Longtime faculty member Maud Casey spoke to the Winter 2016 graduating class of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Here are her remarks:
Welcome to my colleagues, guests of the college, and, most of all, this year’s graduates and their beloveds who have traveled here today. A relative newbie on this esteemed faculty, I’m honored, humbled, and slightly terrified to be delivering today’s graduation remarks to an audience filled with people—students and faculty both—who have over the years, and over the last ten days, been my fairy god-people of wisdom.
What I’d like to talk about today is solidarity and that sacred attic space called solitude, both essential to the making of art. As our tireless, inspiring leader, Debra Allbery, noted in her opening remarks on the first day of this semester’s residency, “an artist’s life is a negotiation between life and the upper room.” Let me begin by offering a story of solidarity to the loved ones of the graduates, loved ones who have provided that essential feeling of home as the graduates wandered in the wilderness of the imagination. I, too, am familiar with the mysteries of living with someone embroiled in that strange, amorphous, inscrutable endeavor called writing. You see, I was raised by those fascinating wolves otherwise known as writers. Read more