Speaker
December 14, 2007
Trying to Say Something About Trouble
Dean Whiteford, Faculty and Staff, Relatives and Friends, Class of Fall 2007: First of all, graduates, congratulations on making the excellent decision to graduate in winter. It may be cold outside, but here inside Hilton Coliseum, you will always have this memory of basking in the glow of adoration from your friends, your family, your professors. See how we have assembled and surround you now, gazing in wonder at your brilliance, beaming in admiration? All those lectures you attended, all those tests you took and papers you completed, all those late nights you spent doing important sociological field research on Welch Avenue! We're proud of you, yes, but also we're happy to linger. What's the rush—it's cold outside.
This ritual, commencement, celebrates your past accomplishments, but it also signals your entrance into the next part of your life. It's a threshold space we're occupying now for the duration of this ceremony, as if standing in a doorway, suspended in a twilight zone that is no longer your past, but not quite your future. So, by design, to mark the moment, we gather together wearing these odd hats and gowns, in full regalia, to reflect on the distance you've crossed, and to dream about where you might go next.
Maybe it's ironic, or maybe it's appropriate that I would be the one to deliver your commencement address. Long before I was an English professor and an author of books, I was a college student much like you. Between 1974 when I started college, and 1984 when I actually graduated with my bachelor's degree from Moorhead State University (I was on the ten-year plan), I had a lot of time to contemplate commencement. You see, in 1977, two classes short of graduating with a degree in Social Work, I dropped out of college and joined a rock band.
I don't recommend this to anyone, and I only feel safe telling you this now, because your own graduation is a fait accompli—the leather diploma binders are somewhere, waiting in piles, the inky calligraphy of your names is almost dry on parchment. So whether you walked the long, crooked path to graduation, as I did, or found the shortest distance between two points, the main thing is that you have all arrived here together at this destination.
I dropped out of college in 1977, because I realized I was on the wrong path, and I didn't know what to do about it. Growing up in my hometown, a small farming community in the middle of North Dakota in the early 1970s, I knew I wanted to go to college, mostly because I was very interested in escaping my small hometown in the middle of North Dakota. But I didn't know a thing about college majors or careers. Everyone around me was a farmer or a banker, a teacher or a nun. I didn't want to be any of those things right then, so I remember scanning the library shelves for books about careers, when I came upon this title, So You Want to Be A Social Worker? I suppose I was young and highly-suggestible, but when I saw that title, something inside me said, “Well, okay.”
It wasn't until my senior year, doing an internship at a state hospital in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, that I realized that, while social work is an admirable profession, it wasn't for me. And maybe that's something for you to think about—just because you can do something, doesn't necessarily mean you should do it. There's something for you to do in the world, but you have to find it. You have to follow your heart and your brain, and your nose. You have to keep your eyes open—see the signs and learn how to interpret them. Okay, I promised myself I wouldn't try to dispense advice to you. So before I start to feel like Mr. McGuire in that famous movie, The Graduate—whotook the Dustin Hoffman character aside to offer him advice about the future saying, “I just want to say one word to you, one word. Are you listening? Plastics!”—I'll just continue with my story.
I should have had a clue, long before I took the drastic step of dropping out of school, that I was misplaced in my chosen profession. In my junior year, I had taken a “Readings in Social Work” class in which we read ten or twelve big social problems novels like Steinbeck's narrative about the dust bowl, The Grapes of Wrath, and Upton Sinclair's, The Jungle. We came together to discuss the novels, but our main objective in reading them was to write intervention plans in which we, as social workers, would imagine ourselves stepping into the plot at key moments to head off the catastrophes that were accumulating since page one in the lives of the characters. I found I loved reading and discussing the novels, but I had no interest in stepping into the plot and intervening. I was content to watch the tragic events play out. Now that I'm a fiction writer I understand this—trouble is a writer's stock and trade. Without trouble, there can be no story.
So I dropped out of college, which naturally came as a great surprise and disappointment to my parents and also to my very nice fiancé, with whom I then had to break up, and I joined a really bad country western band, then later a rock and roll band, then a progressive hard rock band, then a heavy metal band. I stayed on the road like this for seven years, from 1977 to 1983, traveling with these bands. And I was poor, and lived hard, and I dyed my hair jet black, and I wore spandex and leather, and screamed my voice out each night on stage, and I starved, and generally got knocked around quite a bit by life.
But the thing I want to get to, the reason I'm telling you this story, is that in the middle of those years, in 1980, my own band lost all of its equipment in a truck fire—$60,000 worth of equipment, all of it uninsured because who would be crazy enough to insure a rock band—and so I found myself stalled out in Fargo (which is not a fate worse than death, but close) in this sub-basement efficiency apartment where I had long days and long, sleepless nights to walk a circle in the carpet. It was as if someone had bored a very deep, narrow hole in the ground and plunked me down into it. I was twenty-four years old, and I felt claustrophobic in my own life.
I won't pretend to know how I picked up a pen and a piece of paper. But somewhere in those hours it began to occur to me that while I had lost everything on the material plane, the idea of those things was still alive in me. I had the words for them. Already, I felt the separation from that life on the road, but language stepped in to bridge the gap. Already I was reciting sentences and descriptions and stories about the strange people I'd known and the odd things that had happened on the road. This was the beginning of my life as a writer of books, which eventually brought me to my larger life as a teacher and a scholar. But I knew none of these things at that moment. I had only this pen and paper, and this candle on the table, so I lit it. I sat there and stared at that tongue of flame for a long while in the dark room as it weaved and dipped on its wick. “Okay,” I finally addressed the fire, “you got my attention. Now what were you trying to tell me?”
So I suppose with this story, I'm trying to say something about trouble. No matter how good or careful you are, trouble will likely come to you. Here's my wish that if it must appear, it comes in mild forms. I suppose I'm trying to say that the choices you make after trouble appears have power and bear greatly on the future that will unfurl before you. That even if it feels like the bottom-of-the-well-with-no-ladder-out-over, it's not over. That sometimes the awesome destructive power of trouble itself can be harnessed to make a solution, and that even if you can't see your future at that moment, if you can imagine it, you will have some hand in shaping it.
Well, there I go, doing the thing I said I wouldn't do—dispensing advice. But now that I've started, I guess I do have a few basic, nuts-and-bolts things that I really wanted to say, before I let you go. Earlier this week during the snowstorm, I was walking through the slushy ice from Ross Hall to the Union, and I saw this young guy walking with a group of his friends, and he was wearing flip flops—rubber flip flops and no socks in an ice storm! If that was one of you, I just want to beg you to put on some shoes. You're a graduate now. Display some common sense. And those pajama bottoms—the flannel or fleece ones with little sleeping kittens or leaping sheep on them—that people sometimes try to pass off as sweatpants when they run over to QuikTrip or even sometimes to the library and then to class. They're pajamas! Leave them at home, along with the fuzzy slippers. Now that you're a graduate, it's the only smart thing to do.
And, finally, speaking of the smartness that comes with graduation: Several years ago, when I drove home to North Dakota to visit my family, I stopped down to see my sister at the bar she manages. During that time, she was also the mayor. There are four girls in my family, three of whom have moved away to other states, and only my one sister remains in my hometown.
So standing in the bar, waiting for my sister to emerge from the kitchen, I was approached by a regular, a local guy, who waggled his finger at me and said, “You're one of the Marquart girls, aren't you.” I told him I was. And then he scratched his whiskers, and stared at me for a while longer, trying to figure out which one of the Marquart girls I was.
“Aren't you the one,” he finally said, “who was in college for so long?”
“Yes,” I quickly said. Thank godness, I thought, that he didn't say that I was the one who broke her father's heart by dropping out of school and joining a rock and roll band.
“That would be me,” I said, “the college girl.”
But then he continued to stare at me. “You must have been really stupid,” he said, “that you had to stay in college for so long.”
Of course he was joking, but I had this image of the Regents, like a parole board, considering my level of intelligence each year, and weighing how dangerous I might be to the outside world, then reluctantly deciding to keep me again and again, each year, until I finally grew smarter.
So to you, the LAS graduating class of fall 2007, I'm happy to report that you're so smart now that we've decided to let you go. We release you into the world, like doves into the sky. Remember us on your journeys and check back from time to time. We will be here, watching you from afar, tracking your progress, and marveling at the magnificence of your flight.
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- Debra Marquart
Professor of English
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