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.

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Alums: It’s Time Again to Update the MFA Bibliography

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It’s that time of year again: the Program is seeking your updates to the Alumni Bibliography—which currently lists 1500+ alum publications! In addition to being a point of pride and a source for your reading pleasure, the MFA Program uses the list for accreditation purposes and for recruitment. You can always view the alumni list here: https://www.wwcmfa.org/alumni-bibliography/

Please help us keep this list as complete as possible by uploading your new publication information through a form on the site:

https://docs.google.com/a/smith.edu/forms/d/1YazT-pftQh3Syg9q34Iesy26vqqsQDWAP11dFdeos1U/viewform

The form will ask for your:

  • first name, last name,
  • the year in which you graduated,
  • the genre in which you graduated, fiction or poetry,
  • whether you graduated from Warren Wilson or Goddard,
  • the title of your book,
  • the name of your publisher,
  • year of publication, and specify novel, short fiction, novella, book of poems, chapbook, anthology (of which you were editor), translated poetry, translated fiction, or “other” (explain).

Please also share any additional information regarding awards the publication received.

Thanking you in advance,

Patrick Donnelly

Poetry 2003

 

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Congratulations to the Summer 2024 Graduates of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College

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Congratulations to the Winter 2024 Graduates of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College

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Winter 2024 Graduation Remarks from Liam Callanan

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The Best Part

A brief address to the Warren Wilson Winter 2024 graduates

 

Thank you for that kind introduction. And thank you, too, for all those who made this residency possible; they can’t be thanked enough: Alyssa and Caleb, Alex and Carlos, Deb and Rita. Let’s also thank the YMCA Blue Ridge staff who fed us, banked fires in the cold, and kept us safe and dry.

I want to save my biggest thanks, though, for the beloveds. The partners, the friends, the children, the parents, in the audience, out in the world, all of you who saw the graduates through. We spend graduation day celebrating the graduates and rightly so, but we should spend every day celebrating you, the people who made it possible.

You know who you are. You made dinner the night before a packet was due. You delivered tea and soothing words when the thesis wasn’t going well. You shoveled the driveway clear of snow at 5 a.m. in Wisconsin while your partner was in North Carolina, and then shoveled it the next day, and the next, and then, though it was hard to hold the phone since you were developing frostbite, you listened attentively when your writer called from Blue Ridge and said things were going ‘okay.’ That’s great, you said, and they said, ‘you don’t get it,’ and you didn’t, because you didn’t really have time to, because your daughter’s school was calling: she has a stomachache. It’s probably just gas, your writer in North Carolina texted, adding, BTW, I am EXHAUSTED #dance #gymnight #cocoanight #party, hashtag something else, who knows, you’ve stopped reading, it turns out it was appendicitis, and when you finally do text back your writer in North Carolina, you’re sitting on the couch with a glass of your own favorite anesthesia, using your final grams of strength to pick out, ‘no don’t come home, she’s fine now, we’ll see you soon enough anyway.’

Or that’s what my wife texted toward the end of a winter residency seven years ago, and my daughter did make it through her emergency appendectomy just fine without me, the neighbor helped with the snowblower, AAA was super handy when the car didn’t start, and –

Can I just say, though—spouses, partners, kids, parents, friends in the audience today? The dances, the receptions, the workshops, the bookshops, the thesis interviews, the lectures, the grad classes, the conversations that go so late into the night, that—look, it’s morning!—it really is exhausting, this experience. And wonderful.

Especially today. I once got into a debate that, like many of the best conversations at Warren Wilson, ended without a clear answer. The debate was this: what part of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers is the best. Not just good or great, but the best, the very peak.

Again, this may be a place where I must explain to the friends and family here why this is a debate. If you’ve spent money and time to travel all the way to western North Carolina to see someone graduate, this better be the best part of the program. At what school is graduation not?

Maybe…this one. Ask a dozen Warren Wilson grads for the best part of the whole experience and you’ll get a dozen answers. More than a few will say, ‘the call.’ When Deb, and now, Rita, called you to say you were admitted, and said the magic word, “congratulations,” and said it again when you insisted that it couldn’t be true.

Other people will tell you the best part is the opening lecture, everyone buzzing with excitement. Others will tell you about a favorite class or workshop, one that left them mouths agape, forty-five to sixty minutes that changed everything for you.

Some will say the very best part of the Warren Wilson experience was the part they were least looking forward to: the dreaded essay. Some will say the best day was the day the essay was done.

Or, no, it was the thesis, the day when, armed with a mug of coffee, a pencil, and a tenuously cleared calendar, you went through your thesis a final time and allowed yourself to think—shyly, not going to shout about it, but you know, from a certain angle, in this early light—this thesis was all right. You did good. This was time well spent.

Family, friends, that day when your writer came downstairs, circles under their eyes, not necessarily able to form words—and apparently unable, for weeks now, to do a single basic chore around the house—that day when they came downstairs with a quiet smile on their face and gave you a hug, that may have felt like the best day.

Well, it wasn’t.

The best day is what some fear is the worst day. It’s not.

The best part of Warren Wilson is tomorrow.

The best day is the day you leave, walking stick in hand, and return to that other life. To be clear, it’s not easy. It feels lonely. True, it feels amazing to read a book and not have to wrap your head around how you’re going to get an annotation out of this—and two others besides in the next few weeks—but it also feels a little nostalgic, a little empty. Where is everyone?

The best part is that they’re here. The friends you’ve made, the readers you’ve gained, they go with you, stand with you, read with you, write with you. Then there are the other friends you may not even know you have, the 1,150 Warren Wilson graduates worldwide, who, the instant you discover your connection—you’re a Wally, too?—will widen their smile. I guarantee this. In Paris. In Shanghai. In New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, and even Milwaukee, someone already knows you, gets you, eagerly roots for you in all that you do.

Partners, parents, siblings, children, uncles and aunts and grandparents and friends, your writer is going to be a little confused tomorrow morning. It’s going to be the first day in a long while when they wake up and say, “what’s next?”

Here’s what you tell them—what’s next is the best part, the very best part. Getting back to work. Back, when all of us have your back.

Congratulations to you, then, supporters, for getting your writer to the cusp of this wonderful new life, and congratulations to the graduates, too. You have taught us all what ‘best’ really means.

 

Liam Callanan

Black Mountain, NC 

January 2024            

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Louise Glück: A Remembrance by Alum and Faculty Member Sally Ball

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Was the point always to continue without a sign?

 A substantial number of Louise’s sentences recurringly come to mind, filling a big role in the observation-soundtrack of my life. This began after the first long drive we took together. I was her student at Williams College in Western Massachusetts, hired to pick her up and drop her off each week at the bus stop in Bennington, Vermont, as she commuted from Plainfield. I was also working with her for the first time—on my honors thesis, poems—and she had a reading coming up at the University of New Hampshire, where my younger sister went. Louise proposed that I drive her to Durham. A ways out on Route 2, I asked what she would read [Terns, assassins— ]. She said new poems, from a new book. Ararat. “What are they like?” I asked. We’d known each other maybe six weeks. She paused, “Like yours!” she said, elated. “They are a lot like yours!”

This is not me reporting, Sally = Little Louise. This is how she talked to us.

Also, she and I had already found on our drives a likeness in our relationships with our sisters. [My sister and I, we’re the end of something.]  We drove. We arrived—in the woods, in a glade—at the home of Charles Simic, with whom Louise would stay. Turned out he’d planned for me to stay too, and invited me to dinner. I desperately wanted to accept, but I had this stomach-pit knowledge that I could not bow out on my sister. Later, on campus, I told Jennifer about “Like yours!” and then we went to the reading. After “Paradise”—Adam and Eve—Jen leaned over and said, “So, is that how you feel? an ache where something was taken away / to make another person?” I had tried not to get in trouble, but I got in trouble anyway.

On another drive, later in the year, Louise told me a story about being in her twenties and wanting to write to Louise Bogan, admiring her work, but postponing the letter, being busy, and then Bogan died. Thirty years later, I emailed to confirm my memory of this story, and she said:

Yes, Louise Bogan. There was another such event with Ashbery. I was composing a letter in my head the first night at Yale and the next morning he was dead.

Much love,

Write your unwritten letter.

—

A painful early romance of mine caused Louise to say, in casual conversation, First you’re the savior, then you’re the target.

—

 A letter from 1993 (written on the Selectric in all lower-case) is 90% chicken recipe [don’t think of them as guests, think of them as extra chickens], an annotated version of Marcella Hazan. Louise writes, “add fresh rosemary (she says a branch; I use a tree)”; “you can do this two ways: 1) strip needles (they stay in sauce) or 2) use branch and remove. i do both and chew the branches”; “i tend to cover tightly, but then, i hoard by nature”; “something dark green looks nice on the plate.”

When, about a year later, I read Meadowlands (sort of stunned by its being very funny…) I also read, “We can all write about suffering / with our eyes closed. / You should show people / more of yourself; show them your clandestine / passion for red meat.” And there was Louise, chewing the rosemary.

—

I am responsible for these vines. Louise and John came to my wedding, near the end of their own marriage (oh, there is a marvelous photo of Louise dancing with Chris Nealon)—that whole love was marked by many many Louise-isms: We were artists again, my husband….

No one’s despair is like my despair—

Her way of skewering self-importance. You are showing off again, one speaker says to herself, lambasting her own “ridiculous errand,” weeping in the dark garage with your sack of garbage.

—

I remember Louise consoling me when my first class of students (high schoolers) seemed unimpressed, like if they went to Williams College they would end up doing something way better upon their own graduations. “It never goes away,” she said, “I sometimes wish for one of those court buglers to go in ahead of me—”  She described the bugle, the scroll of achievements, the red tights.

—

A white business in the trees, like brides leaping to a great height.

—

Writing this, I felt something akin to what I felt in the first days after Louise died: refusal. I am tempted to go out to the garage and dig through old files for choice Louise criticisms (e.g.: “you’re writing about feelings you’ve already had, not discovering them”) and for other letters, for more of her to put in here rather than say, What now? Who are you in the world if Louise is not in it?

—

In “A Work of Fiction” the speaker finishes a novel and feels bereft, and goes outside to smoke a cigarette. “Where had they all gone, these people who seemed so real?” —oh, how this resembles the question from Winter Recipes, when the sister is dying,

Where did you go next, after those days,

where although you could not speak you were not lost?

The cigarette glows in the darkness. “How small it was,” [the light of the tip, it seems—that’s what we see—“a small dot among the infinite stars,” but also, we realize, she means the novel was small]. Brief, brief, but inside me now, which the stars could never be.

Sally Ball (poetry ’94)

November 2023

 

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Alums: It’s Time Again to Update the MFA Bibliography

,

It’s that time of year again: the Program is seeking your updates to the Alumni Bibliography—which currently lists 1500+ alum publications! In addition to being a point of pride and a source for your reading pleasure, the MFA Program uses the list for accreditation purposes and for recruitment. You can always view the alumni list here: https://www.wwcmfa.org/alumni-bibliography/

Please help us keep this list as complete as possible by uploading your new publication information through a form on the site:

https://docs.google.com/a/smith.edu/forms/d/1YazT-pftQh3Syg9q34Iesy26vqqsQDWAP11dFdeos1U/viewform

The form will ask for your:

  • first name, last name,
  • the year in which you graduated,
  • the genre in which you graduated, fiction or poetry,
  • whether you graduated from Warren Wilson or Goddard,
  • the title of your book,
  • the name of your publisher,
  • year of publication, and specify novel, short fiction, novella, book of poems, chapbook, anthology (of which you were editor), translated poetry, translated fiction, or “other” (explain).

Please also share any additional information regarding awards the publication received.

Thanking you in advance,

Patrick Donnelly

Poetry 2003

 

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