This is my Acceptance Speech:

On libraries and finishing and the things we become.

This morning, as I typed the twenty-eight-hundredth word of my capstone college essay, “From Madonna to Madonna: Profiting off Female Purity in Popular Culture throughout History,” I paused, recognizing the date. In one month I will graduate with a four-year-degree it has taken me twenty-three-years to complete.

Higher education was always my dream. Education, at all, really. Precocious and interested from a young age, I felt stifled and structured in the religious upbringing of my home school curriculum. Our job, in childhood, was first, obedience, and then eventual, and hurried, reproduction. I wasn’t sure how to be more than a Proverbs 31 wife, but when I pushed the lawn mower across our backyard Kentucky bluegrass, I imagined myself giving acceptance speeches for academic awards I’d never win. My parents, both college educated, offered me literature and creation science — it wasn’t until I was 38 that my son explained evolution so I’d finally understand.

Our small town library was my haven of imagination and experience, growing up. After I’d been gone, and grown, some twenty-five-years or more, I found, on Facebook, my childhood librarian, now seventy-eight, to tell her, “I grew up a weird homeschooled kid in rural Kentucky and you were a light to me…