My mother always wanted me to be a doctor. She finally got her wish.
On Saturday, I had the honor of delivering the commencement address to the 2024 graduating class of Hamline University in St. Paul. Along with the honor came a degree. I am now an honorary Doctor of Letters. It was a wonderfully gala affair, full of all the traditional pomp and circumstance, with a palpable celebratory mood in the air, which came from both the students and their rightfully proud families.
It was my first commencement ceremony. You see, I never graduated from college. I was forced to leave Stanford University at the end of my freshman year because I’d taken part in a peaceful occupation of the administration building during a protest related to the war in Vietnam. I never went back to college in a focused way. But as I told the audience at the commencement, this experience started me in so many ways on my path to becoming a writer. For many years after I left college, I worked construction and, in the process, met the kinds of men and women I would never have met in a classroom, who taught me all kinds of things I would have learned from a textbook.
Several good things came from that Stanford experience. Among them, I met the woman to whom I’ve been married for more than fifty years. And, honestly, I’ve always found it far more interesting to tell folks that I was kicked out of Stanford rather than that I actually graduated from the place.
I was so honored to have been asked to deliver the commencement address. I’m a storyteller, so mostly I told stories about heroes and heroines who overcame great odds to achieve their goals. I told them that we looked to them to become our next generation of heroes and heroines. As I’m recalling now the fire that lit their young, eager faces, I absolutely believe that they have a good shot at doing just that.
High Congratulations, Dr. Krueger! I have read all your books and learned so much more from you as a writer than if you’d pursued your initial degree. (I’d likely never encountered you because we live in such different parts of the US.) What an amazing day for you. celebrate with you!
What a fabulous achievement! I’ve read ALMOST all your Cork O’Connor books (I don’t want to go TOO fast because I don’t want the journey to end!), as well as your stand-alone novels, and I absolutely love your work. But more importantly, I love that you weren’t afraid to tell a bunch of college students that you were kicked out of school for participating in something that was important to you in your young life. I am also an adjunct professor of College Composition and I often tell my students that we learn more from our “failures” than from our successes. While some might say getting kicked out of Stanford was a failure, I’d say it’s the best thing that ever happened to you. Perhaps if you’d stayed, we’d never have characters like Cork, Henry, Rainy, Jo, and all the rest… Congratulations, Doctor!
Congratulations! You are worthy oops this degree.
I discovered you in 2012 at my 50th class reunion. One if my class members spoke of your books, encouraging us to read them. We graduated from Aurora High School in Minnesota, a back ground for some of your stories. I now live on a farm west of the Northwest Angle.
Over the past 12 years, I have devoured each of your books, as I am doing right now, reading “The River We Remember, A Novel.” Thank you for sharing your wonderful stories, carry on!
After 44 years as a teacher of literature and composition at the secondary and college levels, and after sitting through more commencement ceremonies than I care (or am able) to remember, I can say with some authority that any graduation is pretty much just hype. Sure, your parents buy you a new pair of shoes, and you get to wear that dorky hat and feel that tassel swinging against your cheek when you strut across the stage in your 15-second walk of fame. But that’s about it.
Here’s a sad truth: Some students who’ve graduated should not have–the school just wanted them to move on. (And grow up.) Others who might have graduated but did not for one reason or another often earn their degree elsewhere, sometimes on the street, sometimes on the farm, sometimes at home, helping out.
So I’m not a great fan of graduations.
To my way of thinking, the important stuff comes after graduation, when the party’s over and you make the transition from student to whomever it is you want to be. Some graduates never make that transition. Rudderless and running on empty, they drift. In contrast, many of their nongraduate peers–the ones who had to leave because life happened–make the transition seemingly without effort. That’s because they are in a state of transition all the time. They learned early on that every night is a graduation. Every morning is a commencement.
So while I congratulate you on your honorary doctorate, Kent, I am more in awe of you because you did not graduate. Still, you know people, and you know language, and you know story. Your books rest on my shelves, and now and then I pick one up to reread a passage. My two diplomas–undergrad and grad–are stashed away somewhere, probably at the back of a file cabinet. Never look at them.
Congratulations, Dr. Krueger!
I’m a former college professor who turned to elementary school teaching three years ago. I just picked up TRICKSTER’s POINT and can’t put it down. I actually know someone named Jubal! He’s getting this book when I finish with it.
Thank you for your strong Minnesota voice in your writing!
Dr. Krueger,
I didn’t make it to college– I dropped out before graduating high school, to raise a family of four children and experience the life that I now write about. I finally went to college in my fifties, and was just a few credits short when I decided I really wanted to write, so I quit. i think I’ve read about half of your published books, and have a new one on my Kindle. I love your colorful descriptions, and your settings, and I adore Henry, and love your fictional children. Thank you for your work.
Dr. Krueger, I do not know why it has taken me so long to discover your writings. I have read The River We Remember, This Tender Land, and Ordinary Grace. Your descriptions of the settings brought me back home to Renville, Minnesota, about 7 miles from the Minnesota River. My father often took us to the Deep Eddy, where monster channel cats were caught. We lived near the granite quarries, and an old gold mine that was so dangerous, but many friends swam there anyway. Your characters are the memories of my childhood. A niece worked the reservations in North Redwood near the Brown Memorial. Several excursions between the whites and Sioux happened there in the 1860’s. Because I graduated from Mankato State, I was well aware of the hangings of the Sioux warriors after the uprising.
Thank you for the beautiful descriptions and characters.
I look forward to reading more of your work.
My book club loved The River We Remember.