At the graduation ceremony for Seton
Hill’s MFA in Writing Popular Fiction, I give, as co-Director of the program,
several introductory remarks to the audience at the start of the ceremony. The remarks this time involved a common topic
that had been introduced for the entire Residency. We provide such topics for each of the
on-campus stays to provide focus for the activities that week, especially for
the writing workshops where time might allow for more discussion.
The topic for this last January
Residency was the question, “Why do you write?”
At the opening Orientation on the
first night I introduced the question and had the students write an answer. I would have used their responses in my
speech at the Commencement, but I need to write these remarks before the Residency takes place (in
order to allow the administration enough time to review the script before the
event). So, when composing the remarks,
I searched online and found a wonderful website, “FictionAddiction,” that
already had collected a large number of answers to that same question. I read through the
answers there and used several of them, with some modification, for the
Commencement.
The
resulting mini-speech was successful enough that a number of students asked if
I would reprint it here in my blog. And it
appears below. I hope you find the collection of responses as interesting,
illuminating, and inspiring as my students said that they did.
Good afternoon.
We began this
Residency with a question: “Why do you write?” And the responses to
that question are many and varied. “I write because I love
stories.” “I write because I like to build things.” “I write to
make up time I never really had.”
These replies
vary from the simple, “I write because I can’t dance,” to the eloquent, “I write
to dwell in compassion, to love the unlovable, to understand the humanity of
those with whom I would disagree.”
Some answers are
practical and blunt: “No one but a
blockhead ever wrote except for money” (that was quoted from Samuel Johnson, by
the way), or “I write because I enjoy having a world I can control.”
Some are
playful, “I write because you look funny if you talk to yourself,” and some are
serious, “I write to stop time.”
Some contradict
and yet oddly support each other, “I write to define myself” and “I write to
get a break from being me.”
One of my
favorites is, “I write because if I don’t I become narrow-minded and
forgetful.” And, perhaps the reason most direct, and yet profound, “I
write because I have to.”
But a
reply most pertinent to our ceremony today is, “I write because I can.”
You’re here to
receive a Master of Fine Arts in writing
because now you can. You’ve
done it. You’ve written, revised, packaged, presented, defended, and
concluded, the novel that you
wrote. And maybe you wrote more than one.
So, you
can. You did. And, though
there might be as many responses to the question “Why do you write?” as there
are graduates here today—and as many as the large number of writers in this
room right now—this graduation guarantees that one of your responses will
always be true: because I can.
And to all you
writers out there, I repeat that simple and yet wonderful statement:
You can.
The
responses “quoted” (not always exactly to make the style consistent) came from
the following writers, listed here to tally with the paragraphs above:
1.
Amy
Brill, Edmund White, David Whitehouse
2.
Diana
Spechler, Ru Freeman
3.
Joshua
Cohen, Adam Wilson
4.
Anna
North, Jennifer Gilmore
5.
Said
Sayrafiezadeh, Allison Amend
6.
Caitlin
Campbell, Ann Napolitano
7.
A.
Igoni Barrett
The
full version of their answers can be found at:
