Faculty Member Christopher Castellani’s Address to the Class of Summer 2019
Welcome, graduates, and my sincerest congratulations to each of you on this hard-won degree, the happy outcome of years of devotion, study, imagination, camaraderie, collaboration, love, labor, and dancing, on and off the page. Welcome to your partners, family, and friends, especially those of you who are making your first visit to the mothership, and thank you for supporting your beloveds in individual journeys that took them away from you and into worlds you couldn’t fully enter. There is perhaps no greater act of love.
In preparing these remarks, I took myself back to those blurry months after my own MFA graduation. I was working as a full-time temp at the Massachusetts SPCA, where each day my sole responsibility was to sit alone in a private, windowless office and hand-write personalized condolence letters to donors whose pets had recently died. I’d been hired less for my MFA than for my Palmer Method penmanship, which I’d perfected in twelve years of Catholic school. Each morning, my supervisor handed me a stack of dossiers, which included full intake histories, donation records, and poignant photos of the deceased in all their fluffiness. I’d spend my days crafting tributes to the likes of Choo-Choo O’Malley and Mr. Pickles Shanahan in my flowy script, drawing upon my newly-certified powers of metaphor and voice and empathy.
I’m happy to tell you that very few rich animals died that summer. Most mornings, I’d get just one or two dossiers, which meant – jackpot! – some unsuspecting temp agency was paying me a halfway decent wage to sit in the windowless room and work on my novel for six hours a day. No distractions, no excuses, no choicebut to prove to myself and to my then-boyfriend and to my immigrant parents that I’d made a sound investment in myself, that this “writing thing” wasn’t a fluke or an indulgence.
The problem was, as Lorrie Moore put it, I had time “like warts on my hands.” The novel chapters I’d workshopped to effusive praise mere weeks ago and was eager to build on now moldered before me, reeking of sentimentality and misplaced ambition. “No one will love your book more than you will,” someone had told me, in some misguided attempt at professional development, which made me feel hopeless and narcissistic and beside the point. I tried various tactics to otherwise my life, including the making of something brand-new and uncharacteristically edgy: a novella based loosely on one of our donors, which I’d entitled, “The Dead Menagerie.” I got as far as the title and gave up.
How poor I was then, in every way. My program, unlike yours, hadn’t required me to read a single book. Not a single book! Unlike you, I had no cohort to help me transition from student – a role that implied humility, fluidity, and deference – to writer, which implied authority and confidence and direction. My nine classmates had all bolted out of state, with only half-baked plans to keep in touch. Without the buzz and thrum and deadlines of the program, I felt adrift.
It took time, but three things had to happen for the words to finally flow again: First, I read voraciously and omnivorously, reuniting with books like they were long-lost childhood friends; second, I gave up on the notion that publishing a novel would prove my value as an artist and human; and third, I found, in GrubStreet, a community of fellow writers passionate about helping each other get better.
It took the convergence of these three things for me to re-discover what got me writing stories in the first place, back in the sixth grade: the drive not to feel important or worthy, but to play, to make-believe, to dress up, to dream, with my imaginary friends. I continue to be drawn to the infinite possibility of these friends, what Grace Paley called the “open destiny” of their lives. They make such excellent, if mercurial company.
This persistent myth that writing is lonely – how does it endure? I may have been poor that summer, I may have longed for a community, but, in my windowless room crowded with friends getting into all sorts of trouble, tantalizing me with their dramas and half-baked ideas, I was never lonely. Though virtually every writer I know can trace our calling back to feelings of isolation or dislocation, the act of writing is less the symptom of our loneliness than its inexhaustible cure.
The point is: I stand here supremely confident that you will NOT find yourself in the same blur I was in twenty years ago. Don’t get me wrong: there will bea blur. You will experience adriftness, nostalgia, even fear. Your hands will hover above your keyboard, unsure if you know what a poem or story even is, let alone how to write one. But, unlike I was, you are extraordinarily well-prepared to contend with this blur: the intense and multivarious work our program has demanded of you, the guidance it’s offered, and the unique and intimate relationships you’ve built with each other and with your supervisors on and off the mothership, have given you all you need, every tool you could possibly require, to bring the blur into focus.
If you believe that, and you should, then believe this, too: with those tools, in the clarity of that focus, with that vision that will continue to sharpen and broaden over the course of your lives as writers, you must remember you are still, and will always be, at play; your investigations into the human condition can and should bring you, yes, joy. This may seem paradoxical, given the serious work that you want to do, but it is not. Making art is an inherently optimistic act, even, especially, when you are singing about the dark times – because the writing of a poem or a story is always a reaching out: to a reader, to a listener, to a future when your words will be translated, interpreted, consumed. It is a way of feeding the souls of our neighbors on this Earth.
And if you don’t trust my confidence in you, trust author Min Jin Lee, who spoke recently about a superpower everyone in this room has: “I’m not sure you knew you had this,” she said, “but you do; you use it all the time. Perhaps you’re a parent and your teenager hurts your feelings; why do you still wait up for him at night when you’re both tired? And when your mother is cranky and needs you to take her to the doctor, but she won’t ask nicely, why do you leave work early and take her? And when your best friend calls you as you’re making dinner and she is crying, why do you stop making dinner…? It’s because you have a superpower: you know how to love when it’s difficult.” Lee went on to ask, “Do you love your writing as much as you love the people in your life for whom you move the world? Do you love your writing even when it’s painful, when it rejects you, even when it will disrupt your very difficult and busy lives? The parts of our lives that we love the most can be almost impossible to bear every single day, but we do.”
At the end of my discussion class eight days ago – yes, it was only eight days ago – I asked you to consider the moment we are in, and what it requires of the us as writers. This is the personal, and therefore political, question I hope you’ll continue to ask yourselves in the months and years ahead as you play and as you dream, and as you love, leaving yourselves open to all possibilities, forms, voices, and modes of inquiry. Which jagged pieces of our broken world will you pick up, and what will you write upon them? Speaking for all of your former supervisors, let me say, to paraphrase a line from Deb Allbery’s poem, “Constellation,” “[We] want to see what you do with them now, the sentences you don’t send [us].”
This ceremony is not an ending, though it has the sense of one. So does this final but instigating benediction with which I’ll leave you. It comes from Prior Walter, our guide through the ravaged world of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. He’s standing before the frozen Bethesda fountain, hoping and planning to survive his illness long enough to see the fountain turned back on next summer, and the summer after that. And maybe he does. Maybe he’s there right now. “The world only spins forward,” he is saying to us. “We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.”
Thank you, graduates, and, again, congratulations.
