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If Deborah Fryer (’81)’s professional and academic journeys demonstrate one thing, it’s the transformative power of stories—the ones we read, the ones we share with others, and the ones we tell ourselves.
    Among the first stories to capture Deborah’s attention were works by the likes of Ovid and Virgil, encountered and voraciously devoured in her Commonwealth Latin classes with Polly Chatfield. “I can still see her and hear her as we’re reading the Metamorphoses,” Deborah recalls. “I remember us weeping over how beautiful the language was.”
    A self-described “free spirit” in those days, Deborah followed her love of Classics wherever it might take her, from a six-month program on a Greek island working as a weaver’s apprentice to an eventual master’s degree in Latin and Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature. Shortly before completing her Ph.D., she attended a conference on women in media, where she encountered a lecture on Aristophanes’s Lysistrata and the power of women to change outcomes—and in the span of one weekend, everything changed. “After this conference, I thought, ‘I want to do more than teach Classics. There must be something more that I can be doing.’” 

At first glance, Emma Brennan-Wydra ('11)'s career might seem like a winding path, from aspiring chemistry professor to ballroom dance instructor to librarian-in-training to data analyst at the New York Times. But beneath these pivots lies a consistent thread: a passion for shaping and sharing knowledge to inform, inspire, and empower others.

"I’m really motivated by learning and helping other people get information that they need,” Emma reflects. “I realized I don't necessarily need to be this super deep expert on one topic. I wanted to build things and do things that enable people to answer their own questions."

In this moment, Commonwealth alumni/ae who work with language, from novelists to medical editors, grapple not only with holding readers’ concentration but holding onto their own habits of mind to overcome distraction. We turned to them to rediscover what’s distinct about the sustained attention of a Commonwealth English class, what we lose when it’s gone, and how—in writing and life—we can keep cultivating it.

Some people end up in postgraduate programs because they’re following a clear, standard path, destined for, say, med school from that freshman-year Anatomy 101 class. Alexander Droznin-Izrael ’11, however, landed in his for quite the opposite reason. “Everyone knew I was a pre-med, but it seemed like all my friends were on that path” he says. “I liked the idea of pursuing something non-standard.”

Having majored in Russian in addition to biology, he enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard. But as much as he enjoyed the subject material and his work teaching undergraduates, he couldn’t shake the feeling that a lifetime in that field would feel disconnected from much of the world, and medicine crept into his thoughts again.

If you’re searching for an engrossing chat about books, movies, art, language, or anything in between, look no further than Yann Dardonville. New to Commonwealth this school year, Mr. Dardonville wears his passions on his sleeve, bringing an infectious enthusiasm to his French classes—a place, he says, where “being a clown” is only an advantage.