It was a Saturday in June. My husband has been talking about that day 11 years ago when I was completing my last MLA residency and my mother was dying. I did not know this about my mother, and he says now how he remembers how happy I looked when I gave my speech. I had been chosen as class speaker. Claire Davis spoke that day too. There was a bagpiper. A friend sent champagne, which I forgot in the dormroom refrigerator after he told me, he was in such a hurry to drive home.

This evening, I went looking for the speech, not sure my new computer would open that old file, and here it is. It makes me cry to read it over. Gary says he “had a little cloud” over him when he heard it that same time. He enjoyed it more just now.

Here is what I told my graduating class:

ART SAVES LIVES by Jan Priddy

Good afternoon.  On behalf of the class of 2007, including those tethered to their lives far away, I welcome students, faculty, honored guests, friends and family, the interns, Amber, and Shelley—oh, Shelley—who is a writer and sparks this magic that happens to us.  We are grateful to one another for the help along the way, for reassurance and emails, Art Barns, phone calls, and other metaphoric hand-holding.  We thank you all.

I used to have a bumper sticker on the back of my car that said:  Art Saves Lives.  I was sorrier to lose that slogan than I was, eventually, to lose the car.  Because here we are saving our lives.  Here.  All together.  And we are a part, all of us here, together we join a long line of readers and writers, of people who value language and who need to write.  We add our words to those who came before.  We claim them:  Sappho and Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain, William Stafford and Ursula K. Le Guin.  All part of us now.   

Last year Peter stacked books on this podium solidifying the reason we are here.  Art on the page.  We all want to transport our readers with words, carry them across time and space to meet people and feelings and ideas.  We should be humbled, but our goals are not humble.  We want to change the world with our imaginations, one word at a time. 

We are writers.  Crafty people.  For two years we learned our craft from those before us.  Words are our tools, and I know from studying with David that each word matters.  Valerie taught me to shape my imagination.  We know dialogue is important, Pete, and that we share the world with other people, Marvin.

We’ve savored Dorianne’s smoky Juliet, followed Claire’s frog down the throat of a child, and reconsidered John’s take on Job.  A hawk ruptures Sandra’s window and Pattiann hands us sex on a cloud.  Jack plunges us under the ice and Craig mourns a child.  Judy’s natural disaster drives us to community and Ellen soaks us in honey and pins us to the wall.  Joe’s porcelain throne gleams in imagination.  So do our fellow students. 

But I am a story teller and most of my ideas come attached to stories. 

Here is a story:

In 1836, a recently widowed visionary, remarried.  With his second wife he fathered seven children, preached, taught, found academic employment, and wrote in his study while a large household revolved cautiously about him.  Quiet.  Don’t disturb Papa, he’s working. 

Most of us scramble and bargain for writing time, often finding it only in slivers and odd hours, between the detritus of day-to-day responsibilities and paying work, wedged between the insistence of people who rely on us to put their demands first behind our human need for rest.  How lovely to sit behind a door, working until we are ready to stop, parishioners anxious and waiting, our loved ones tip-toeing past the door—Quiet, don’t disturb the Writer. 

But we are not writing sermons that come crashing into the world with authority and an eager audience, we are not Calvin Stowe, that mystic composing in his study, and most of us have never even heard of him. 

It is his wife we know—the wife who bore the seven children and ran the house and did not, in her day, enjoy legal recourse to law, the right to vote, or a paying occupation.  The woman who provided Stowe with a room of his own, didn’t have one herself.  Harriet Beecher Stowe.  It is her writerly story that more closely resembles ours.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, nearing forty years of age and with a newborn seventh baby, began writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the kitchen table while running her household. 

The little lady who started the Civil War, Lincoln called her. 

Harriet Beecher Stowe lived to see slaves freed in America and granted citizenship.  She saw her own 85^th year, but no other writing of hers had the impact that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had upon the world, but then again, neither has the novel of any American since. 

I wonder:  Was she scared?  Did she wonder if her words would run out?  Did she call herself a fraud and suffer writer’s block?  Was it possible for her to have imagined, with a household bustling, interrupting, and tugging at her, that the words she struggled to pen would change the world? 

Maybe we are writing our own transformational books at our kitchen tables and we don’t even know it. 

Few of us have sheltered space or devoted congregations.  We are not Emily Dickinson or even Calvin Stowe.  We are poets scribbling lines while we wait for laundry to spin, composing in our head on a run; we are novelists running sentences across the ceiling before sleep or rehearsing stories in the hour, the rare hour, children are preoccupied; we are memoirists and essayists getting up to make the coffee and losing ourselves in words when we have so much to do.  We hear voices.  We stare into space and forget where we are and what we’re supposed to be doing.  Hopefully this doesn’t happen while we’re driving to the grocery store. 

We cannot know the influence our words might have on that still-imaginary audience.  We only know we want to do it—this writing.

With so little outside our need, without free time or a room of our own, the leisure and space that all human beings deserve and crave whether they are writers or not—what have we? 

We have words.  We have each other.  We have imagination.  I’ve been using that word a lot.  We can’t know what we cannot first imagine.  Time, curiosity, stolen moments, and imagination.  We’ve had two years of community and permission.  We have only just begun to find voice on the page.  We look up from our table and out at the world, and, bending to our page agin we’ll write what we understand of it, or admire, or deplore, dream, fear, hope.   

We can read and think, write and reason, feel and sing, and always question, and do this honorably and diligently and during every moment we breathe.

People have been asking us all week what we’re going to do now that we’re graduating.  The only answer that matters is:  Keep writing.  We’re not done with our work at the kitchen table.  Whether we transform the whole wide world, or our own private corner, Art saves lives.  I know it’s true.  I think it’s why we’re here.  We’re saving ourselves.