Kelly Sundberg

MFA Faculty

oN blue: an induction

In my first year as a tenure-track faculty member at Ashland University, the English honors society, Sigma Tau Delta, asked me to give their induction address. What follows is a slightly edited version of the speech that I gave. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about what to discuss tonight, and for some reason I kept thinking about the color blue—in particular passages of great literature that reference the color blue—and as I was trying to unthread this vague idea that I had about blue, and beauty, and melancholy, I realized that what I was really thinking of wasn’t the color blue, it was my younger self, and I knew then that I wanted to talk about opportunities and reinvention through this veil of blue. 

I read the powerful writer Rebecca Solnit’s book, Savage Dreams, as an undergraduate in Boise Idaho while I was taking a Literature of the American West class. It was the first time I had encountered long-form narrative nonfiction, and after I turned the last page, I had a moment where I thought “I want to write like this.” I quickly dismissed that notion because writing was not something that I had ever thought someone like me could do. 

In Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild, she chooses to hike the Pacific Crest trail by herself as a way of dealing with the grief of her mother’s death. Before this hike, Strayed had fallen apart in a spectacular fashion—even turning to heroin—and her goal is to rediscover the core of who she is, the girl that she knows still lives inside of her. At one point, she meets a man who gives her a ride. When he talks about the mistakes he’s made in his life, she asks if he would change them, and he says, “There’s never been a time when there’s been a fork in my road.” 

I’ve never forgotten that line; it’s something that haunts me. When I was on the academic job market, I interviewed with a school in Utah. One of the interviewers said, “How would you support our students who want to publish with New York publishers?” I said, “I would tell them that it’s not impossible, that I grew up just like your students, and no one ever told me that I could be whatever I wanted to be. That kind of mythology was reserved for other kids—kids who didn’t grow up rural and poor.” 

I didn’t get that job.

As someone who grew up in the American West, I think of it as a place known for its inescapable beauty and loneliness. Also, ruggedness, lawlessness, individualism, an abundance of natural resources, and the exploitation of those natural resources and the people who exist within them. 

While messaging with a friend in Washington state last night, she asked me if I knew a woman from my hometown who had left and gone on to become a successful writer, I told my friend that I’d never heard of the woman who was older than me, but it became clear from my Google searches that the woman was part of a prominent ranching family in my community. I wrote to my friend, “She was related to my high school English teacher. He was actually a really good writer himself, but kind of an alcoholic and womanizer, and he has been standoffish to me since my writing career took off, which is no surprise now that I'm reading the rest of this sentence.”

I then told her something I believe to be true, “Smart women from that area get punished when they leave.” 

The West is my home, but it can be a hard, lonely place to be born into. 

Something I appreciate about Solnit’s writing is that in her skilled hands, the West is neither caricatured, nor minimized. She knows that the West is both beautiful and brutal. In her writing, the landscape often becomes representative of her inner state. In her essay, “The Blue of Distance,” the blue sky on the horizon near the Great Salt Lake is the blue of desire. She writes,

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.

I remember reading that phrase—the blue of longing—and knowing precisely what the blue of longing is, though it would still be difficult for me to describe. Maybe it’s that, once we have the object of our desire, it’s so often no longer the thing we desire. Maybe it’s that dreams are always at their brightest when they seem both possible and impossible at the same time. 

When I first encountered Solnit’s writing in that Literature of the American West class, I was back in school after a long break. Years earlier, I had entered into the honors college at the University of Montana when I was 18, but I found myself paralyzed by anxiety and perfectionism. I ended up failing most of my classes and dropping out. It was the most epic failure of my life, and it was humiliating. I’d like to say that I learned my lesson, but there were many other failures and will likely be more. Still, as Samuel Beckett wrote, "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." (It’s likely that Beckett didn’t intend for his words to be quoted in such an optimistic manner, but it works for my purpose here).

When I was in the ninth grade, I was one of only two girls who was cut from the high school volleyball team. That was one of my earliest humiliating failures. Still, the next day, I let a friend talk me into joining the cross-country team. I mostly did this because, on the cross-country team, I’d get to ride the bus with boys (my priorities were clearly those of a fourteen-year-old girl). I didn’t get a boyfriend, and I was terrible at cross-country, but it ended up being some of the most fun I’ve had in my life. My mom would bring this up for years after as an example of my resilience. I would fail in some way, and she would say, “You’re going to be okay. You’re my daughter who, when you got cut from the volleyball team, joined the cross-country team.” 

Years later, after I had left my physically and emotionally abusive husband, I was crying on the phone to my mother. I didn’t know what I was going to do—didn’t know how I was going to support my child, how I was even going to make it from day to day. My mother said to me, “You’re going to be okay. You’re my daughter who, when you got cut from the volleyball team, joined the cross-country team.” 

I paused for a long while then said, “Mom, getting cut from the volleyball team was humiliating.” 

She didn’t know how to respond, so she didn’t, and she stopped bringing up that story, but as happens with stories like this, when she stopped bringing it up, I missed it. The tale had been a reminder of my failure, but it was also a reminder of my mother’s faith in me. And what I grew to learn in the years following was that I was resilient. That I was my mother’s daughter who got cut from the volleyball team, then joined the cross-country team, and that there was no shame in that. 

Shortly after that conversation with my mother, I divorced my husband, then I left the state the very following day to raise my child alone and start my PhD. It was during my PhD that I began to write my own story. 

In her book Blue Nights, Joan Didion writes, “In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue … You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming—in fact not at all a warming—yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise … To the English it was ‘the gloaming.’ The very word ‘gloaming’ reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers, slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights, you think the end of day will never come.” 

Fall, too, has a certain gloaming, and is, in my opinion, the best time of year to write. Fall always makes me a bit melancholy. An English professor once described melancholy as “a sadness that we enjoy,” and maybe this is why I love the color blue so much. The blue of distance, or longing, or gloaming is, also, a sadness that I enjoy.

Maggie Nelson writes in her book Bluets, “And so I fell in love with a color—in this case, the color blue—as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.” 

I first read Bluets while on a Greyhound bus from my hometown to Salt Lake City where I was headed to catch a flight to a writer’s residency in Belgium. I had sold my book to HarperCollins on a proposal and received an advance to support me while I wrote it. It was a dream that I had never been told was possible. No one had ever told me that I could be whatever I wanted to be. Outside the windows of the bus, the Rocky Mountains and cerulean blue skies flew by. I thought of Solnit’s Great Salt Lake—so impossibly blue—the blue of longing. I always felt that blue most acutely when I was home in the West. It was a kind of painful longing, but one that I enjoyed.

I read more from Bluets, “Then again, perhaps it does feel like a fire—the blue core of it, not the theatrical orange crackling. I have spent a lot of time staring at this core in my own ‘dark chamber,’ and I can testify that it provides an excellent example of how blue gives way to darkness—and then how, without warning, the darkness grows up into a cone of light.” 

For me, that’s what the best writing does. It gives us a chance to stare at our own “dark chambers,” then the “darkness grows up into a cone of light.” I tell my students that this is universal truth—a truth that resonates with all of us. 

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Blue is light seen through a veil.” 

While I was at that writer’s residency in Belgium, I walked on a path every night. The blue of the sky was so different from the blue skies I had grown up with—softer, dimmer—as though it was light seen through a veil. One night, I looked at some thick, cumulus clouds, and a line from an Amy Lowell poem flashed into my head, “Over the street the white clouds meet and sheer away without touching.” I had failed so many times in my life, but all of those failures had brought me to this place. I went back to my room and wrote at my little desk that overlooked a field full of ponies while the sun dipped behind the horizon and the blue faded to black. 

In the final chapter of my book, there is a pivotal moment where I’m feeling happy with a friend after a long period of grief. In that moment, both as it happened, and as I wrote it, I tried to memorize the outline of my happiness so that I’d have it to return to when I felt sad. Mostly, I tried to memorize the outline of those blue, western skies. And it worked. Though I don’t live in the West anymore, I’ll always have those skies in my heart, and in the color blue, but I also have a book now, a career, a happy child, and lots of wonderful friends. I am nothing if not reinvented. 

Most of all, I always have literature to turn to when I’m looking for solace. 

If I could have told my 22-year-old self— a girl who grew up in cattle country, who had flunked out of college, who had never been told that she could do whatever she wanted to do—that I would one day be a published author who traveled to Belgium for writer’s residencies and taught writing for a living, then maybe my 22-year-old self wouldn’t have been so filled with the blue of longing. Still, so much beauty was contained in that longing. 

If there is a message in this, it’s not that we can all be whatever we want to be because I don’t necessarily believe that, but I do think there is power in failing, and dreaming, and reinventing ourselves. For me, that power is akin to Solnit’s blue of longing. Success doesn’t come from the achievement; it comes from the desire that propels the journey. It comes from the magic of a life that holds both possibility and impossibility in equal measure. 

KELLY SUNDBERG'S MEMOIR, GOODBYE, SWEET GIRL: A STORY OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND SURVIVAL WAS PUBLISHED IN 2018 BY HARPERCOLLINS. HER ESSAY "IT WILL LOOK LIKE A SUNSET" WAS ANTHOLOGIZED IN BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2015, AND OTHER ESSAYS HAVE BEEN LISTED AS NOTABLES IN THE SAME SERIES. HER ESSAYS HAVE APPEARED IN ALASKA QUARTERLY REVIEW, GAY MAGAZINE, DENVER QUARTERLY, GULF COAST, GUERNICA, SLICE, AND OTHER LITERARY MAGAZINES. SHE HAS BEEN THE RECIPIENT OF FELLOWSHIPS AND GRANTS FROM VERMONT STUDIO CENTER, A ROOM OF HER OWN FOUNDATION, DICKINSON HOUSE, AND THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS. SHE IS AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF CREATIVE WRITING AT ASHLAND UNIVERSITY.