Good morning. Thank you so much to Reverend Chadwick for asking me to speak this morning, and for making Lower School Chapel feel like such a home this year. Thank you also to the Vestry—both the Form II Vestry, who are not here, and the Form I students who have helped out while Form II has been away—for being so helpful and for welcoming me into the Lower School.

This morning, I’d like to tell you a story. The summer before fourth grade—when I was younger than you C formers sitting right over there—I visited the beach one day with my cousins and my life changed forever. I should say, right off the bat, that if you are expecting a story that’s exciting in the typical way—me realizing I am an Olympic-gold-medal caliber surfer or me saving someone from a riptide or me fighting off a great white shark—you will probably be disappointed. This day at the beach wasn’t all that exciting in itself. I remember playing in the water with my cousins. I remember eating sandwiches for lunch, and probably grapes. But what I remember most of all is that this beach was covered in drift wood, big logs and small branches that had been bleached and sanded smooth and made light enough to carry by time spent in the salt water. My cousins and I spent most of the day building a big, elaborate fort out of the drift wood, and it was so much fun. We buried branches upright in the sand to build tall walls, we dug a giant moat around it, we found patches of seaweed to decorate the interior. We worked on our driftwood fort all day, and then when the sun started to go down, we went home. That night, the tide came in, like the tide always does, and washed away the fort. So why did this day change my life? Why am I telling you about it? 

Well, in order for you to really understand, I have to tell you about one person—Ms. Bellingham. My family’s trip at the beach ended, I went home to New York City, where I grew up, and I walked into my fourth grade classroom, where I met my teacher for the year, Ms. Bellingham. Before she was a teacher, Ms. Bellingham had been an actress, and she had great hair, and she was very good at reading aloud. I loved Ms. Bellingham. So when, one day, our assignment from Ms. Bellingham was to write a story, I really took my time on it. I thought for a while about what I wanted to write about, and I remembered how much fun I’d had that day on the beach with my cousins, and how clearly I remembered the feeling of the driftwood, so strangely light, in my hands as we built, and how beautiful the fort looked in the setting sun as we walked away, and I wrote a little story about it. 

I don’t have the story that I wrote any more, and I don’t remember Ms. Bellingham’s words exactly, but what I do remember is this: when she handed it back to me, she said how much she’d enjoyed it, and she told me I should keep writing. And really it was this, this encouragement from a teacher who I looked up to so much, that changed my life. She helped me understand that I could have an experience, could notice something about the world—the beauty of a day at the beach, for instance—and that that experience, that noticing, didn’t have to end there. I could write about it, use the tools of fiction and storytelling to make it as interesting as possible, and, in doing this, I could make it something that other people got to experience, too. 

If you’ve been listening to the very kind prayers and announcements that the Vestry and Reverend Chadwick have made sporadically throughout the year, you will know that, a few months ago, the book that I wrote while I was the Writer in Residence in the high school last year has been bought by a publisher, along with a second book that I haven’t written yet. But it wasn’t like I went right from being a fourth grader who had written a story I liked to being an adult who has a book that’s coming out. So how did it happen? What did I do between then and now? I won’t tell you everything, because that would take a very long time, but I’ll tell you the basics. 

Most importantly, I kept writing, because writing kept feeling fun. I didn’t write all the time, but I wrote little stories in notebooks or for school, and I always chose the creative option when I was given a choice on English assignments, and I kept feeling excited about recording the world around me. When I was in eleventh grade, I spent four months at a semester school in Vermont called the Mountain School. At the Mountain School, which was a school and a working organic farm, I had all these experiences I’d never had before. I made friends who are still my best friends today; I harvested lettuce that my classmates and I then ate for lunch; I helped care for baby lambs that had just been born; I camped by myself in the Vermont woods for four days and three nights. And when I wrote about these experiences in my journal at the end of each day, it felt like getting to live them all over again, getting to catch hold of all the details so I could remember them and communicate them to other people, later. 

When I was writing this talk, I was reminded of Mr. Belsky’s talk last week about AI and learning. What he said about how learning is the process of doing the work really resonated with me. For me, the thing that’s most fun about writing is the work—getting to reflect on experiences that I’ve had, on little things I’ve noticed about the world, and trying to make that noticing beautiful. And I continued to try to do that in college, where I studied English, and in grad school, where I studied fiction writing, and after I finished school, when I would set aside time in the mornings or on the weekends to put words on paper. 

Now, I’m not saying that every time I sit down at my desk to write, I feel surrounded by the beauty of the whole world. Often, when I sit down to write, I feel annoyed that I can’t figure out a character, or I feel like it would be a better use of my time to go fold my laundry, or I feel like I would much rather be walking down the street to get an iced coffee than struggling over the order of words in a sentence. A lot of writing is failing, or at least feeling like you’re failing. I talked to some high schoolers earlier this year about choosing a creative profession, and I showed some screenshots on the board of rejection letters that I’d gotten for stories I’d submitted. Because I can’t project anything here, I looked back at the website that tracks submissions to literary magazines to give you a sense of the numbers. In the past eight years, I have submitted stories in the hopes of having them published more than one hundred times. Do you want to guess how many acceptances I have, in my long list of submissions? [Pause for guesses] Three stories. That means that I have more than ninety-seven rejections. But the reason I kept writing stories, and submitting them, and working on my novel, was, simply, that it kept feeling fun. I kept having the feeling that it was worthwhile to write stories, and to try in my own small way to make sense of the world. And that feeling is what allowed me to keep getting better, even in moments when I got another rejection and I wondered whether maybe I wasn’t so good at writing after all. I also kept being lucky enough to have teachers like Ms. Bellingham, and friends who were also writers and readers, who mentored me and encouraged me to keep writing even when I felt doubt and who talked to me about the things that helped them make sense of the world. 

So if I hope to leave you thinking about anything at the end of this chapel talk, it is this question: What is it that makes you, specifically you, feel like the world is a beautiful place to be? Maybe, like me, it’s writing that makes you feel that. Most likely it’s something entirely different—walking in nature or playing baseball or teaching or gardening or drawing or something else! Only you know what that special thing is, and maybe you haven’t even found that special thing yet. But once you do, I’d ask this: keep doing that special thing. Keep writing, or walking, or playing baseball, or gardening, or doing whatever it is that feels, in the work of doing it, worthwhile. And maybe you won’t be the best at that thing right away, and maybe you won’t even be very good at it, but you don’t have to be. If something makes you happy, that is more than enough reason to pursue it. Because a world that is full of people finding time to do things that bring them joy sounds like a very beautiful world to me.