Warren Wilson College MFA Graduation Speech, July 2026

The following remarks were given by Brian Norman, Provost, and Matthew Olzmann (Poetry ’09) Poetry Faculty, MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, on Friday July 10th 2026.

Provost Remarks, Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, July 10th 2026

Thank you, Rita and Matthew, for inviting me to speak. Thank you, Alyson and Caleb, the Academic Advisory Board, College staff, the Presbyterian Church staff, and others for making this gathering possible. I have been looking forward to it. 

Like many, one of the first things I knew about Warren Wilson is its legendary MFA program. A little gift tucked into the folds of the Swannanoa Valley. What a dream that I now get to welcome the next generation of writers on the program’s 50th anniversary. 

I myself am not a writer. But I am married to one. When he learned we were moving to Asheville so that I could join this College with its amazing writing program, his advice was pretty simple, “Don’t mess it up.” Well, he may have used a spicier word to make his point clear. But I am told the Friends of Writers organization may print my words.

So, here I am to offer remarks on this precipice occasion, as each of you embark on a life of words. When I asked if graduates would be wearing regalia to receive their masters’ hoods, I learned that “we don’t do that here.” No, I learned, we do street clothes and walking sticks. I should have known: Warren Wilson isn’t like other places. And we don’t have to be.

Today, I stand here not as a writer, but as a Provost who also happens to be a scholar and citizen of writing, interested in the relationship between writing and social change. James Baldwin in particular has been my touchstone–or, my walking stick–as I set my lot with writers who understand their responsibility to both the word and the world. From Baldwin, I offer two wishes.

Wish One: An honest man and a good writer

First: I go back to early Baldwin when he–like you–set out on a writer’s life. Many of you are probably familiar with his simple goal as a preacher’s son from Harlem heading to self-imposed exile in Paris in 1948, seeking escape from the constraints and indignities of a segregated nation–crimping his imagination as much as his daily life. In his 1955 preface to his first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son, he declared simply, “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.” 

Note the order: An honest man. Then: a good writer. For Baldwin, the first is a precondition for the latter. He spent the rest of his literary career helping an entire nation see through its own myths, including the original myth: the myth that it is white.

My wish for you: May you be honest. At this moment in American political life, honesty is precious. It can also be dangerous. May this walking stick guide and protect you.

Wish Two: From Torment to Connection

Second: I go back to Baldwin’s earliest work as he came to fully comprehend the responsibilities that come with choosing a writer’s life. Let me remind us of another well-known insight, this one from a 1963 interview for Life magazine: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” 

In this moment of profound political polarization and a loneliness epidemic, these words can javelin you. (Thanks for that verb, Christine Kitano.) For Baldwin, a young gay Black kid whose world opened when he went to the movies and went to the library, storytelling exploded his world and saved him from the bitterness that was his father’s legacy.

And so, as you prepare for the drudgery of the writer’s life–the minutiae of submittable, the terror of the slush pile, the endless drip of contest fees–let’s take a moment to look up and look back.

My second wish for you: remember what writing first did for you. Do that for the next person. To borrow from Flannery O’Connor and Alice Walker, you may be saving a life that is your own.

And now, let us proceed to the official business: diplomas and sticks.

Faculty Remarks, Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, July 10th 2026

At a dinner earlier this residency, Mike and I were talking about how we both enjoyed being uncles. For me, the pleasure comes from loading my nieces and nephews up with sugar then sending them back to their parents. Or telling them embarrassing stories about their parents, then returning them. As any responsible uncle would do.

What does this have to do with this graduation? Mostly nothing. However, because I never had the privilege of directly supervising any of today’s graduates, there is a parallel where I feel an uncle-like responsibility here, to tell you something truthful about your faculty supervisors. Aside from being immensely proud of you, they’re all a little afraid that you’ll forget about them. They will never say this aloud, but they need constant reassurance. To provide that, consider reaching out to them from time to time to update them on your post-MFA writing adventures. How often should you do that? I’d say at least four times per week by email, daily text messages, a phone call every other week (if you don’t have their phone numbers, I will provide them), and once per month please try showing up on their doorsteps with a manuscript under each arm. This would me so much to them. Uncle Matthew would never lie to you. And if what I’m saying turns out to be inaccurate, I’ll note that I have a long tradition of being awkward at graduations. I don’t know what to say at these things and—elsewhere in the world—I tend to avoid these ceremonies entirely.

Many of you know I did my MFA here, graduating in poetry in 2009. Prior to that, I went to a community college and then a university. Got a degree from both, but I skipped both of those graduations without hesitation. Since leaving this place with my walking stick, I’ve had the good fortune to teach at four different colleges. I’ve mostly steered clear those graduations as well.

The main reason I try to avoid graduations is because I don’t like goodbyes.

But Warren Wilson’s MFA graduations are a little different. I’ve attended a lot of these, and I don’t see as them anything like a goodbye. Graduates of this program often refer to the time that follows graduation as The Afterlife. There are a thousand of us out there in The Afterlife waiting for you. One of the cliché troupes of commencement speeches is the speaker almost always tells those in attendance that a “commencement” is a beginning. And while that’s a literal definition of the word, I don’t think it applies here. The journeys each of you are on to become the writers you want to be all began long before you arrived here, and those journeys will continue long into The Afterlife.

The reason I don’t see this as a goodbye is because we leave here with the knowledge that nothing is finished. And if you continue to do this work, your paths will keep intersecting well into the future. I mean that metaphorically, that your paths might cross in the pages of magazines and literary journals and on bookshelves across the country. But I mean it literally as well; you’ll find each other again and again at summer workshops and writing conferences and reading series and—who knows—maybe even back in these mountains again. The point is: the thing that connects us is the work. The work is what brought you here, and it’s what will guide you to where you want to go next.

If I have any advice, it’s to simply keep doing what you’re already doing. I used to hear horror stories about a post-MFA writing slump, and what I’ve observed is that it can be avoided. What you need to do is exactly what you’ve been doing for the past two years. This is especially important in the months that immediately follow this residency. In the next few months, a new normal will be established in your lives. People are going to think that you now have all the time in the world. “I’m glad so-and-so is done with that writing thing,” they’ll say. But you’re not done, are you? And if you just keep doing what you’ve been doing every day—reading, studying the work of the writers you love, reading, staring down blank page after blank page, reading, writing things then deleting those things, then rewriting those exact same things, then revising them—if you keep doing that, then all your acquaintances will eventually shrug and say, “I guess that’s just who they are now.” Show up each day. Punch the clock. Keep doing your work. That work is what you love, and that love is what has carried you this far.

About that specific work, I’ve got a poem to share. I heard there was a Thomas Lux bookshop last week? So, to add to that conversation, here’s a poem from his book God Particles. I think it’s an Ars Poetica about the work you’ve been doing and that the work that’s still ahead.

The Pier Aspiring

See if you can see how far out it goes; see? You can’t see the end!
I’d take you out there
but it’s a six hour walk
and the work’s redundant: one board laid down after another.
When the sun is high
the boards are hot.
Splinters always pose a problem walking any other way but straight.
What keeps me working on it, driving piles,
hauling timber, what’s kept my hand
on the hammer, the barnacle scraper,
what keeps me working through the thirst,
the nights when the waves’ tops pound
the pier from beneath, what keeps me glad
for the work, the theory is, despite the ridicule
at the lumberyard, the treks with pails
of nails (my arms
2cm longer each trip), the theory
is this: it’s my body’s habit,
hand over foot, pay check to pay check,
it’s in the grain of my bones,
lunch box to lunch bucket.
It’s good to wear an X
on my back, to bend my back to the sky, it’s right
to use the hammer and the saw,
it’s good to sleep
out there — attached at one distant end
and tomorrow adding to that distance.
The theory
is: It will be a bridge.

Graduates: I’m astonished by all you’ve accomplished. Whatever bridge you might be building next, the rest of us will look forward to meeting you on the other side.

Congratulations and good luck.

Matthew Olzmann