Part 1 of “Necessary Fire”


Part 2 of “Necessary Fire”


Part 3 of “Necessary Fire”


Part 4 of “Necessary Fire”

Ann Kidd Taylor:
President Whitson, Columbia College trustees, faculty, staff, parents, grandparents, friends, and above all,  graduates. It is an honor to be here. I was sitting up here thinking about my time at Columbia College, wondering which one of you had post office box 210 in the Harrleson Student Center. It has to hold the record for Most Notifications Received for Packages- as my Grandmother sent an astounding number of caramel cakes to that address, all of which ended up as part of my Freshman 15. I was wondering how many times since I’d graduated had someone poured detergent into the fountain, creating a bubbling masterpiece and a clean-up nightmare– not that I ever had anything to do with that. I was also pondering whether I was the only Columbia College student to ever go to the infirmary with a severe Pop Tart burn.  
The most conspicuous question floating through my head, however,  was... how did I get on this stage?

There are scenarios in your life you never see coming, and I am in the middle of one right now. When I sat out there in my cap and gown as part of the 1998 graduating class, no part of my brain was entertaining the idea that one day–– say 11 years later–– I would return to my alma mater and deliver half the commencement address and that the other half would be delivered by ... my mother. Nor did it enter my head that one day I would write half a book and the other half would be written by... my mother. In fact, when I was sitting where you are now, I felt lost. I had no idea what to do with my life, and worse, that take-on-the world feeling you’re supposed to have when you’re sitting in those chairs had abandoned me. I was, I regret to say, in retreat mode.
I was a history major whose career plan had recently collapsed in a true crash and burn fashion that had left me dazed, confused and depressed. If someone had suggested to me then that I would become a writer, it would have been like suggesting I go off to NASA and become an astronaut. But that is the great thing about life. It is a surprise party beginning to end. You dream and scheme and of course, you should, but in the end, life will surprise you in some way.
Allow me to tell you how I got surprised.

In the corner of a painting by Paul Gauguin, you can find three timeless questions: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” Frankly the first two didn’t seem that pressing when I was in college, but the one about where I was going– that one got my full attention during my junior year as I began to feel some pressure to figure out my future. What exactly was I going to do with a history major? The question was on my mind as I set off on Columbia College’s first study tour to Greece. It was an experience that changed me. I realize everybody says that about going to Greece, but I promise something deeply altering happened to me on that trip. I fell in love with Greece’s culture, ruins, people, myths, and art, but especially with its ancient history.  Indeed, it so captivated me that one day, while sitting in the shadow of the Parthenon,  I concocted an answer to Gauguin’s third question about where I was going. I would go to graduate school, study ancient Greek history, and become a professor. In that moment it seemed like all the dangling wires of my future came together to throw a spark that would last forever.
The novelist John Gardner suggested that the true search in life is for one’s  “necessary fire.” I believe he was referring to the genuine, inborn desire in one’s heart– the one that  feels required, as if it is part of your purpose for being here. Your necessary fire is an endeavor that holds the possibility to bring you alive, but also one with which you have a deep compatibility, a true affinity. 

There is no doubt a fire was ignited in me in Greece, but whether it was the necessary one is another matter. To be brutally honest, while my plan for the future did bring me alive, I did not have a real compatibility for teaching. It was just not me. Nevertheless, I was not one to let a little thing like compatibility get in my way.
I came home from Greece, applied to graduate school in Greek history and bonded with my dream for an entire year. Then one day, shortly before graduation, I opened my mailbox and found the letter that rejected me from the graduate school to which I’d applied– the only one with an emphasis in ancient Greek history.
Call me naive or overly confident, but somehow I had not imagined this outcome. My grades were good enough, my recommendations, stellar, and I had all sorts of extra-curricular bells and whistles. I’m sure my GRE score didn’t dazzle anyone, but it wasn’t that bad. The rejection threw me in more ways than one. It didn’t just implode my well-laid plans for the future, it demoralized me in some deep and tender place inside where I was secretly trying to answer Gauguin’s second question: “What are we?” Or more to the point: What was I? I was, I decided, a failure. I was not good enough for graduate school. I was not good enough. I was not enough.

I told myself a thousand times to get over the rejection letter, to regroup, but the pain surrounding it only grew, as did the unsettling question–  Now What? It was odd how abandoned I felt by the future, by my own self. I am not proud of any of this, mind you, how I no longer wanted to take on the world, but retreat from it.
So what do you suppose my parents gave me as a college graduation present? A trip to Greece. It had been planned before the rejection letter arrived, and it was to be my Mom’s fiftieth birthday present too, so it wasn’t like I could call it off. Going back to Greece wasn’t easy, considering, but at the same time there was no where else I’d rather be. While in Dephi, I came upon the best and wisest piece of advice ever carved onto a temple frieze: Know Thyself.

 So began my attempt to enter into a serious conversation with myself about my future. I tried to listen to the quiet, sure voice inside. You know the one. It  sounds a lot like your mother’s voice at first, but it’s yours and if it’s telling you you’re out too late, you probably are. As you practice listening to it, the voice will evolve. It is simply the part of you that knows, and it will not lie to you. It is your inner compass pointing True North. The needling thing is, you can’t borrow someone else’s compass– like your parent’s or your friend’s and expect to find your True North. You have to acquire the habit of conversing with your own depths, of listening, of reading what’s inside of you. Nor does the compass pay the least attention to the common idea that life is primarily about acquisition and achievement.
My conversation had barely gotten underway the Fall after my graduation, when I got a gopher-esque job with a city magazine, answering the phones, making sure there was a fresh supply of file folders, and notifying customers of their overdue bills. I moved through the weeks and months like the proverbial hampster on its little wheel. Feeling like I was going nowhere.
One day my boss began asking me to submit essays for the monthly magazine. The last thing I’d written about was the Peloponnesian War. I put her off. I wanted to explain that writing was what my mother did, that I did not have her genes. That yes, I had dreamed of becoming a writer when I was a little girl, but that was then, this was now. I wanted to say: Why in the world would I take up something that is famous for rejection letters ?
          However, I broke down and wrote my boss an essay, boss being the operative word. It was on the riveting subject of my dad bequeathing me an uncommon love of peanut butter. Funny thing, I really loved writing the essay.

As I deepened the conversation I was having with myself, I came to realize that what brought me alive was writing, and moreover, I actually had a deep compatibility and affinity for it. And so, surprise!  I found my necessary fire. Eventually, I mustered the courage to leave my job and write full-time, becoming a writing-apprentice, as I called myself, the title of writer being too presumptuous for me back then.
There’s a story I love about an eager student who approached his famous professor, Swiss psychiatrist Karl Jung. “Professor,” he said. “What is the shortest distance to my life goal?” Dr. Jung did not hesitate. “The detour,” he replied.
Today, at thirty-three, as I think about the conversation that needs to go on inside of you at this moment in your life, I hope you will include  a serious discussion about necessary fire, inner compasses and the lost art of listening to oneself. I hope you throw in a few words about the courage to invite surprise.  And remind yourself, there may be wisdom in the detour.

Sue Monk Kidd:
I am happy to add my voice to my daughter’s and bring you Part Two of the commencement address. It turns out that the administration felt you needed ‘double advice,’ so you get to sit through two speakers. At least you will have the novelty of being among the few graduating classes, if not the only one, to get a mother-daughter tag team as commencement speakers.

It is an honor to speak to a class of young  women poised at this particular moment. I am aware that you began your college life together as Freshmen by reading my novel The Secret Life of Bees, so it is quite special to be able to speak to all of you as you exit your college life. About all a commencement speaker can do is offer a couple of things that she believes really matter. Ann has offered the idea that it matters to listen to what’s inside of yourself and find your necessary fire. Part II is about the fact that your necessary fire is not only necessary for you, it is necessary for the world itself.
Years ago, I came upon an ingenious line by the writer, Frederick Buechner: “You are called to the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” I would even go so far as to say that one of the more powerful outbreaks of happiness and meaning in your life will occur when you pair your passion and the world’s need.

Even as a child, my passion– or as Ann would say, my necessary fire– was writing. I felt back then that I’d found the small, true light in myself. Later on, of course, I lost it. Actually, it was more like turning my back on it and finding something practical. Becoming a registered nurse seemed more doable and sensible. So, I took my passion for writing and sublimated it into nursing. Until at twenty-nine, I began to feel an internal sense of exile, a kind of homesickness for my place of belonging in the world. On the morning of my thirtieth birthday, I announced to my husband and our two toddlers at the breakfast table– “I’m going to be a writer.”
I spent years studying the craft, practicing the art, and developing my voice. The main conversation I was having with myself  was about how I could serve my work– and it is a very important conversation to have. But it is only half the conversation. Finally one day, I began to ask myself: what does my work serve? What difference will it make in the world? And then the conversation got really interesting.
While I was in Chicago at a book signing for The Secret Life of Bees, a man approached me and said, “I didn’t want to read your book, but I read it anyway.” Not exactly the greeting you hope for. I asked why he was resistant to the novel, and he explained that he was a 49 year old corporate executive who had grown up in a privileged family in a large northern city. My novel, as he pointed out, is about a 14 year old girl who grows up on a peach farm in the South and endures a lot of hardship. “It couldn’t be a more different world than mine,” he said.
“Why did you read it?” I asked.
His reply: “Because my wife made me.” 

I teasingly said, “Was reading it very painful?” at which point he confessed that to his surprise he made a connection with 14 year old Lily and with the African-American women in book. He put it like this: “They had a real effect on me I can’t explain. I just know I am more disposed now to the South, to black women and to little girls who need their mothers.”
I understood that he had given me a reason to write fiction that went beyond fulfilling my own need and desire to do it. Because it creates empathy. Most of us tend to go through life more or less preserving our separation from others, especially if those others are different from ourselves. But when we read fiction, we participate intimately in other peoples’ lives– in their sufferings, ecstasies, and yearnings, in all the ways their lives are shattered and put together again. And if their experience is different from our own, all the better. Empathy is what enables us to break out of the limitations of our own egos and agendas and see the world through the eyes and heart of someone else. It allows us to re-imagine the world.

The man in the bookstore helped me to deepen my conversation with myself about the purpose of my work. The truth is that it is hazardous to leave the world out of such discussions. We no longer live within the old paradigm of rugged individualism, but in the new paradigm of global community. A vast number of planetary ills seem to derive from the breakdown of community– from our inability to truly belong to the family of Earth, with all the mutual care that implies. I suspect that understanding how your endeavors serve the community and how they do not serve it will become an increasingly indispensable ethic. 
          In one of her poems, Edna St. Vincent Millay penned this beautiful line: “Oh World, I cannot hold thee close enough.” We should, however, be honest here. The world is not easy to cuddle up to. Neither is it easy to embrace the big, dysfunctional family that populates it. The world is rife with agonies and horrors, as well as with beauty and goodness. But for all its darkness, it is still ours, and there simply comes a time in the maturation of a human being, when she feels a need to embrace the world. To tend to it. To mother it and sister it a little.
There is a provocative, new idea afoot that emphasizes women as the emerging architects of change in the world. It is now recognized that the largest untapped resource on the planet is women. Melanne Verneer, the new American Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues, recently said that the major problems in our world cannot and will not be solved without the massive involvement of women. Well, that would be you. And that would be me.
Several years ago I had some quotations stenciled on the walls of the stairway that leads to the study where I write. The quote  at the very top is by the French novelist Emile Zola: “If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, as an artist, will answer you, I am here to live out loud.”          

I read the words everyday as I climb the stairs. They force me to think about the imperative of living out loud. There can be something quite terrifying about making yourself audible in the world, about putting your passion and your true self out there in the hope of making your contribution.
It will require courage. When The Secret Life of Bees first came out, a woman raised her hand at one of my readings and asked me quite seriously: “Did you write the book yourself?” I had no idea what she was thinking, but what went through my mind was that she had taken one look at me and thought– That woman couldn’t possibly write a novel. I’m sure that popped into my head because I’d spent a lot of time thinking the same thing. Fear and thoughts of inadequacy will come; the trick is to not let them keep you from diving in anyway. I assure you I became a novelist by jumping in over my head. By erring on the side of audacity.

In The Secret Life of Bees, my 14 year old character, Lily– a motherless runaway–  finds refuge among a group of African-American women. One of these women is August Boatwright, who lives with her sisters in a pink house, in which presides the statue of a Black Madonna. These women turn to the Madonna for strength and consolation. One day August says to Lily, “Listen to me now. I’m going to tell you something I want you to always remember, all right?... The Black Madonna is not some magical being out there like a fairy godmother. She’s not the statue in the parlor. She’s something inside of you. . . When you’re unsure of yourself, when you start pulling back into doubt and small living, she’s the one inside saying, ‘Get up from there and live like the glorious girl you are.’... This Mary I’m talking about sits in your heart all day long, saying, ‘Lily.... don’t you ever be afraid. I am enough. We are enough.’”
I am not August Boatwright, but I want to say something like that to you. I want to say: Find a purpose grand enough for your life, and whatever your necessary fire turns out to be, remember that in some way it is necessary for the world, too. Try to love the world despite what you see out there. Go, make your big, beautiful dent.  And as you do, come down often on the side of boldness. If you err, may it be for too much audacity, not too little. For you really are enough. You have untold strengths and undreamed resources inside of you. You have your glorious self.