So I first met Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya at a coming out party.
It was a coming out party for a desert tortoise--
[LAUGHTER]
--a desert tortoise named Juliettete.
And Juliettete was coming out of hibernation.
I had been to a party for Juliettete's coming out
the year before, and maybe even the year before that, too.
The thing is that Juliettete doesn't always actually come out
from under her rock at these parties.
They're anticipatory parties.
In fact, I don't think she's ever actually come out
in one of these parties.
Usually she emerges a few weeks later, once everyone has gone
and the warmth of spring has grown a little bit stronger.
Someone who did come out for this party,
however, was Rodrigo.
I did not know then that Rodrigo was
the author of The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos.
I didn't know that his work had appeared
in the Kenyon Review, The Offing,
or in Diagram. shout out to Diagram U of A. Or
that he would later be named a finalist for the 2025 DAG Prize
for Literature.
I also didn't know that his partner
Morgan was a novelist, too.
Working on a book with the coolest title
you've ever heard, The Oldest Bitch
Alive, which is about a dog.
Look for it next month.
It comes out next month.
But anyhow, to me, they're in Juliette's yard.
Rodrigo and Morgan were just a couple of cool guys.
Friends of a friend.
Sometimes when I meet cool people
who also happen to be writers, I almost
don't want to know what they write,
because I just want to be friends.
The way that we used to be friends with people before it
mattered what we did or what we wrote about.
And for a while things went according to plan,
and I remained oblivious to Rodrigo's writing.
Meeting up with him to watch Champions League Soccer matches,
or inviting him over for decidedly un-writerly hangout
sessions in which we mostly played video games.
I remember one night playing Mario Party.
Every time it was Rodrigo's turn,
he would sit straight up and make
everybody stop talking to him, saying
that he needed to lock in.
As he ignored everyone else in the room
to focus on rolling his dice, or chopping an onion,
or swinging on a vine, or whatever else
you end up doing in a Mario Party.
And one thing's for sure, Rodrigo is good at locking in,
because he definitely kicked everyone's ass that night.
And y'all should watch out because I see him locking
in the front row right now.
Anyhow, a months after this, I finally bought Rodrigo's book.
And I ended up reading it in a pretty locked-in environment
as it happens, during a self-made writing retreat
at a Benedictine monastery nestled
at the end of a canyon deep in New Mexico.
The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos opens in Tucson.
A 21-year-old goalkeeper is reflecting on his life after
a soccer injury.
His thoughts turned to the years he spent adrift
as an 18-year-old in Washington, DC with the first Trump
presidency roiling in the background,
as he struggles to place himself within an immigrant identity
in a time of xenophobic upheaval.
The book hit close to home.
I once lived in Washington, DC when
I was 18, in college during the Bush years,
as the Iraq War rattled on, and the power of border hawks
grew in the halls of Congress.
I probably felt more adrift in those years
than I've ever felt in my life.
And as I read, I saw myself clearly
in the book's narrator, Gregorio,
who seemed like a past self I had almost
forgotten about entirely, until cracking the spine of this book
under the red walls of that canyon,
with the sound of beavertails slapping
against the waters of the Chama River in the distance.
It's no surprise that I had largely
forgot about that time in my young adult life, a time when
our heads are filled with questions
about our place in the world.
Here on the grounds of a university,
this time is a perpetual present.
As Gregorio prepares to say goodbye to his father
before a visit to Colombia, he worries
about leaving his old man alone with all of our ghosts.
He means the ghosts of an immigrant family.
But the ghosts were here first, Gregorio's father tells him,
as if to let this young person know
that there is no life without the churning questions of who
we are and where we come from looming overhead.
All there is to do, his father seems to imply,
is to decide when and how to come out from underneath them.
Please welcome Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya.
[APPLAUSE]