Monday, May 16, 2011

Dream Small: A Commencement Address

A couple of weeks ago I had the honor of delivering the commencement address to the graduating class of King College in Bristol, TN. It's a strange, rather daunting genre. I took brevity to be one of the primary virtues of such a talk. And given that I was in the middle of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King while writing this--and that his own Kenyon College commencement address was rumbling around in my head--I was worried about being entirely derivative (and a bit of a downer). But when I got the invitation last fall, I immediately remembered a note I had scribbled in my moleskin almost two years ago and was able to give them the title immediately: "Dream Small."

Dream Small: King College Commencement Address