I did want to, just because I don't know the next time I'm
going to get to be in Tucson.
If there's ever, like, an occasion for my life
to flash before my eyes or a montage made of my life,
one of the moments would be in Tucson.
I came here in 2004.
Just proposed to my current wife,
had no prospects when I came here.
This sounds so old, but I picked up a telephone
and I called Pima Community College
and I said, hi, I'm Andy Grace, I'm a new poet in town.
I would like to teach at your school, can I?
And from some dumb luck, eventually that phone call
led me to Meg Files, who is in attendance tonight.
Thank you so much, Meg, for coming.
And Meg, a great supporter of all things
poetry and creative writing, hired me sight unseen.
So I loved teaching at Pima.
For some extra money, I also taught,
some of the longer time Tucsonans
will remember the mall on Broadway,
and they used to have--
the woman who drove me from the airport
here is telling me that that's empty at this point.
But I used to have a Borders Books, Borders on Broadway.
And so I worked there part-time.
And the whole time we were here, there was this pressure.
And I think that if there are younger writers here,
there are moments in which you have a thing,
but then you need the next thing to happen
and the doors are closed and you're just
waiting for that open door.
So Meg opened the door for me to be here.
So now I needed the next thing, especially since we
were going to get married.
So it was weighing on me.
I was applying for everything.
Everything was a no.
And I remember this particular day,
I was alphabetizing Chilton automotive guides at Borders,
like, to do home mechanics.
If you don't want to take your car in, can fix it yourself.
So I'm like, Ford, Mercury, and I'm just thinking, like,
what is my life?
What am I doing with my life?
What am I-- why did I propose if I couldn't do my part of making
money for the family?
So I was catastrophizing.
And I get this phone call from my wife.
And if you've ever worked retail,
that you can't just pick up a phone when you're on the floor.
So I was like, I'm just going to let it go.
And if it's important, she'll call back.
And she called back immediately.
So I was like, OK, something's up.
So I asked for a break, I go outside and I call her,
and she's like, when I would apply for things.
Back then, we moved so much that I would just
list my mom's contact info for stuff.
And so my wife was like, hey, your mom
just called about a voicemail that she got.
Some Irish lady at Stanford is calling about something,
and they didn't know what that meant.
But I knew what that meant.
And it meant that I had got the Wallace Stegner
Fellowship, which was like the biggest long shot, Hail Mary
that I had applied for, the most competitive thing I applied
for that I had written off.
And so I had this moment of just utter joy.
And I look up, I I'd been in the box store
for so long, I forgot about the outdoors.
And I look up, and I see this sunset
that I think the desert sky is like, uniquely
capable of creating, which is like the pinky-salmon,
purple-orange.
In the Midwest, we have some good ones,
but not like what you all have out here.
And it was the most epic sunset I'd had the whole two
years, here was in front of me.
And I had this news, and there's this landscape,
and it was just one of those inflection points
that I think a lot of writers and artists go through,
where you need that open door, the next thing.
And so I bring that up just to say thank you
to the universe of that moment of me in Tucson.
There's some square of concrete by that defunct mall that's
like a Spirit Halloween or something
that is like, we'll always have a piece of me living with it.
But I do hope for the young writers
that when it's your turn to pray to the gods of the open door,
that they listen, and I bet that they will.