Make Your Soul Grow
Background
In the fall of 2006 an English teacher at Xavier High School in Manhattan, Ms. Lockwood, gave her class an assignment: write to your favorite author and ask them to come and visit. Five students chose Kurt Vonnegut. He was the only author who wrote back.
He was eighty-four and no longer making appearances. Instead he sent a one-page letter with the best assignment those students ever got: make a small piece of art, for no one, and see what it does to you. He died five months later.
From the letter
November 5, 2006
Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:
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What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
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You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.
God bless you all!
Kurt Vonnegut
Copyright. This letter is still under copyright, held by the estate of Kurt Vonnegut, so this page quotes its heart rather than the whole. The parts left out are the funniest: why he doesn’t make public appearances any more, and the homework itself — a rhymed six-line poem, and what to do with it. Read the full letter in Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note or on the Letters of Note website.