After about thirty-one months of writing, revising, commenting, critiquing, reading, outlining, formatting, laughing, singing, fretting, missing sleep, pushing, organizing, and double-checking, I was presented with my Master of Fine Arts degree on Saturday, August 11^th, 2012.

They also presented me with a freaking wizard staff.

Oh, they call it a walking stick, and it’s one of the hallmarks of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts that each MFA graduate is presented his or her custom walking stick.  But let us consider the circumstances:

1)      The candidates are taken out of their normal environment.  In this case, not only are the graduating students separated from their homes and usual surroundings, they are also separated from the residency itself.  This graduation was held in a different location from the ones before it, a half-hour or so down the freeway from the Captain Whidbey Inn, where residencies are held, and ten or fifteen minutes further than Greenbank, where past graduations were held.

The candidates must arrive early (an hour before the ceremony and a good half-hour before people not involved in the ceremony start arriving), and before the event itself begins, the candidates are brought into an isolated room where they don ritual clothing (robes and mortar boards, along with hoods that we carried through the beginning).

What we have here is “separation” – the first element of a classic initiation ritual, as described by Arnold van Gennep in his landmark work The Rites of Passage.

2)      The ceremony itself.  The village elders, I mean the Board of Directors and the faculty of NILA, recite their incantations (commencement addresses, charge to the candidates and such).  The candidates are called upon to prove their fitness (in this case, the “response from the candidates” delivered by one student, Mandy Manning, representing all of us).  Then the recitation of NILA’s authority to confer our degrees, and the presenting of the degrees.

If you haven’t seen an MFA graduation, a key part of the ceremony is that the thesis advisors (Bruce Holland Rogers in my case) place ceremonial hoods decorated with the school colors around the necks of the candidates (we don’t put the hoods up).  This, combined with the movement of the tassels from right to left, represents “transition” – the second initiation element from The Rites of Passage.

In our program, after the tassel and the hood, each candidate is presented a unique walking stick. Personally, I think of a walking stick as being about the size of a cane, but these things are tall.  Mine is at least five feet long.  Standing there in a robe, mid-ceremony, being handed a staff gave it a sense of magic I hadn’t considered in advance.  I didn’t want to ever put it down.

3)      Presentation of the new graduates.  The final part of the ceremony itself involves having the graduates turn to face the audience for the first time as Masters of Fine Arts.  People applaud, and everyone goes outside to take pictures, give and receive congratulations.

This is “re-incorporation” – the third and final initiation element from The Rites of Passage, in which the initiates are returned to the tribe for the first time in their new standing.  I don’t recall much about this except for smiles, hugs, and a whole lot of pictures.

In the case of our graduation, there was another element post-ceremony: the readings.  In a ritual sense, this would represent the new initiates proving their skills, or perhaps moving directly from initiation to action on behalf of the tribe.  What we actually did was have everyone return to their seats, and each of the new graduates read a portion of his or her thesis (about eight minutes worth).

The reading went well, and now after graduation I am home and looking ahead to life after the MFA.  I have a manuscript to get published, another to finish, and a whole lot more to come.  I know this much though – the next time I have moments of doubt about my writing or career, I’m going to pick up my staff and go for a walk.

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Speaking of life after the MFA, it’s time to talk about the future of this blog.  I’m going to write two or three more posts about graduation and the MFA, but then I think the topic has run its course.  I started this blog to talk about the process for people wondering if an MFA program might be right for them.  But now that I’ve finished, I have plans to redo the site a bit and take the blog itself in a new direction.  More about this to come.

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