SHOW YOUR WORK

THE CLASS

English 406

Creative Nonfiction Workshop

THE STUDENTS

Tyler Ettelson ’23

Neha Jampala ’23

THE TEACHER

Justin Romick

THE ASSIGNMENT:

Literature has an historical precedent of transmuting the realities of human existence into compelling narratives, thus accommodating an impulse articulated by Nietzsche when he wrote, “we have art in order not to die of truth.” This course will allow students to engage in the practice of writing creative nonfiction with a variety of forms and approaches. We will read and follow the models of Ta-Nahisi Coates, Hanif Abdurraqib, John McPhee, Rebecca Solnit, Adam Gopnik, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Jia Tolentino, Rebekah Taussig and several others as we familiarize ourselves with the genre and create artistically compelling pieces of narrative truth.

—Deerfield Academy Course Catalog

After assigning The Headmaster by John McPhee ’49, English teacher

Justin Romick asked the students in his workshop to write profiles of one another in McPhee’s style, using the techniques they had observed in The Headmaster. They researched, interviewed, and considered the “internal contradictions” of their subjects. The result was a series of compelling essays, including the following two by seniors

Tyler Ettelson and Neha Jampala.

by Tyler Ettelson ’23

Neha Jampala loves to write. Medium is no object: her fingers fly across the keyboard as gracefully as her pen dances across the page. Her writing has weaved its way throughout her life. This past year, Neha wrote the eye-opening nonfiction work, Reflections From the Covid-19 Pandemic: Pursuits of Panaceas, culminating her years of journaling and writing as a whole.

She writes in her introduction that the book’s central message is about finding solidarity, solutions, and hope in the community. She eloquently writes, “when we read, our natural inclination is to try and decipher what will happen next, which activates our brains to see situations from different perspectives” (xi, Jampala). Using the first person plural, we, she includes herself, alluding to how she functions.

Neha takes this approach outside of literature, into how she reads the world. For example, when sitting in the Dining Hall, Neha walked me through her thought process when I asked her if she would like to get up to grab coffee with me: “No,” she says. But in her head, she thinks: “I don’t want coffee. So no. Wait. How will Tyler feel? . . .” These ponderings were brought to a close with me finishing my question: “so that we can continue chatting?” But in that instant, she thought of not only what she wanted but also what I would think, what I would feel. She read the situation. Neha ended up walking with me.

Neha’s writing is spontaneous, much like herself. After toiling away at work on a Saturday afternoon, Neha decides to go to a local sheep festival in Western Massachusetts. A local sheep festival. This sheer-pun intended-level of spontaneity is not uncommon. Whether it be pausing work to go on impromptu gas station runs, or writing down ideas, or saying whatever comes to mind at the moment, a chaotic spontaneity resides within Neha’s placid composure.

Writing is how Neha thinks. Even for quantitative subjects like math, her notes are extensive, words proliferate the sparse mathematical equation.

Like her writing, which shifts from Scroll editorials to research papers, she transforms herself. But this transformation doesn’t occur to appease others, rather to appease her own desires. At home, she oscillates between locking herself in her room to work—shouting a vicious teenage “What” at any semblance of a disturbance at her door—to barging into her mother’s office demanding to cook some obscure recipe and watch an Indian movie. Although this sounds like your usual teenager, when you couple Neha’s actions with insight from her friend Ashley, Neha is conscious of time. She never procrastinates. She’s honest and always says what is on her mind. As a friend of hers once said, “Neha does everything she can to get as far as she can,” aligning with her parents’ anecdote of Neha at home.

So, where did this passion for writing originate? Neha claims it’s from being an only child and, more specifically, from attending school in Arizona.

BASIS School. Per its nomenclature, it sounds like an institution that develops a strong base from which students can continue to excel in secondary school and beyond. For Neha, BASIS School embodied the lonely years of her childhood. BASIS did not follow the basic school structure. There were two sessions of schooling: Early Bird and Late Bird. This rupture caused a staunch divide between the solidification of Neha’s intellectual and academic basis and her formative childhood experiences. When her classmates left for the day promptly at 2 pm, Neha stayed late, doing her homework as her parents had to pick her up late. The one sparse break from this childhood world stuffed full of academia was Thursdays. On Thursdays, Neha got to leave school early with everyone else.

But why did Neha love Thursdays? Because of writing. Well, more specifically, because she attended Kumon, an after-school math and reading program, on Thursday afternoons. Her Kumon packets were riddled with vocabulary and grammar: the tools to write. Thus writing and Kumon are inexplicably tied to her joy of fitting in, of conformity with the other students at BASIS.

It’s no contest that Neha cares about her writing, always putting her best foot forward, but more importantly, Neha cares. A prime example of Neha’s receptivity to those around her comes in the form of a rowdy freshman’s questions over a nice waffle on a calm Sunday morning. While I was interviewing Neha, a freshman injected himself at our table and hijacked my job as the interviewer, with a complete disregard for manners as he brimmed with freshman ignorance. This child asked a bunch of extraneous questions such as “How do your glasses affect the political and economic state of the world?” To which Neha quipped, “I’m helping the supply chain run by being a consumer.” Neha’s deadpan response elicited laughter all around the table. She didn’t brush off the freshman’s inquiries; instead, without missing a beat, she answered.

Over Long Winter Weekend, Neha and her friend Chelsea decided to hike Mount Sugarloaf. Chelsea kept stumbling on the uneven, slippery, and eroded path up to the summit. With a smile on her face, Neha would always help her up despite constantly falling victim to the ice herself. Following their excursion, Neha wrote a thoughtful handwritten letter which her friend was able to repeat to me verbatim. No matter how busy she is, Neha will always outstretch a hand to friends or proctees with a smile beaming from her face, with her left cheek arching slightly as if attempting a wink.

This kind, caring center of Neha is hard to see; it’s sheltered. When asking those not well-acquainted with Neha about her temperament, the response was uniform: Neha is a quiet, hardworking intellectual. Over the course of this profile, I have pushed aside Neha’s façade of a quiet intellectual and have begun to unravel the mess behind this neatly pressed curtain. Her humor does not shine through the curtain to those unaware that it’s a curtain, not a wall. To them, her humor and personality falls flat as high-brow intellectual-speak. In reality, the humor is so flat it’s hilarious. They are looking at a curtain and just have not waited long enough for the show to start. It took two weeks, but the orchestra is tuning. Through different perspectives Neha’s curtain is being drawn, revealing her intellectual, kind, and caring nature.

In some respects, Neha’s mind assumes the following structure when at an impasse: How may I achieve my goals? What is the person across from me thinking? Do their ideas align with what I desire? Do I care about them (in almost every case yes)? How can I achieve a relative balance between what I want and what they want? Egh, whatever, let’s just do what they want.

She insightfully perceives the totality of her surroundings, like a writer crafting a setting of a densely wooded forest with vivid imagery. Yet sometimes, she blurts out whatever is on her mind. To her, this is her largest point of fallibility. She’s constantly telling me: I’m working on it, I promise. What exactly is she referring to? She believes her honesty can come off as rude, and that she needs a better filter.

Neha doesn’t like to bother others, her friends always say that they need to text her, that Neha never texts first—especially Zoe. Yet she takes on excessive loads of work, and another friend stated that she always knows when she needs help and always reaches out when that moment arises. The dissonance here lies in the fact that if she never reaches out, does she never need help? Is Neha infallible? No.

Neha writes the context of her friendships, always with kindness and thought. But that context is flexible based on the desires of her friends. Neha might not be the infallible author of her own life, but she is certainly writing her desires into existence. Similar to her book’s central message, Neha Jampala has found her own solidarity, her own solutions, and her own hope. //

by Neha Jampala ’23

If you were ever to meet Tyler, your first encounter would probably be at Table 17 in the Dining Hall, and you would definitely be sitting at an awkward 90-degree angle from him if you plan on joining him for breakfast. Tyler is always sitting in his usual back-facing-the-wall seat, and you will find his friend Gabe sitting 180 degrees across from him. Both of them want arm space so you cannot exactly sit right next to them either. Of course, you cannot sit in their seats because it will thoroughly disturb both. For context, Tyler told me once that he and Gabe were very perturbed by the fact that I sit at a different breakfast table every other week. Tyler finds comfort in being in the exact same seat every morning because not only does his seat give him a vantage point of the entire dining hall, but also has a perfectly straight route to his left for coffee. He calls 6:25 am (his average arrival time) a prime-time for work, which is both a necessity and routine that grounds him.

Although many attest that Tyler is naturally melancholy, if you greet him on a morning when he got more than four hours of sleep, you will likely get a cheery fist bump from him and a “How’s life?” As he pushes back his hair and fiddles with the bracelets on his left wrist, you will start to notice what he predicts people will notice first: that he’s “Wasian,” coming from mixed descent. If you continue prodding him on what it’s like being mixed, he’ll tell you that he’s mixed in so many other ways (which he obviously doesn’t specify) and that he’s become sort of a chameleon as he embodies the type of person that other people see him most saliently as. His chameleon analogy was an evasive response to a question about feelings, and you’ll start to notice that Tyler is A) incredibly intelligent and analytical in many ways but also B) extremely guarded.

(continued on the next page)

by Neha Jampala ’23

Although Tyler always keeps a guard up, he is highly attuned to the emotions of people around him, even if he doesn’t necessarily confront his own directly. As I’ve got to know him better, his innate compartmentalization is an extension of his mantra: “First with the head, then with the heart.” He shares that his mom, an extrovert at heart, was one the biggest influences in his life, as she helped him come out of his bubble, shaping Tyler into someone who leads with a mix of head-first and heart-first thinking. From his childhood days at Buckley, where Tyler was undeniably a quiet, serious, and introverted student, he has since allowed himself to open up to the vastness of Deerfield. He now exists in his most genuine self around his friends who only recount the best in their friend who has shaped their growth just as much as they had shaped his.

From doing endless Kumon packets or Wordly Wise on the glass counter table in his living room, to playing at state chess championships as only a pre-teen, Tyler has a natural inclination for analytical thinking and problem-solving. He prefers the compartmentalized and quantitative nature of life. Yet Tyler subconsciously guards himself by putting up walls, but they are only made of paper, according to friend and co-proctor, Gabe. Gabe is a very qualitative, expressive person, Tyler complements him as a reserved and quiet thinker. Perhaps this is why they work well together, and more so because their relationship is built from common ground even if it faces opposite directions.

As I talk to Gabe, I can see precisely why they are friends. To me, they were an unusual pairing at first, but I could tell that they both brought out the better sides in each other. After spending fifteen minutes talking to Gabe about Tyler, I felt as though I could write a paper on Gabe, right then and there. I still had no idea where to start with Tyler. Not only does Tyler exist very differently in my own mind than he does in reality, but he also carries his personality in a rather evasive way, making it hard to define or articulate. Most of his responses to my questions are: “Well, Neha, it really depends…” So I realized one thing: I would not be able to write this essay depending upon what Tyler tells me. Instead, I would need to glean from observing him, since his actions speak the words he most often keeps guarded, and his friends who know him best see a larger and more complete picture.

Tyler is organized. He writes his to-do lists on his mirror, and color codes his weekly calendar. Although he sometimes dresses in monochrome since he gets dressed in the dark, he never stands out as conspicuously unusual but rather tidy and put-together. Sometimes his multi-colored polka dot socks tell a different story, but perhaps this quirk connects to the way he thinks of himself as somewhat chaotic, as he believes his brain doesn’t necessarily coordinate with the way he wants to function physically.

The spinning Apple pencil between Tyler’s fingers that sometimes distracts his interlocutor from what he is saying, anchors him closer to his own thoughts. While his pencil serves as a constant force of exerted pressure, Tyler himself is extremely level-headed under pressure of all kinds. One rarely knows how much is happening inside Tyler’s mind; we are met instead with a polite, sometimes tired, smile. As Thomas tells me repeatedly, “He’s unconditionally supportive.” Despite his own qualms, Tyler will instead ask you first: “how’s life?” There were many moments when I didn’t know how to address Tyler’s classic “how’s life?” question —whether to answer generally, or whether to answer truthfully In the face of questions like these, I only want to reflect the question back at him, but I always refrain since I wonder if it will only burden him more by forcing him to confront emotions he usually does not want to say aloud.

While Tyler does reveal his entire emotional spectrum, behind his paper walls is his empathetic, caring heart. One of Tyler’s closest friends, Jackson, tells me: “It doesn’t matter what he’s doing. If you need him, he will stop everything and make time for you.”

Tyler is the friend you are unexpectedly drawn to, the type of kid who does not shy away from questioning you, yet does so with quiet restraint. When I was out of class with strep one day he sent a text: “R u alive?” Although someone with strep would rather see a “how are you feeling?”, I appreciated the thought. In the process of writing this paper, I myself unexpectedly began to feel an affinity for Tyler, and more often than not, returning to Table 17 to ask for Spanish or math help. His natural ease with conversation is something that came with time. Although Tyler was relatively introverted growing up, his now wide circle of friends, easy rapport with many faculty members and classmates, and attentiveness as a proctor reflect his growth more than anything. Tyler’s dad, a Deerfield alum, says “Tyler’s definitely not your DA cheerleader. But he’s a quiet leader, and that did come with a lot of growth.”

Tyler’s quiet traits of care and compassion are often kept to himself, much like the way he handles relationships with his family. When I asked him about who his strongest influences in his life were, he weaved through an answer, ever-evasive, and gave me an unexpected response: “my end goal in life is to make sure my sister is taken care of.” Those who are only acquaintances with Tyler may not assume that he was an older brother, let alone one that would sporadically send random selfies and exchange emoji spams. In most of his classmates’ minds, Tyler exists one-dimensionally: the hardworking, respectful kid who holds decent conversations, is good at chess, and is happy to help if you ask. As Gabe confirms Tyler’s “Type A” personality, he mentions that when Tyler’s excited or happy, he talks incessantly. But he proceeds to say: “I’ve never seen Tyler truly happy.” They’re an interesting duo.

While I may have never seen Tyler truly happy as well, I can affirm Tyler’s talkative nature when he warms up to a person. Perhaps it was just because of the heat on the swelteringly humid day we walked down Albany Road, but it was that moment I knew that I had maybe, just maybe, poked a hole in one of Tyler’s walls. He tells me about dealing with migraines during a tough junior year and trails off into several postulations about how his fish, Flash, died by the time he came back from a trip, and he mainly suspects the doorman and his other fish, Rose, who became twice as big.

If LM were having a Monopoly night, Gabe would be more focused on distracting everyone with tangential conversations while Tyler would be the banker and scrutinize his assets as if it were real life. In short, Tyler is more action-oriented than conversational. Yet, once you get to know Tyler, you will find him surprisingly talkative, dropping hints of himself along the way while still holding his guard up. While he can hold a good conversation, sometimes he puts an end to ours by asking me rebuttal questions on my writing process or if I dislike hypocrites and liars. With Tyler, you never know where the conversation will go, but you will likely have a good one before ending on a curious note that makes you contemplate your childhood or entire existence.

In more metaphoric terms, when you hear Tyler talking about things he loves the most, you hear the thoughts that slip through the walls he has constructed. As we sit at Table 17, having a casual conversation about the superiority of the waffle versus omelet bar at brunch, Tyler—a multi-tasker at heart but a linear thinker—pulls up a design he was working on throughout the conversation and asks what I think of it. Of course, me knowing almost nothing about architectural design, could only offer a casual “looks pretty cool” but Tyler takes the words with enthusiasm and appreciation. He’s a person with simple appreciation for affirmation and buttresses my “sorry, I don’t really know anything about architecture” with an “awesome, thanks! That’s all I needed . . . for it to look cool.”

Despite doing well in almost everything he chooses to pursue, Tyler undermines the compliments and claims that he just “wings stuff”, sees how it goes, hopes it’s fun, and covers up his reasoning for doing it with analytical logic. In this sense, I’ve been able to reconcile Tyler’s dynamic mentality and easygoing nature as it juxtaposes his compartmentalization and serious commitment to the things he cares most about.

More than anything, understanding and “figuring out” Tyler has shown me what growth looks like. From descriptions from friends and family members to the way Tyler perceives himself, I notice how every day, Tyler tries to be a better person for the people around him. Whether it’s through proctoring or his experiences with art, he tells me that “I’m not trying to be the best, I just want to be better. Nothing about me is really done, and I think I’m just trying to improve every day.” When I asked him what he believed was life’s purpose, he cursed, sat quietly, “ummed” for 10 seconds, and said: “can you clarify the question please?” I didn’t clarify the question, I just repeated it. But this time, he responded quickly: “I want to leave behind a legacy.” I, unsatisfied with Tyler’s brief answers as always, asked him to expand. In short, he explained that leaving a legacy does not have to be tangible, but having the satisfaction that “you have a net-cost positive impact on the world.” Again, this was a classic Tyler response, one that was analytical, hints at his creative and emotional side, and leaves you questioning your own values and wondering about your impact on the world. This essay means to capture the existence of Tyler, the accomplished and highly analytical friend, classmate, brother, and son, who often keeps much to himself in a charmingly respectful manner. But Tyler is also talkative, easygoing, effervescent, and affectionately observant. Although I had never spoken a single word to Tyler our first two years at Deerfield, a junior year biology class was our official introduction, and I’ve since grown to appreciate his constant, thoughtful, and melancholy presence. Whether it’s across the table in the classroom or across the dining hall from Table 17, there’s something about the familiarity in the traits I see in common between myself and Tyler and the differences between us that make his words and actions compelling. By the end of this paper, I’ve officially been granted an “always welcome to join” invite to Table 17, albeit it came from his friend, not Tyler himself, since Tyler would never say those words out loud. It might take me another year of having to get to know Tyler to hear him tell me that I am welcome at his breakfast table, but only on the conditions that I didn’t sit in his or Gabe’s seat and only if I ensure my presence doesn’t interfere with the 270-degree elbow space they both require. //