The history of writing is curiously bound up with magic. Magic is not the origin point of writing—the actual birth of our writing system lies in accounting—but the ability to capture speech and generate formulas of language designed to effect a change in the world, otherwise known as spells—those are sometimes considered the first forms of written poem. I am a materialist– I don’t believe in magic, but I do share magic’s fascination with the interstitial and the liminal, a fascination with those meeting points where different spaces come together. Spells are best cast on beaches, where the ocean meets the land, or on solstices, where two seasons touch. Graduation is one of those liminal spaces—the moment where your lives as students and your lives as degree holders touch. So welcome to your own moment of transformation and wonder, where you are concluding something significant and embarking on something new. If you feel something transformative about today, something a little bit magic, you are not wrong.

Of course, this transformative day is shared by your friends and family, many of whom will be relieved never to hear the word “packet” again. Packets! The bane of our existence and our own unit of measurement—along with residencies—that form our own private Warren Wilson metric system. Graduates, you have spent so many late nights at your computer, typing away, and Loved Ones, you have spent those same late nights waiting for one of these writers to come to bed, to tuck you in, to call you back. Friends and family, you get MVP status at this ceremony–yes—for your forbearance, for your understanding, for your patience, yes for bringing those extra cups of tea and coffee, for listening to ideas for annotations and stories and poems, yes for letting your favorite person in the whole world disappear to writer camp twice a year, but more importantly for sharing your writer’s vision of themselves as writers, for believing in how important and central writing can be to a person’s life. To love a writer can often feel like being relegated to supporting character status, but today, friends and family, you are protagonists. You did this too. I want to celebrate you for being the most supportive parents; the most understanding partners; the most devoted children; the kindest step parents; the warmest polycules; the coolest surprise half-sibling ever offered up by 23 and me; and anyone I left out, you too. No one writes alone, and you know that better than anyone. A round of applause for everyone here who is here supporting a graduate!

You are graduating at a fantastic time. Literature is cool again, Amanda Gorman on the cover of Vogue and Ocean Vuong hanging out with Oprah, and Fellow Travellers in it’s 29th paperback printing, but when I embarked on my own MFA in the late 1990s, poetry felt like an obscure corner of the art world. Telling people I was a poet often felt a bit like telling people I was court wig maker or a telegraph operator—and the look on people’s faces often told me that they felt a bit sorry for me, as though someone needed to tell me that I had confused an anachronistic hobby with a profession—though I often found that if I let the conversation continue, they would begin to confess their own love for particular remembered poems, or want to share with me that they (sotto voce) wrote poems sometimes, but this did not shake their conviction that I was a bit, arrested in my development.

I undertook my own private project of teaching students at every age to see precisely when people soured on literature. When did people dismiss poetry as irrelevant to their lives, I wanted to know. I have worked with underserved 2nd and
3rd graders in the Bronx; I have taught 5th an 6th Graders at the Center for Talented Youth—I have worked with 13 to 18 year olds at a summer arts camp; I’ve been a visiting poet at many High Schools, I’ve taught at two year colleges, at four year colleges, in graduate programs (obviously), at conferences, and in private workshops, I’ve facilitated corporate retreats, I’ve done it all. I went looking for the moment when people thought that literature lost its centrality to their lives and I couldn’t find it.

Then one day, I found the answer at my block association’s spring planting party. I was grilling burgers as our communal chef, and my neighbor began telling me about studying poetry when she was a child. She recounted a unit on poetry in an elementary school classroom, and this beautiful wistful look came into her eyes
and she said “I really believed I was a poet.” And then it passed. The sensible, clear-eyed, bilingual lawyer for a multinational conglomeration who had recently purchased a brownstone returned.

Suddenly, I understood. Almost everyone loves literature—but a shockingly large number of people believe that they outgrow it. Poetry, short stories, and novels get sent to the same place of nostalgia as dissecting frogs, playing little league, and going to prom. I still don’t fully know what to do with the sad fact that everyone seems to love literature—but that most people outsource it to educators, so most people also believe that it is something to be left behind. You came to this program, as I went to my own MFA, to put stories and poems at the center of your life. You valued literature so much that you demanded to reach the highest levels of understanding, practice and analysis of our art . You hold MFAs from Warren Wilson in your hands. You will never leave literature behind. Poetry and fiction are at the center of your lives. You will never outgrow it. You will live lives in devotion to the art and craft of writing, credentialed as advocates, scholars, teachers, and practitioners of literature. You will build on what you have started here, and you will guide others in developing the same skills you have learned here.

Graduates, you did it. As my pilates instructor joyfully says at the end of every class: You can’t undo it. You will never outgrow the lessons you have learned here—you leave us with a foundation to build on for the rest of your lives, but in truth, you never really leave us because you will carry the work you have done here with you. As faculty, we have been the panes in the greenhouse sheltering the seedlings of your work. Today you are planted in the wild. As the walking stick suggests, and forgive me the mixed metaphors —you have affirmed that you are on this path for life. I speak for the entire faculty when I say we cannot wait to see what you do next, though we will actually have to wait because that’s how time works. But what changes today? Today is the first day, graduates, that we are no longer leading you along the path, but rather we are walking beside you and you beside us. Enjoy the magic.

Jason Schneiderman

Swannanoa, NC 

July 2025