Author’s note: This article is part two of four in a series on women at Kenyon who the author personally finds to be downright inspiring. This series is by no means comprehensive since of course, all babes of Kenyon are badass.
Name: Trudy Wrona
Class: 2020
Major: Modern Languages and Literatures
Concentrations: French and Arabic
Hometown: Fort Mill, South Carolina
Groups involved with on campus: WKCO and the Kenyon Review
Role model: Her older sister Annie, for her kindness, and her other older sister Mary, for her work ethic.
Why Trudy is badass: I’ve known Trudy since I was a junior in high school, and she has intimidated/fascinated/been kind to me ever since. We went to the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities together, a public boarding school attended by high school juniors and seniors who audition to get in. Trudy and I are both graduates of the creative writing program. At Kenyon, Trudy is both a first-generation and an independent student. She and her three sisters, Drea (who moved to Mount Vernon last semester), Mary, and Annie, learned very early on how to fight for and take care of themselves: they grew up under an abusive father, who became even more so after their mother passed away. Like Toneisha, who I interviewed in my last article, Trudy has never held less than two jobs at once during her time at Kenyon. TL;DR: Trudy is a boss-ass bitch out here defying odds and working harder than just about anyone I can think of.
Sarah: So it’s the final push to the end of the year. What are you trying to accomplish before the end of the semester? Trudy: I want to do some more stuff for my residents, so that’s one thing. I’m getting summer plans finalized, so that’s another thing. I also just started flute lessons… Let’s see … that’s pretty much it, other than keeping it the fuck together until the school year ends. I’m sure I’ll feel a significant decrease in stress. Then we just play our finances right until Drea leaves for college.
S: Cool… You said you’re finalizing summer plans; what are those?
T: So I’m definitely going to be working part-time at Wiggin Street over the summer, and I’m definitely going to be CAing. I know that they need people to CA KEEP [Kenyon Educational Enrichment Program], which would be really cool because I didn’t get to go to KEEP because I was going to the Iowa Young Writers’ Program during KEEP the year before I came here. So I didn’t get to do that, but I did REACH [Recognizing Each Other’s Ability to Conquer the Hill] my freshman year, and I love the ODEI [Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] and they’re really important. Especially this year, Jacky [Neri Arias ‘13] has just been so good about everything I need … just so great, because she knows everything that’s going on with my sister, and so she’s just like, “If you need, like clothes, or a toothbrush, let me know.” And my life is … sometimes I need clothes and a toothbrush, you know? So it’s really nice to have her… Overall, I’ll probably work about thirty hours a week with res life and twenty hours a week with Wiggin Street.
S: Where’s your summer?
T: Well, you know, it’ll be in the evenings. I worked nine to five last summer—in a lab, researching—so I was doing forty hours a week, and I was always surprised about the amount of free time I had. It looks like what I’ll be doing this summer is working from morning to afternoon in res life and then closing every single day at Wiggin Street, which is only three to four hours every day. And that just seems right. That’s a good rhythm I can get into, being like, “Okay, I close every day,” and then my day is done at seven. And then I can just do whatever I want.
S: I’ve heard of this thing people experience here called the “sophomore slump,” where they become sort of apathetic towards being here because the excitement of being a first-year is gone, but you’re not a junior yet so you don’t have the excitement of going abroad or anything. Have you experienced that?
T: I’ve been thinking about this a lot, about whether I have or not, and I think what happened instead of the sophomore slump is that I had to kick it into like … I don’t know, I wish I knew how to drive stick because I’d make a really good metaphor here. Kick it into like, sixth gear? I don’t know, how many gears are there? First semester I was still pre-med—and I was starting Arabic… I was with a lot of first-years and I was living on a first-year hall, being a CA for the first time, which was also new, so I think I had these new stimuli, and that was fine for like, the first month, and then … It must have been literally September first or something, my little sister texts me, “I’m living out of my car.” And I’m like, you know, “Okay, come here.” I literally had two weeks where life was “normal” or whatever before I had to become this almost this parent-figure for my sister.
Then, I didn’t get into this summer program that I thought I really wanted to do—this research program—and I didn’t care at all. I was like, “I don’t even want to research. I don’t like researching.” This was in contrast to, a couple weeks earlier I had auditioned for Word of Mouth, and I didn’t get it, and I sobbed for like, three days. I was such a wreck… I realized then that obviously something matters more to me that what I was doing with my major, and that thing is writing and the English language. And that’s what I want to do.
Anyway, that’s as close to a sophomore slump as I got. It wasn’t like the depressive side, where you’re pulling away from people and things and there’s a general apathy. It was more like, “Okay, what can I do? I’m gonna change everything.” And so I changed my whole class schedule so that I could get out of organic chemistry and that whole track because I was going to fail that class… So yeah, I would say in terms of the slump, I just completely changed my idea of what I wanted to do. I had been so sure before, and I’m usually a pretty sure-footed person. But I guess I got to really listening to myself and then I was like, “No. I want to write. I want to be a fucking poet. And I just want … to do it. I just want to do it.” That’s where I’m at.
S: And Drea? How has it been with her living here?
T: Yeah so in the beginning, I did everything: I rented an apartment in my name because she was still seventeen at the time, and I brought her over here. I was already paying her car insurance and everything, and her phone bill, but this was a whole new kind of … thing that I had to undertake. It was very new. And in a lot of ways, that first couple of months, I was just her everything: she had no friends here, you know; she needed a lot from me emotionally, as well, and it was really difficult.
It’s almost like, you know how when something traumatic happens parents have to put on a brave face for their kid? Well, our lives are just trauma. This whole situation—her having to come—she didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to do it … Ideally, like if I could have had it another way and she was still happy and safe, then we would have had it that way. But, this was our only option. We were going through the traumatic experience together, and I had to be the one who had their shit together and who was less affected by everything and less down about everything. Because if I hadn’t have kept my shit together, I don’t know who she would have looked to… because she faces a lot of mental health issues, and I know that is so difficult for her, and I think if I were a less stable person, period, but also if I wasn’t ready to be in this position where I’m juggling constantly … Like, I can’t tell her what to do, because I’m her sister, but she gets everything I have… I was on full-speed, soccer-mom mode all of the first semester.
Then, winter break was a long pause in that, where I got to kind of relax, and Drea and I fought more than ever but also enjoyed each other more than ever. I think it was a big change in our relationship because the next semester she was trying to get jobs, and she was in a better place with herself. She wanted to be medicated now, and she was ready to take these steps that I knew, had I been like, “This is what you have to do,” she would have rebuffed me. But now, she’s so much better.
S: I’m so happy to hear that. I love seeing her around campus; she always waves to me and it’s so nice. Okay, so, moving backward a little bit … you’re back on your writing bullshit. How has that been?
T: It’s been good… I’m currently working on this story about twin sisters, and I’m also really excited about that, but I haven’t finished it yet, so we’ll see how that goes. I’m drafting poems all the time too; they’re just always like, really shitty.
S: How do you keep up the discipline and motivation to write all the time when you’re not in a class for it?
T: I find that when I’m reading a lot, I’ll be more into writing and like, thinking about my stories when I’m not writing. And I know you fucking know this, but some people don’t know this: even if I’m not writing every single fucking day if I’m working out kinks of the story … Like, in the story that I’m writing—the twin story—because I have a couple pieces or whatever but they’re all bullshit places right now—in this twin story, one of them has a really bad relationship with their father, and one of them has a fine relationship with their father. And that happens a lot in my family. We’re all in weird, different places with my dad. We can’t all wholly agree that he’s villain in our narrative, but we also can’t wholly agree that he’s someone we should keep close.
So the two sisters have such different experiences, and I can’t figure out why. Every once in a while when I’m not thinking about anything, I’ll be like, “Why? Why did the father treat Gretta this way and Ida this way?” And I just need to think about it a lot and then I’ll figure it out. And then I’ll know. Because you’ve gotta think about the implications of … whatever reason you give, you know? The emotional implications and the implications in the story, and so I think even that—that’s not writing, but it’s a part of the process. And so I do that daily and … I don’t know. I guess staying interested in your own shit is sometimes hard? When I’m really bored I’ll just read instead of write. That’s what I do. That’s my process.
S: You’ve told me before that Kenyon was your dream school for a long time. Has it lived up to your expectations?
T: It has—and this is not just because this will be on a Kenyon-affiliated website—it has truly surpassed my expectations. It is crazy. It was my dream school because … Well, because of John Green, just like everybody else. It’s lame, but whatever. Kenyon was the first of its kind that I’d heard of: somewhere that I could probably actually get in, that wouldn’t make me feel like I had let myself down or … I don’t know. I had to get out of South Carolina… For me, it was like, “Yeah, I need to be better than my hometown.” That’s an unfortunate way to feel and to look at it, and I still love people from where I’m from, but it was a bad place for me and a bad time for me. Governor’s School was a great step, and I kind of wanted something that felt similar, I think. As I looked into others and looked into Kenyon, I was like, “Yeah but I think this is the place I want to go.”
… Anyway, Kenyon has literally surpassed all my expectations. I had jobs before I set foot on this campus. The first job I had my freshman year was childcare for an old director of the ODEI. I watched her five-year-old daughter, and that was such a fabulous experience. We spent a lot of time exploring and reading, and she was such a great kid. A lot of it for me is like kismet as well: I get this chance to watch a single woman who’s raising her daughter, who’s a little bit crazy and a little bit of trouble … and then, the very next year, I have my own sort of daughter, who’s a little bit crazy and a little bit of trouble.
I also worked in a lab, and… there were always pockets of my people, and that was really nice and affirming… Then, a week into CA training this year, I met my now-best friend, Sofia [De La Cruz ‘20]. We had never crossed paths before, ever in our lives at Kenyon, and automatically I found her, and my people. The people that I knew existed here, and just in time, which felt to me like kismet as well, because if I hadn’t have gotten a CA job, I wouldn’t have met Sofia. If I hadn’t have met Sofia, nobody would have told me, “You can do it. Drea can come here, and you can take care of her. We can do it.” And that’s how it has always been, ever since. And she met me like, five weeks before Drea came.
It’s like the like-mindedness here can be bad, but it’s also good.
And then, the resources of the ODEI have been fucking amazing in my life. My sisters—I have seen them fight tooth and nail to get what I get. Like, I get emails asking me if I need to file as an independent student, if I need this resource, if I need this resource. Them going to state schools, they have to be like, “Please pay attention to me. Please, please, it is so that I can survive.” I feel like I’m really lucky in that respect too: I have to fight for enough things, please just let me go to college. My sisters are really strong, and that was really hard for them, but I love that Kenyon has made it so easy. I couldn’t have anticipated that before coming.
S: You and your sisters are all sort of spread all over the country now. How do you stay close to them?
T: They’re better at it than me. I can attest to that. They really are. Oh God, I’ll have to send them this article. They’ll be like, “Ya damn right.”
My sister Mary—my oldest sister—is so good about calling and FaceTiming and wanting to be there, because that matters a lot to her, and that’s how so many relationships have been for her as the oldest… When she went to college, all of her best friends were back home with us, and it was constantly just phone calls, text messages, FaceTime—making sure that her presence was still meaningful in our lives. I think maybe a little bit of that comes from… There was a long period when she was like a mother to us, because she was the oldest, and she took over that position and wore it really, really well. Then when she graduated, she had to go and do things for herself. It had to be about her. And I really respect that: that’s a strong, hard decision to make. I think that’s what makes her so dedicated to contact. Her relationships mean everything, and she shows that. She proves that… You know she cares because she will make the constant contact.
And so I’m trying to get better about that. Annie, as well—the sister just younger than Mary—she can make an island of herself as well. We all are really good at dealing with our shit, so we like to do it alone because that’s just what we do. But I’m trying to be better about keeping up that contact because I know Mary will always touch base, but if Annie’s going through something, I could not know for weeks. Because of the choices we both make. At least Annie calls every once in a while. I’m really bad about it.
And of course, Drea’s here all the time. But yeah, it’s just about making that effort. We have phone dates now.
S: Do you see yourselves living close together when you all grow up? T: Oh, I certainly hope so. I really hope so. Even if we don’t, it’s not possible that we won’t see each other. I saw them over spring break, even though Mary’s living in Oklahoma City. She’s always gonna make it back to us. Really, that is one committed girl. Of course, Annie’s in South Carolina still; she’s still finishing up school, and now Drea will be back in South Carolina, and so we’ll have a year where that’s home base. That’ll be nice. I’m sure we’ll see each other a lot next year.
But I hope that wherever our lives take us, that we’ll be drawn towards the same center of gravity. I see myself prepared to follow in the future. And I’m glad that I can be like that, at least in my mind, like a satellite. I don’t need to establish my life wherever I want. I can go and be close to Drea and Annie and Mary. That’s the goal.
Image Credit: Trudy Wrona