By Claire Jeantheau

The student arrived twenty minutes late to class—“waltzing in,” veteran English teacher Mary Kate Bluestein recalls. But as he strode into the room, he exclaimed to her by way of explanation: “I was reading Chapter 39! I forgot to get off the T!” 

That would be Chapter 39 of a Commonwealth staple, Dickens’s Great Expectations, in which Abel Magwitch (“Pip’s scary guy that leaps out from behind tombstones–slash-benefactor,” as Kate refers to him) reveals himself for the first time on Pip’s doorstep in London during a midnight thunderstorm. While surprised, Kate could understand why the student, catching up on homework on his commute, missed his stop: “It’s just a humdinger of a chapter.” 

When was the last time you were lost in a piece of writing so deeply—missing-your-T-stop, under-the-bedsheets-with-a-flashlight deeply? Last fall, an Atlantic article, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” with its claim that (as of 2022) 11.5% of high-school seniors didn’t read a single book for fun over the course of a year, sparked discourse among writers, publishers, and educators alike. Suspected culprits for the low numbers abound: social-media oversaturation, reliance on AI-generated summaries, a decline in reading full novels in English classes, even brain fog from COVID-19. Regardless of explanation, there’s a fear that the total focus Kate’s bookish student once enjoyed is a thing of the past.

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.

"Let It Happen"

The Commonwealth English class of 1975 was “really not that different” from one decades later, remarks Kate, now retired, who spent more than forty years teaching. Indeed, alumni/ae throughout the generations, when asked about reading and writing at 151 Comm. Ave., invariably turn first to names: those of teachers (John Hughes and his small third-floor classroom; Brent Whelan and his Hemingway pastiche assignments) and authors (Yeats, Shakespeare, Auden).  

Then come the lingering images: the paradox of being “free” while “imprison[ed]” in “Batter My Heart, Three Person’d God” by John Donne; the omniscient eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg’s billboard in The Great Gatsby and Daisy’s tears at Gatsby’s rich and multicolored shirts. It’s a trove stockpiled from years spent close reading, the Commonwealth mainstay of focused study of authorial choices and textual structure. To hear it described, though, is to learn less about specific literary terms and techniques and more of a way of being. 

“The way that I think about how close reading is incorporated into my life today is the same way that I think about how studying French grammar might be part of how I would talk in French,” says author Ottessa Moshfegh ’98. “It’s part of how I write. It’s part of how I hold words in my head and how I listen to people when they’re talking.” 

Judith Siporin, whose tenure as a Commonwealth English teacher also lasted more than forty years, is adamant about this point: that close reading is much more than a “catchphrase” or a single analytical technique. “It’s a whole complex of attitudes that are involved and parts of oneself that are engaged in it,” she insists.  

Or, as Ottessa puts it: “There is this element of appreciating the miraculous at Commonwealth.” 

The miraculous can be humbling. As a writer, where to begin? How to describe what compels you about a detail in the text that seems striking, profound—maybe even ridiculous? “It's not that you don’t have large ideas. You just don’t start with those ideas—you don’t come in with any baggage at all. You leave it all behind you, and you try to come free,” Judith explains. “You let it happen to you. You don’t impose your ideas on it. And then you try to write as directly about that experience as you can—without jargon, without highfalutin literary terms.” 

Alina Grabowski ’12 published her debut novel, Women and Children First, during the summer of 2024; the first time she learned to linger with sentences and consider their underlying meaning, she says, was at Commonwealth. The philosophy of “let[ting] it happen” has entered her own craft. “When I’m working on fiction, I oftentimes don’t even really know why I’m drawn to what I am creating. If I go in with a preconceived notion, it quickly reveals itself to be faulty or flimsy in some way,” she reflects. “I think writing, for me, is following these obsessions or interests that have to be revealed through the work itself.”

Women and Children First traces the lives of ten female narrators following the death of a young woman in a tight-knit Massachusetts coastal town. Following each perspective, wherever it might lead, guided much of Alina’s writing process. “It’s very character-driven,” she says. “I think all of the women, in some way or another, are stuck in their lives.” As she probed each narrator’s past, Alina asked herself: “‘Why is this character like this? What are the circumstances of their life and the way that they’re currently leading their life that lead to their current situation?’”

 

Testing the Walls

But curiosity is never the final aim, whether in Commonwealth English class or when alumni/ae write. 

“It always started there, but it would never end there,” observes Alex Star ’85, an executive editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. “The point wasn’t just to read and ooh and ahh and gasp in appreciation. It was hard work. Then it became puzzle solving.”

“If the writer is doing a good job—which, in everything we read at Commonwealth, that was the case—you can go back and figure out the underlying mechanics that allow you to be immersed in the scenery of a particular scene or that make a character seem so alive to you,” Alina says. “Oftentimes upon your first read, you sense those things, and then you’re able to go back like a little detective on the trail and figure out: What actually led me to that impression? Was it because of a staccato succession of words? Was it because the colors were really exaggerated in the writing, and the scene felt almost psychedelic? 

“These are the individual bricks of the work,” she finishes. “And if I can see how all the individual bricks fit together, then I understand how the whole house is built.” Alina echoes author and naturalist Annie Dillard in her memoir The Writing Life, comparing each line written to a “hammer” testing the potential shape of a piece: “Some of the walls are bearing walls; they have to stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls can go with impunity.” 

Learning to test for those walls—uncovering, and then writing, a coherent argument—remains a hallmark of the curriculum. Michael Samblas, who teaches tenth-grade English at Commonwealth, directs his students to mark down every reference of devils, demons, or Satan in their readings of Frankenstein: “That gets them really thinking, ‘Wow, this isn’t just occasionally referencing Paradise Lost.’” When they turn to Their Eyes Were Watching God—which begins with protagonist Janie reclining under a pear tree as a girl—they search for the images of flowering plants that signal Janie’s blossoming into a woman. On an initial read-through, Michael says, “you might not know that this detail matters, but when that detail shows up twenty times, then it stops being coincidence.”

As Alex edits nonfiction books that span the breadth of global history, politics, and beyond, he identifies similar patterns in how each author marshals their points, which guides him as he helps hone their writing. “It is important to really think about the arguments and how well-grounded they are in evidence and how persuasive they are and just how interesting they are,” he says. “That close attention to language and tone and structure and ambiguity that Commonwealth gave me is completely essential to just being a good editor.”

 

Risk-Taking and Impossible People

That testing doesn’t just strengthen analysis. It also builds a kind of courage as students, sometimes in dialogue with their peers or teacher, go out on a limb, attempting to position themselves from a different viewpoint. 

Ottessa can pinpoint the exact moment when she took a risk on writing in her own voice, rather than in her image of a “good student,” in an English paper for Eric Davis. When he handed back her essay, she remembers, he had highlighted the spot where her self-expression was most marked, praising her and saying he’d keep a copy for his files. “That was the class where I really started talking more and felt like I could have a voice,” she says, the class where she could “explore without needing to be right or wrong about how a sentence might have moved me to think a certain way.”

Ottessa remains a risk-taker, with her narrators—cynics and paranoiacs, criminals and would-be detectives—transgressing many readers’ social boundaries. (Recent senior speaker Tien Phan ’24 gave her 2018 bestseller My Year of Rest and Relaxation a shout-out during graduation, noting that close reading helped him understand the underlying emotions of, in his words, a “resigned but manic” protagonist.) As a writer, she feels it’s “extremely important” to be sensitive to the idiosyncrasies of each character. 

“There are so many micro-decisions that we’re making at any given moment—when we’re describing something or trying to give an opinion or asking for something—that are particular to us. They inform whoever’s listening, in a very specific way, about who we are and how we think and what we want—and they also might convey ways that we’re trying to manipulate you,” Ottessa says. “The peculiarities of a voice can come across sometimes in really clear and obvious ways, and other times they’re more obscure. And the subtlety, I think, is the really challenging part of character and storytelling.”

Judith, approaching from the reader’s angle, appreciates the provocative characters that emerge from those efforts. “In some works of fiction, when you’re reading closely, you begin to realize that you can’t really trust the narrator,” she observes. “He’s obtuse. He’s missing things that you get. Or he’s maddening. He says outrageous things, and you know, ‘Oh, he’s at it again. Impossible person!’” 

There are moments, too, when an “impossible person,” like an unreliable narrator, lurks in our own internal assumptions. A new student, transferring from another school, arrived in Kate’s eleventh-grade class as a “‘no, I don’t do poetry’ kind of a guy,” she remembers. “He clearly thought that poems were for ladies with fluffy hats and teacups in their hands”—until the day they dove into a complex sonnet about despair. 

“He just looked at me like, ‘Oh my God, this is about the real thing,’” Kate says. The student’s transfer to Commonwealth had been spurred by personal tragedy, and he connected the poet’s anguish with his own. Engaging with the writing on its own terms, Kate believes, enabled his breakthrough. “It wasn’t me saying to him, ‘I know you’ve really been through a tough time, and you might like this poem because it’s all about getting through tough times,’” she says. “He would’ve just rolled his eyes.” 

Kate herself was once frustrated by undergraduate English classes where she read about many authors, but examinations of their works themselves were few and far between. “They were just teaching us the Norton Anthology generalizations about what we were reading—you read Marvell, and you find out something about seventeenth-century poetry,” she says, her disappointment still unmistakable. Later, while earning her Ph.D. in English at Boston College and during her first years teaching, Kate—like Ottessa and like her once poetry-averse student—would plumb for multivalent voices and motives that weren’t always evident at first glance. 

 

Endangered Attention

As these writers describe the mindset they nurtured at Commonwealth—open, constructive, attuned to the layers of others’ perspectives—several are concerned about its erosion. 

Before Alina published her first novel, she taught English; her students seemed increasingly “resistant” to drawing too much from a work of literature. She worked to show them what could be gained from spending time with each text—that “if we look at the repetition and why the comma is in this place as opposed to that place, and why are the tense shifts there, it will crack open the whole work for you.” But the typical response was “‘You’re reading too much into it,’” she says. “The way that teens live is so utterly different from what my teenage experience was like in terms of social media and how students engage with text.”

Introducing a deeper level of analysis comes with a learning curve under the best of circumstances. “Students will always wonder, ‘Do I know that this actually does have this deep, significant meaning, and I’m not just blowing smoke or making mountains out of molehills? Why do I know that this detail matters?’” Michael says. The instantaneous availability of information (and misinformation) online, however, gives the issue a new urgency. “When students feel like they can get an answer or an essay question about a text using [artificial intelligence],” says Alex, “the idea of just reading that closely is really endangered.” 

Alex is wary of the kind of “transactional” approach to language this can engender, where the main goal of reading or writing is to “take a message away”—closing off possibilities for how initial expectations might change over time. “The message is going to be flawed,” he argues, “if one isn’t grounding it in the sort of tactile realities of what a text is.” What do those realities look like? Alina contrasts “Googling in five minutes” with investing time in “a novel talking about three generations of a family,” for example, or a complex academic theory. “That is so many hours someone has spent wanting to impart something,” she says. “You just get such a deeper understanding of things, I think, if you’re willing to engage closely.”

It’s not just a problem that plays out in English class. “There’s a lot of talk about how media literacy is in trouble,” Michael notes, especially considering that “kids today are being advertised to pretty constantly.” 

“That’s the danger of the Internet,” Judith adds. You need to continuously ask: “‘Who’s telling me this? What’s the motivation behind this? Is this evil? Is this mere fact, or is this really skewed?’ That’s an important thing in life, generally, apart from school.” Words always have someone behind them, whether that’s a direct copywriter or the programmer of an answer-generating chatbot. Without slowing down to parse their thinking and motivations, a lot will be missed. 

Staying Present

Kate once entered her classroom after school to find a young woman copying out a string of words over and over. Asking the student what she was writing, Kate learned it was a poem she’d been asked to discuss in a written response. “I see more in the poem if I literally write it,” the student had explained. “I actually put the words down with my hand in my handwriting.”

“I thought that was so striking. I’d never heard that said before,” Kate says. “She knew that was a way of being present in the piece of writing.”

If quick answers threaten deeper understanding, how do alumni/ae writers engage with their own craft? Kate’s student’s practice points to one answer: complete immersion. 

“I routinely, repeatedly revise my poems, often as many as thirty times or more,” says Michael Ansara ’64, an author who has introduced numerous students to living poets as a founder of the nonprofit Mass Poetry. His memoir, The Hard Work of Hope—a work nine years in the making, detailing his decades of activism in the anti-war movement and political reform—will be published in 2025. When he speaks of developing that work, along with an earlier volume of poetry, What Remains, he dwells on “endless revision” and the cycle of “cut, rewrite, and cut again.” 

“I had to learn to be willing to go where the poem wants to go,” he says, evoking Judith’s approach of “leav[ing] it all behind you and try[ing] to come free.” He also had to learn how to create his own “psychic space” for his work that would be separate from the world—a marked contrast from digital settings that can bombard users with notifications and up-to-the-minute news. “I cannot write and be thinking about the news, emails, taking calls, or wondering how the election will turn out,” he adds. 

 

Liz Pease ’93, a senior medical editor at Eversana Intouch, also stands by the close re-read—even when her subject matter would ordinarily make her switch television channels. “You know those lists of side effects at the end of drug ads? I read those, sometimes over and over and over,” she says. An early role as an editorial assistant at an educational development house first pointed her towards her twenty-five-year career in proofreading and editing.

For Liz, the skill feels partially intuitive (“I seem to have been born with something that just makes errors stand out to me,” she muses), but practices like reading aloud—“even punctuation” and especially “if I know I’m losing focus or getting tired”—help her “make absolutely sure I’m not missing things that are easy to overlook.” It’s a strategy that goes back to Commonwealth: Alina does the same with her writing, noting that Judith was her “first advocate” for never keeping background music on while making edits. 

As for current classes, Michael Samblas says, “I really like that Commonwealth students seem to still take personal pride in being able to write and take writing seriously as a skill they want to learn rather than just do well at for grades.” He’s organized his instruction to place greater emphasis on face-to-face interactions in small groups over individual assignments, encouraging students to try their theories on each other rather than first turning to search engines. And he’s introduced weekly writing assignments—each about a paragraph in length—to encourage continuous reflection about each work that students encounter.

An Invaluable Gift

Given the “transactional” relationships to information he’s noticed, Alex wonders whether it might become “a little more difficult” to find the broad audience support for the kind of nonfiction he specializes in at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. But he still believes that the valuation of good writing hasn’t disappeared yet.

“I try not to be too deterministic or declinist about it,” he says. “It’s much easier to notice when someone is looking at their phone when they could be reading and being annoyed by it, and much harder to appreciate that someone actually is reading and getting something out of it.”

His optimism isn’t unfounded. Several years ago, Judith, along with her husband, Eric Davis, and former Head of School Bill Wharton, ventured to Palo Alto for an alumni/ae gathering. Her apprehension rose as she wondered how this group of language-minded faculty would address a guest list that included senior leaders at Google and other major technology companies. As an icebreaker, Bill asked alumni/ae what part of their Commonwealth education had the most value in their lives beyond the school.

“Most of the people who spoke,” Judith recalls, “said it was the English department and learning how to write—how it had been invaluable and what a rarity it is in the tech world and how they had been sought out and valued at their jobs. We were astounded. We thought we would have nothing to say to one another, but afterwards we had many wonderful conversations and were so happy to have made this unexpected connection.”

It’s the “teaching of being fully present” at Commonwealth, Alina says, that is so enriching—in working with language and in any other aspect of living—and that will endure over time. 

“I think we’re all, unfortunately, pulled in many directions, but that way of giving attention to something, whether it’s a conversation with a friend or looking out your window and admiring how your garden has grown…it’s applicable, essentially, to everything in life.”

Claire Jeantheau  served as Commonwealth's Communications Coordinator before becoming the Marketing Manager for the American Exchange Project. This article originally appeared in the winter 2025 edition of CM, Commonwealth's alumni/ae magazine.

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