Now, she is Alice Elliott Dark, with a host of published short stories and essays, novellas, a novel, Think of England, and The Betty Book to her credit. She has won the O. Henry Prize and Fellowships from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has lectured widely, serves on literary award panels, gives workshops, and is Writer in Residence at Rutgers-Newark University.

Ms. Dark’s collection of short stories, In the Gloaming, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2000. The title story, first published in The New Yorker, was chosen by John Updike for inclusion in Best American Short Stories of the Century. It was made into an HBO film directed by Christopher Reeve and starring Glenn Close.

Ms. Dark is a master of the last line, of the twist at the end that changes the entire story. In a speech to alumni in 1996 she said “I write about what I believe we all have in common, which is this extraordinary and completely inexplicable ability to occasionally, under certain circumstances, be better people than we usually are.… I write with the intention of celebrating the existence of transcendence within daily life.”

It is for such writing that we give Alice Kirby Dark the Distinguished Alumni Award.

Thank you so much for this honor. It means a lot coming from Shipley, because Shipley is where I was formed, and Shipley has formed hundreds of other distinguished alumni as well. The girls in my class alone are extraordinarily accomplished: I have never again met a group of people as smart and focused. So that this year this distinction comes to me is necessarily something I have to think about and learn to accept over time. I deeply appreciate it.

I arrived at Shipley as a kindergartner in the spring of 1958. My mother and aunt were Shipley graduates, so it was natural for my sister and I to go here as well. Since that first day at Beechwood House, I haven’t really ever left. Thirteen years of childhood and youth in an institution with a strong philosophy cannot be separated from who you are.

Some of you may have literary aspirations, so I’m going to cite four ways—out of many--that Shipley helped me become a writer.

The first is friends. I still know a lot of my Shipley classmates—some are here today. I knew them when they were five and all the way through until they were 18. Not only that, we knew each other’s families. That gave us an intimacy that doesn’t happen later in life, except with one’s spouse.  I spent so much time at their houses, and they mine, that there were no secrets between us. We still can pick up where we left off, even after years pass without talking. We spent dozens of nights staying up, telling each other stories. I was known to stay awake talking even after friends had fallen asleep. I tried to be interesting enough to keep sleepy girls awake. This was a lesson in the importance of dramatic tension and suspense; it is important to keep the reader interested.

The second is teachers. One expects a high level of teacher from college, but I only had two professors at Penn who were the equal of the teachers I had here. We are in the Reilly theater, and I find it no wonder Mrs. Reilly has been honored with an auditorium. She took me in hand when I most needed it. I was a very rebellious girl and never wrote the assignment she asked. She would literally hunt me down in the school to hand me back whatever version of the assignment I had done for her, which she took seriously, and commented on as if I’d followed instructions. At the end of these chats, she’d always stand up straight, give me a stern stare, and say. “Now go home and do it my way.” I own Mrs. Reilly my revision skills.

The third debt I owe to Shipley comes of the honor system. Does that still exist? It held a huge place in my imagination when I was here, and I spent many hours pondering what to report myself for, what to say if I were caught in a wrong doing, and what to write in the school newspaper that might change some of the rules. It was a great source of pressure and soul searching to have to live up to an honor system, and it helped form some of my ideas about theme. It was good to be continually tested: I developed a conscience at Shipley, and now supply one to my characters.

The fourth lasting influence is the two great headmistresses who ran the school during my years, Miss Speer and Mrs. Epes, both true intellectuals. Mrs. Epes shared her love of poetry in assemblies such as this, and her poetic sensibility allowed her to see potential in me that would have been overlooked in many places—I know it.  She let stay in school when my behavior really warranted a different outcome. Mrs. Epes told me I was a good poet, and I believed her. Miss Speer’s stories of her girlhood in China, which I heard before I was even ten, surely influenced me to become a Chinese major in college. These women did not have easy personal lives, but they set a high standard for scholarship and discipline—longs hours spent among books. They admired writing, and when I finally decided I would go ahead and be a writer, I had their strength to help me along.

I hope that you all appreciate being students at Shipley. I don’t think what college you go to matters nearly as much as having spent your early years in a great school. Shipley was a great school, and from everything I hear it still is. I am glad I ended up doing a few things to repay what I got from being here. I wouldn’t say that my ending up being distinguished was entirely predictable—but you are being prepared for the unknown. I was.

Thank you very much.