The Art of Writing

4/6/2026

Matt Margini, Upper School English Department Coordinator, Illustration by Noa Garcia ’27

When Jeff Freundlich Lindsay ’70 transferred to the Ransom School after a couple of years at Ponce De Leon Junior High, he immediately wanted to do one thing: get into Dan Leslie Bowden’s English class. At the time, Bowden required prospective students to write an essay explaining why they wanted to take the course. Lindsay concocted something suitably lofty: “It is my ambition,” he wrote, “to emulate the verbiage of the great writers.”

On the first day of class, Bowden returned the essay with the sentence circled in red and a note in the margin.

“One mustn’t.”

Indeed, one didn’t. Among many other plays, novels and stories, Lindsay would go on to write the Dexter series, one of the most distinctive and inventive crime sagas of the last half century, which Showtime turned into an iconic eight-season TV show and three full spinoffs. The Dexter novels center on a serial killer who kills other serial killers, channeling his insatiable bloodlust toward ends that one could reasonably view as beneficial to society. Lindsay put it simply: “He’s a bad guy. He kills people. He’s a naughty man.” But the novels have a strange, darkly funny way of getting you to root for him, subverting the basic tenets of crime fiction and challenging our moral intuitions.

They’re novels by a writer who learned, at some point, how to use writing as a means to think differently, expansively and provocatively. For Lindsay, that happened in Mr. Bowden’s class.

“He never really said, ‘Do this, or you’ll be sorry,’” Lindsay reflected. “But he really insisted on it if you were capable of it. I learned the rules, and I learned when to break them. And I was exposed to a ton of good writing, which helped.”

Lindsay is not alone. Playwrights, screenwriters, novelists, journalists: the RE alumni network is replete with writers of all stripes, and if you speak to any of them, chances are, they’ll tell a story about an RE teacher who inspired them. The network is also full of professionals from every other walk of life – scientists, attorneys, physicians, financiers – who say the exceptional writing skills and habits they honed at RE helped set them apart from their peers in college and beyond. Now, with artificial intelligence threatening to transform (or perhaps deteriorate) the written word itself on a massive scale, the RE Humanities Department is focused more than ever on preserving and building on that tradition of cultivating exceptional writers – and original writing – through teaching, mentorship and high standards.

“I learned the rules, and I learned when to break them. And I was exposed to a ton of good writing.”

Jeff Freundlich Lindsay ’70

Gabriela Ulloa ’14, a journalist who has written for dozens of high-profile outlets and launched her own Substack and YouTube channel, Irregardless, traces her career back to the influence of former RE faculty member Josh Stone. Ulloa found her voice in Stone’s Voices from the Inside a senior elective course focused on writing produced by and about incarcerated individuals.

“It was probably the first time a teacher sat with my writing and was like, ‘You’re a very good writer. You should think about doing this,’” Ulloa said. “I guess it was the first time I really locked into the idea that my voice was a thing.”

For Ryann Werner ’11, a television writer who now works on the hit Netflix rom-com Nobody Wants This, her journey as a storyteller actually started in another medium: it was former drama teacher Sean Paul Bryan who first identified a capacity to express herself through acting that she would later bring to the University of Southern California and Hollywood.

“He was really supportive in saying, ‘You’re good at this. You should do more of this. You have a large capacity to embody something, or to portray something,’” Werner said.

For Tara Narula Cangello ’93, a physician-journalist who wears many hats – cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, Good Morning America’s chief medical correspondent, and now the author of The Healing Power of Resilience – it was English teacher Kitty Proenza who planted a seed that would sprout later. In medical school, Narula realized that her calling wasn’t just medicine but storytelling, and she had a unique flair for the delicate art of communicating scientific information to a mass audience.

“[Proenza] made me believe that I could write something that was meaningful, and that mattered, and that would resonate with people,” Narula recalled.

“Kitty Proenza made me believe that I could write something that was meaningful, and that mattered, and that would resonate with people.”

Tara Narulo Cangello '93

It seems true that any writer who commits to this strange, maddening pursuit can probably trace their passion back to a Bowden-esque figure who inspired them to look at the world through a different lens. And yet, stories of Dead Poets Society heroics also tend to belie other important factors. Writers also become writers for unexpected reasons – because the world around them elicits feelings that only writing can turn into sense.

Ulloa remembered “breaking down” when she met a young woman who had just gotten out of prison and came to speak to Stone’s class.

“In high school, you couldn’t pay me to cry in public,” Ulloa said. “I remember just being so taken aback by her story and her strength. She was so young. She was like 24, and the system had just done her wrong. It was another peek into the fact that, as simple as it sounds, every single person that you meet on the street has equally complex things going on in their life. It unlocked a new layer of empathy.”

For Narula, a pivotal moment came when she witnessed a heart transplant, which she processed in a personal essay that she wrote as an RE senior. Unbeknownst to her, her mother submitted it to a contest in Private Practice Magazine – and it won.

“I think between realizing, ‘Gosh, I won this prize, and I got good feedback from my teachers, and I could use it as this way to express myself when things were challenging,’ I went to college really believing in the power of writing,” Narula said.

“I learned to read first, and then I learned to write. And I often think of writing as a way to convey what I have read.”

Vanessa Mobley '88

What will it take to create the conditions for the next generation of RE writers to find their voice? As English Department Coordinator, I must admit that this question keeps me up at night. On the one hand, I have no doubt that this amazing department I call my professional home contains a whole slate of latter-day Bowdens and Proenzas who inspire our students every single day.

Connor Alfonso ’26 said the influence of current RE English faculty member Julia Clarke was indispensable as he worked to publish a sci-fi novel, Turn to Wander, last year.

“Dr. Clarke took the time out of her busy schedule to review every chapter of my novel with me, helped me write query letters to literary agents, reviewed numerous short stories with me, and her mentorship inspired me to pursue my novel’s publication,” Alfonso said.

On the other hand, existential threats to the written word itself seem to be looming on the horizon, if they aren’t here already. Last November, The Baffler published “Brain Rot Without Borders,” a series of essays from writers all over the world bemoaning “postliteracy”: a decline in deep, reflective reading practices precipitated by TikTok-addled attention spans, the abandonment of speech protections by illiberal governments and, of course, AI.

When Vanessa Mobley ’88, Senior Editor of Guest Essays for The New York Times, looked back on the RE education that laid the foundation for her own literary career, she remembered reading first and foremost – reading copiously, deeply and expansively for a 30-page capstone essay on playwright Sam Shepard in Jane Dolkart’s sophomore English class.

“I learned to read first, and then I learned to write. And I often think of writing as a way to convey what I have read,” Mobley said. “If you were a nerdy kid or you desired to learn about the world through books, Ransom Everglades provided so many opportunities to do that.”

Critics of AI tools tend to focus, for very legitimate reasons, on the way they automate writing. From the perspective of Chief of Innovation and Strategic Programming John A. King Jr., the more insidious problem that has emerged three years into the AI revolution is their ability to automate reading – to short-circuit the long, exploratory process of knowledge-gathering that good writing ultimately depends on.

“What I worry about with AI is the increasing lack of respect for knowledge,” King said. “Good writers are curious people who don’t think they know everything. And that’s why they do tons of research, even if it’s just to inform a tiny scene.”

I share Dr. King’s concern, and what it underscores for me is the necessity of teaching intellectual humility as a habit of mind in the humanities classroom: a deference to the hard work of research, the slow work of reading and the irreducible beauty of a human voice on the page.

“You’ve got to read a ton of stuff, as much as you can possibly cram in,” said Lindsay. “It’s like someone saying, ‘I’m going to be a football star, but I’ve never seen the game played.’ No, you’ve got to see as many games as you can.”

“Good writers are curious people who don’t think they know everything.”

John A. King Jr.

But I also can’t help but feel excited about students discovering new forms of knowledge – and yes, even writing – that would’ve been inaccessible without AI. In the next academic year, the English Department will introduce a digital humanities course, Research Seminar: Literature and AI, that asks a basic question: What can we use this technology to do, in the humanities, that we couldn’t have done before? Some students will use it to find new patterns of thought and literary expression across vast bodies of text. Others might use it to make their research come to life in novel, interactive ways. No one will use it to write their paper – or, for that matter, to do the reading. The aim of the course is to give them a whole new universe of things to write about.

“What does AI introduce, what does it bring to the party, that can elevate the design of what we’re doing and still preserve critical thinking skills? I think one of the exciting things is that what we’re writing about will be perhaps different because AI will give us some opportunities, some insights, some ways to analyze text in a way that you couldn’t do before,” explained Humanities Department Chair Jen Nero.

I also take comfort in the idea that some things never change. If you crack open the 1970 edition of The Lamp and the Book, the Ransom School’s literary magazine, you will find numerous poems by Jeff Lindsay, then known as Jeff Freundlich. Among them are modern riffs on character portraits from The Canterbury Tales, written for Bowden’s class.

We still do that exercise every year. And if it helped one great writer find his voice, I have no reason to doubt that, even in 2026, it could help many more.

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RE founder Paul Ransom, circa 1903

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