SPRING 2026 Ransom Everglades LOG 19 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. 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. 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 “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 Kitty Proenza Sean Paul Bryan Jeff Freundlich Lindsay ’70
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