This article was originally written for FirstGenerationStudent.com, now a part of ImFirst.org.
I still recall being a freshman college student in the balcony section of the first convocation of the year. The college president was giving us a speech about college life and how the next four years would be transformative, whether we realized it yet or not. Then he warned my freshman class to be prepared to be seen as outsiders, especially if we came from a small town. He told us that people will see us in a different light. He made it sound like attending a prestigious college cut us off from friends and family back home who’d never been to college, and those who’d decided not to go.
It was in graduate school that I learned how unlikely my trajectory as a first-generation college student was. Little did I know that those words the college president spoke back in August of 2002 would come to pass. In fact, over the years I found myself glossing over college in conversations, not mentioning degrees, and staying mum about my publications. Was writing simply a socially awkward thing to do (and explain), or did my rural American roots subconsciously encourage silence when it came to writing and higher education?
Yearning for More
My personal battle for a college education began long before. As early as eighth grade I was yearning for more challenges, more books, more experiences, just … more. Outside my bedroom window was an Angus cattle farm, punctuated by black barns and gleaming white fences over rolling green hills—a postcard of Kentucky, really. By my freshman year of high school I was plotting my escape to college. I cherry-picked the best schools I could find. By my sophomore year, I was a walking encyclopedia of admission rates, average GPAs and Ivy League schools. I knew where my favorite writers had gone to school and I spent nights browsing the newly formed websites of the schools that my parents had agreed to visit with me the subsequent summer.
The following year was characterized by stacks of applications at various stages of completion littering my bedroom; there were thick envelopes and essays in progress. Meanwhile, I would be downstairs, engaged in a heated argument with my parents. The trouble lay in my family’s attitude toward higher education: What is it for? Why do you want to go? I didn’t go. College is expensive…why does it cost so much?
The fact that I had no plans to pursue a financially viable trade like medicine or law didn’t help my situation. I wanted to continue reading great books and learn more about writing, so my answers were never as goal-oriented as my parents would have liked. Looking back, I now understand how infuriating it must have been to have a conversation about college with the 17-year-old me. Although I couldn’t articulate a career path, my transcript was nearly flawless and I had my high school guidance counselor firmly on my side. After months of getting nowhere with my parents, I asked the guidance counselor to please talk to them and try to reason with them.
From Stalemate to Changing for Good
The stalemate broke when my father allowed me to apply to a college that was ranked as the best liberal arts school in the state. You’d think this would have made me happy, but I didn’t look happy. It felt like I’d spent years getting the architecture of my college application just right. I’d been a four-year member of the band, eventually rising to principal clarinet. My participation in the yearbook staff had progressed in a similar way: after two years of assisting, I served as the editor for junior and senior year. I’d even had a poem published in a nationally distributed literary journal. I requested that the college application be mailed to me, and when it arrived I took it to my bedroom and slowly began filling it out by hand. I was told that completing other applications would be a waste of time, so I trashed all of the applications to schools like Williams College, Mt. Holyoke and Amherst that I’d worked so diligently on.
Within a month, I got the acceptance letter in the mail. As I stood there at the mailbox, reading it over one more time, then turned to walk back up the long driveway, I felt like I was finishing a race somewhere in the middle. I felt lost in a crowd and so small that you’d have to squint to see me. I’d had dreams of going somewhere with a legacy, a place where the only poets I’d really cared about had already been. I wanted to be on the same trail they blazed long ago. I felt like I was still nowhere, just spinning my wheels.
But that fall, when the college president spoke so candidly to my incoming freshman class, I started to believe that my life was changing for the good. It’s true that when I went back home, people treated me differently, which makes me wonder: Why is it that rural America is so suspicious when it comes to higher education? Does higher education seem like a luxury? Do people think it’s like taking the easy way out? In my hometown most people work on farms, in factories or in construction. This work is really physical and very exhausting. In contrast, my life as a graduate student often featured me laid up on the couch for hours on end, annotating dog-eared copies of Baudelaire, Anne Carson and Chaucer. I wonder if that’s the real concern and source of suspicion: the inevitable rift that opens between you and your hometown when you decide you want more.
Coming Full Circle
During the fall 2011 semester I taught English at Western Kentucky University and for the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. I worked to expose my students to books, stories and poems that have rattled, challenged and haunted me over the years. Some days I was victorious; some days I fell flat on my face. But I tried to give them a broad sense of how literature makes us better people by enriching our lives and making us a little wiser.
So what about people like me—or, should I say, people like the 18-year-old me? I’d wanted to get out of town because I felt like the town had nothing for me—not a future, anyway. More than anything, I wanted cultural opportunities, exposure to the arts and to meet like-minded people. Now, back in my home state, I feel proud to be working with college students interested in the creative arts. It feels like I’m helping to fix something that I had found broken. Through my work in college advising and the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, I hope to assist other first-generation college students interested in the arts make a case for their dreams and, most importantly, make college a reality.