[music playing] - Hello.

My name is Kwame Spearman.

I'm the CEO and co-owner of Tattered Covered Book Stores.

This year I, along with PBS-12, have started a Leaders as Readers series in which we ask our Colorado leaders the importance of reading in their lives and how it inspires them to be leaders.

Today we have our Secretary of State, Jena Griswold.

So great to have you here.

- Thank you for having me.

- Talk to us about how Spirit Run has either influenced or is a part of your campaign.

- Well, you know, as secretary of state, I really try to do everything that I can to make sure that every eligible voter has access to free and fair elections.

I think this book shows different lifestyles.

People who may be United States citizens who don't speak English.

People who live rural.

People who are working really long hours, who probably can't wait in a long line to vote.

So it's, you know, folks like that.

It's people who grew up rural.

People who live in big cities, regardless of partisan affiliation, regardless of someone's color of their skin, the amount of money in their bank account they, should have access to the polls.

that's why I fought so hard to expand drop boxes by over 65%.

We just passed a new law where we will have a multilingual hotline to assist people in different languages.

- Interesting.

- We added in-person voting.

We have added a whole host of new programs like automatic voter registration, which has registered 350,000 eligible Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated.

It's also why I really stand up against attack on voting rights because every day, people should be choosing their elected officials.

Elected official who should care about folks in rural parts of the state.

Folk who are blue-collar, just as much as anyone else.

So Spirit Run is actually written by a friend of mine.

A good friend from college, Noe Alvarez, and it's about really discovering his identity and taking control of his identity through running through North America.

They literally ran from British Columbia to almost Guatemala.

- Interesting, and you say there, so you mean they run with other people?

- Yep.

So a group of indigenous and Latino younger people, because we were literally in college, and he took a leave to do this run.

Then ended up writing this wonderful book.

We are friends because we have -- we identify with each other.

You know, he talks in his book about his parents going and working at the factories and picking apples, working on the orchards.

And, you know, I grew up really blue-collar too.

That's one of the reasons we were friends to start with.

I grew up in Estes Park.

You know I'm not Latina, but I started working really young with Spanish speakers, and that's how I learned Spanish.

So it's also really special to see your friend write a book, and the book is really unique for a couple reasons.

Number one, it's detailing this -- what I would say horrendous run because it's so many miles and at some points, is he talking about his knees are just ballooned like grapefruits because it's so grueling.

There are also really neat things about the book.

He throws in phrases in Spanish, and sometimes he translates them, and sometimes he doesn't.

- Kind of like Spanglish a little bit?

- Well, the phrases in Spanish are Spanish, it's just Spanish phrases, and it's really interesting to see it as a bilingual speaker because I can follow the whole book, but sometimes he just doesn't translate.

- I wouldn't be able to.

- Right.

That's really neat.

I think it's like this whole -- you know, you are the book expert, but basically, Chicano literacy movement happening with folks in the United States right now, so it's also just really neat unto itself besides the fact that he is awesome and a close friend of mine.

It was my escape.

I was a little bookworm.

I grew up going to the library, sitting in the library all the time.

I know when I was writing applications for college, it was from the library.

We didn't really, you know, I can't even remember if we had a computer or if people had computers then.

Even applying to law school, it was from the Estes Park Library.

So it was a focal place in my childhood, maybe because I was a -- you know, a bookworm little kid.

But, really, allowed me to imagine the different types of lifestyles and really gave me the tools to be able to, you know, have empathy for people, also.

- Of course.

Of course.

What type of genres or books at that time?

Anything spring to mind?

- When I was a little kid, mysteries, you know, loved the whole like Goosebumps and all those.

- Of course, R.L.

Stine.

- R.L.

Stine.

But really all types of books.

So, it really launched -- I think, my love of learning which I think we always do throughout life.

Then when I went to college, I double majored so politics and Spanish literature.

So, it was opening up this whole other genre of the classics in Spanish.

- And what were your takeaways from that?

- Well, that it's hard to read -- [LAUGHING] 100-year-old Spanish literature.

- Trying to interpret.

- So you are kind of seeing through Spanish literature, you learn a ton, and just like English literature, there's all different times and cultures people are writing about.

You learn that how race is defined by society.

You learn about people's belief in religion and people's belief in, you know, a higher calling.

So, just overall, you know.

It's pretty neat.

- It's super interesting.

Something, you know, we have spoken to people who came from maybe more humble beginnings.

- Yeah.

- And a constant theme is reading was an escape.

It allowed them to imagine things that they couldn't necessarily see in their day-to-day life.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- Did reading get you interested in politics?

- I don't think so, to tell you the truth.

I would say, you know, my dad; he ended up getting his bachelor's degree when I graduated law school.

First, in my family to go to a four-year college and then law school.

But, growing up, you know, he would be in between jobs, never really held a steady job until later in life.

He became a teacher, a special needs teacher, and then worked for Denver housing authority.

Through our entire childhood, it would be like marching through a city park and just reading.

So that's something he really instilled in me, and I guess, you know, growing up in Estes Park, it's a small community that gets very dark and very cold in the middle of the winter.

And we never really traveled as kids.

We took -- I think I remember like one vacation to Steamboat Springs, but it was a way to think about other places, and I would think more that what reading did for me was just learn about other people, but I think the role of empathy you can learn from reading too because you are putting yourself in other people's shoes.

So, when you come to situations where folks might not be treated as fair, you can imagine yourself in them.

That's what really caused me to run for office, and that's why I'm doing everything I can to protect the right to vote because I think all of our fundamental freedoms come from that right.

- So let's go back to -Yeah.

Yeah.

- To Spirit Run.

Something is that was very interesting that the author described was he was a first-generation American.

- Yeah.

- There was a duality that he was experiencing.

Talk about your feelings when you were reading that and why that is integral to the book?

- Well, I think a lot of people can feel between worlds.

I think it's more than just being an -- we should not put words in his mouth, but it's more than just being, you know, his parents from Mexico and him growing up in Washington State.

It is also a major class issue, right?

So, he grows up really humbly, and his parents are telling him just go to college.

Just go to college.

Just go to college.

And that's how you are going to, like, have self-realization, and that's how you are going to have a better life.

And one of the lines he ends up saying is from everything he learned.

He didn't think he needed the college degree.

But he went on and graduated from college, got advanced degrees.

So, I think it's kind of like the onion of identity.

It's the Latinoness and growing up Chicano in the United States.

It's growing up humble and going into this affluent college world which he really doesn't get into, but that definitely was a dynamic, right?

- It was -- there's kind of a -- where he talked about the dining hall.

- Yeah.

- And there were vegan and gluten-free.

- Stuff you never knew about.

- Stuff he never had known about and how that sort of isolated him from the community.

I wonder, since you know him did he use literature for that same form of escape?

- You know I don't want to put words into his mouth.

- Of course.

- But a huge reader.

Huge reader.

- That's awesome.

- So basically, I go to Whitman College.

I'm first in my family to go to college.

I went sight unseen.

They offered me a slightly better scholarship, so we drove out there in like my car, that was so old the odometer stopped working at 260,000 miles.

- Wow.

Had you been in Washington State before?

- No.

No.

I -- I remember going -- a couple things from that drive.

So my mom drove me out.

We stopped in Wyoming, and I had never seen -- I have never been in a state where someone pumps your gas for you.

- Okay.

- So that was.

- Never been in New Jersey.

- I had never been to New Jersey.

I remember getting to Walla Walla, a town of 30,000 people, and driving there and thinking I'm in the big city.

- Wow.

- That was my perspective at the time.

But, anyhow, I get to school.

My college -- my parents hadn't gone to college.

I, you know, was -- was students whose parents are doctors and lawyers, and so, I ended up making really close friends with people who had backgrounds like me.

Not only did we become really close friends.

I actually texted Noe that we were having this conversation today.

- Amazing.

We will send him the link.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

He will love that.

But also we started organizing.

So, I was one of the co-founders of the Whitman College working-class organization.

We were pushing for good policies for working-class students who couldn't afford, you know, the extra fees.

Who didn't have -- couldn't go home.

They couldn't afford the plane ticket to go home for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

That was also really neat, and that organization still exists.

- That's so awesome.

Let's get into it.

Do you want to read a part of Spirit Run?

- Sure.

Let's see.

There's a couple of neat spots.

Exactly.

So, set these up and have at it.

- Yes.

Yeah.

Okay.

Have to give me a minute to find the --.

- Sure.

Of course.

- Okay.

This is ironic for its first line because I'm a woman reading it, so we will just have to roll with it.

- We will roll with it.

- Okay.

Okay.

"There are moments in a boy's life when he thinks a single action can turn him into a man and solve all of his problems.

I thought that moment arrived when I was 12.

It's the time of day again when strange music flows from the old white house across the street on Jefferson avenue.

Our neighbor Dallas's house and into the small carpeted living room where I sit watching, through the curtains, my brother Tito launch himself from a skateboard.

He's eight.

I'm 12.

It's mid-day summer in eastern Washington State in a poor neighborhood that keeps its door ajar for cooling.

Our kitchen is fragrant with our mother's cooking.

Noe [Speaking Foreign Language] my moyther says, her hair is in a ponytail.

One hand rests on her hip while the other she toasts red chile peppers as if to clear the house.

I run outside to play with Tito, coughing, leaving our mother to stew in thought until our father arrives.

In the late evening, after work, my father rests in the dining room.

In his usual chair besides steel toe work boots that are crusted with dirt.

An orchard laborer and carpenter grappling with a language he doesn't understand, he pours over a stack of mail.

Noe [Speaking Foreign Language] he asks me to translate something and shows me a paper in English.

I look it over, numbers, words.

I don't know what this word is, I tell him.

I'm too terrified to translate the word bill overdue for him".

- So, explain the significance of that to you.

- Well, I like this passage because it shows what I was mentioning.

Sometimes he translates the Spanish, and sometimes he doesn't.

So there are two Spanish phrases in here.

The first is Noe [Speaking Foreign Language] "Noe, finish your chores."

He doesn't translate that.

And he does translate the phrase, Noe [Speaking Foreign Language] "Noe, translate this for me."

That's the -- the bill issue.

So, I think artistically, that's really interesting because I think it functions for English and bilingual speakers.

- Interesting.

- Because it kind of shows the barrier when you don't speak both languages.

And the reader is experiencing what his parents are experiencing.

But I also just think it's really neat unto itself because, again, it's these bilingual leaders who are really leaning into their own identities and saying, this is my American identity.

I think that's really valid too.

So I think that is really artistic, but the second thing is, you know, just showing vividly what it means to grow up very blue-collar in this country, very rural.

Then adding in what it means to be really still a little kid and having these big responsibilities translate this for me.

- Exactly.

- And not wanting to do it because you are going to crush your parents.

Right?

You are going to have a really sad emotion from your parents and putting that on little kids.

So I just think it's a really neat scene.

This book, it jumps and back and forth between him and the marathon and then like flashbacks to when he was a kid.

So --.

- It's amazing.

And there's a second part you wanted to go through?

- If you want me to read a second passage.

- Please.

- Let's do it.

Okay.

I really like; there is really good passages about the run and what he is learning.

The dynamics in the group with other young adults.

The scenery he seeing because there -- they are really on this like crazy run.

I really like the observations of his childhood.

- Okay.

So this is another one, and this is really early in the book.

"Many times this summer, I observe my mother hard at work.

Harder than any mother should be.

I watch her going through motions planted along machines.

Nothing I can do about it but hold out for that day I will graduate from High School and go off to college, become a small-town hero, return a different man.

Until then, my jaws clench in the thought that my mother's body is being molded by the demands of apple orchard owners.

Her feet, shoulders, and hands secretly from her sinking stiff posture, her aches, and misaligned joints.

Blood cues in her calves in the form of varicose veins, and she shrugs at the pinch above her shoulder where the muscle has thickened like a bull's hump.

A similar deformation is taking shape in her knees.

Only now, this summer, do I learn the pains resulting from standing for long hours in a factory.

The uncirculated blood below the knees crushes my feet.

I wonder how my mother has sustained this for as long as she has, decades.

I feel sorry for ever having been impatient for her, for not being more helpful around the house, and for not fully understanding what the warehouses were doing for her mental health.

Years of toiling in these conditions has left her too beaten down to start anew.

I now begin to understand why my mother didn't want me looking for jobs here.

She was probably afraid of what I would see or, worse, that I might view her differently".

- Wow.

- Yeah.

- And just quickly explain the significance to you.

- Well, I -- so a couple things.

It's a really good description for readers to understand the physical toll on someone's body.

- So vivid and that description.

- Very vivid.

- And so the Yakima Valley in Washington State, there's lots of orchards.

There's mint; there's bending, there's grabbing; it's a very physical toll, and remember, a lot of folks have to follow the fruit around the country.

So I think it's just a scene that a lot of Americans probably don't think about when they are getting an apple from a grocery store.

- Of course.

- Yeah.

It's also really neat because his mom and his parents just want him to go to college.

That was like my parents, like, you can be whoever you want, just go to college.

He is really determined to living those experiences.

And again, I think it's like when you are growing up between different worlds, you want to understand where you are coming from, but you are never fully in either world.

Right?

Until you meet a lot of people who have those same experiences.

And that's kind of what this book is about.

That's what like our friend group was about.

Finding these people who are really trailblazing, trailblazing for themselves, for their communities, he describes himself as, you know, the small-town hero.

If he goes to college and comes back.

But also trailblazing new identities in the country.

So, pretty great.

- It's amazing.

Thank you so much for sharing your childhood, - Thank you.

- Your love of Spirit Run with us today.

- Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

- And thank you all for joining us.

This is Leaders as Readers.

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