Faculty member Brooks Haxton’s memorable closing remarks from the summer 2012 MFA residency:
It’s a pleasure to celebrate with you the accomplishment of this graduating class, and we all appreciate it that the families and friends of graduates have traveled so far to join us. You visitors, who have been there for these writers with support in spirit and in substance for a long time, now, by being here, help the rest of us to appreciate what this work involves. Thank you for coming.
Writing is a mysterious business for the people who do it, and for the people who watch it from the sidelines, it looks even more mysterious. Most of us as writers spend long hours alone, mumbling to ourselves. We mumble, some of us, without moving our lips. Many of us, I can see, are mumbling now. Without making a sound, we mumble. It’s worse than that. We listen to what we’re mumbling. We go into a little trance; and we write out what we said. Then, we ask people to believe we were inspired, and to make us believe it.
But when we read these same pages over to ourselves alone, we cannot believe that any self-respecting person wrote this garbage. So, we start mumbling the revisions, and, despite recent experience, we listen to ourselves again, as if we were the oracle at Delphi.
