A Writer's Prayer

I thought this posting appropriate since I will be pursuing a masters degree at Harvard Divinity School in the fall. I returned home last night from a week long visit to the open house for admitted students, during which I was haunted be an insidious realization: I want nothing more than to write very good stories. This means not writing essays, not reading 1300 pages of scholarship per week. However, the program is extremely flexible, I will design my own focus, a number of the professors are novelists, and the diversity and dynamism of the students is inspiring. Two of the New Yorker's 20 under 40 fiction writers are recent graduates. And they're paying my tuition, and its fuckin Harvard. We'll see how it goes...

A Writer's Prayer by Wallace Stegner

“Lord, let me grow into such a man as has something to say! Let me be one of those that Henry James speaks of, one of those ‘upon whom nothing is lost.’ Let understanding and wisdom be engraved on my mind as deep as the lines of living on a wise and weathered face. Teach me to love and teach me to be humble and let me learn to respect human differences, human privacy, human dignity, human pain. And then let me find the words to say it so it can’t be overlooked and can’t be forgotten.”