Cruise Ship Transcendence  

By Emma Reynolds

The most popular senior elective at my high school was “Writing From Within” and was taught by Mr. Connolly¹, an enthusiastic teacher who wore brightly patterned shirts and always had a tin of Altoids in his desk drawer that he would pass around during class.

The syllabus featured myriad creative nonfiction essays, each followed by assignments where we wrote essays imitating each author’s writing style and tone. I’ve forgotten all of the essays we studied except for one: David Foster Wallace’s² “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” ³ ⁴

The classes where we discussed this essay went as follows:

1. You would raise your hand to comment on last night’s reading. 

2. Mr. Connolly would ask you to be specific—Where did you notice him using an unexpected word choice? Where he calls caviar “blucky”? Or where he compares the sky to the color of old dimes? 

   a. If you couldn’t quite remember, fear not! Chances were high that Mr. Connolly knew exactly where it was. 

3. The class would collectively turn to page 258 or 307 to see what you were talking about.

4. Mr. Connolly would inevitably decide we had to read some of it aloud. 

5. He would call on Jack or Bailey or me to do so. 

6. Jack of Bailey or I would begin reading. 

   a. Mr. Connolly would let you get 0.1–1.5 sentences in before he would interrupt you—not with a word, but with a general exclamation⁵ such as: 

   i. Read that again!

   1. How does he measure his room? WITH HIS SIZE-11 KEDS! 

   2. What does he nickname Tibor, Table 64’s waiter?⁶ 

   ii. Did you catch that?! 

   1. He’s telling us a word is overused and then USING IT ANYWAYS!⁷

   2. He’s analogizing Jaws to porn!

   3. He has a footnote that complicates its own existence!⁸

   iii. WHAT IS HIS CAPITALIZATION DOING FOR US IN THIS PART?!

7. This would repeat for the remainder of class—ft. a brief intermission where the wintergreen Altoids were passed around the circle of tables. 

Please note: these question-mark-exclamation-mark⁹ comments/ questions/ wonderings didn’t only come from Mr. Connolly. My classmates and I talked about it in the dining hall, on the athletic fields, during cross country drills. We high schoolers had never encountered nonfiction written with DFW’s tone and voice —even our cultivated apathy toward assigned reading couldn’t withstand it. 

For me though, it was more than excitement—it was permission. “ASFTINDA” was an invitation to write the way I—a passionate, nerd-adjacent girl with ADHD— thought¹⁰. For the DFW imitation essay, I didn’t have to delete the part where I got sidetracked and wrote three too-long sentences back to back to back. I could keep the ellipses, the virgules, the parenthesis within the parenthesis¹¹. I could write the way I talked¹² —which was something I hadn’t done since the third grade.

And now, as I reread the essay once again at age 32, another layer to this aforementioned “permission” is emerging—deeper than what I felt in high school. Perhaps because I am looking less for the linguistic patterns I can imitate, and am instead turning towards the I— the narrator’s voice that is so its own, the observer becomes part of what is being observed. On this re-reading, “ASFTINDA” is not just permission to write the way I think, but permission to acknowledge that when I write about a person, a place, a cruise ship, a father—I am also writing about myself encountering it.

Which means it’s time to tell you that Mr. Connolly is my dad. I changed his name to enable this surprise—he was actually Mr. Reynolds. Still is, in fact, though I haven’t had to call him that since I graduated in 2013 from the private school where he worked, where we lived, and where my sister and I were known as faculty brats (AKA children of teachers and staff who were afforded the incredible opportunity to go to said private high school tuition-free.)

I withheld this detail because I was and am always afraid that my view of my dad will be dismissed because we idealize our parents and also overly criticize them and therefore can’t really see them and yada yada—which is very fair and mostly true, but ALSO, as DFW taught me, we don’t have to sand away our relationship to the subject in pursuit of some more objective truth.¹³

And in a way, I got closer to the truth of who my father is by taking “Writing From Within.” I got to be in a space where he wasn’t relating to me as “my dad”—but as “my teacher.” And later, when he became “a mentor,” “a cover letter editor,” “a backpacking companion,” “a friend.” And those special moments when he transcends all of those relationships and becomes just his love of a thing. 

¹Mr. Connolly was the poster child of the school—he was photographed teaching poetry under a cherry tree, hands outstretched, gesturing at something we could not see but could tell mattered, both to him and the students. He coached Poetry Out Loud, started the annual Shakespeare Festival, and made Hamlet matter to 15-year-old boys. His students went on to become bestselling authors and Pulitzer-winning reporters, but perhaps more tellingly, at reunion each year, he was swarmed by former students who needed to thank him, tell him a story, or introduce him to a daughter who would be starting at the school the next year and who, they hoped, would have the privilege of having him as her teacher.

²Who shall be referred to as DFW. Come to think of it, I don’t know if I’ve ever heard someone refer to him as “Wallace.”

³Which shall be referred to as “ASFTINDA” for the remainder of this essay.

⁴ASFTINDA is one of the only books I saved from high school. DFW’s titular essay is annotated in blue and then hot pink pens. There are stars in the margins and footnotes that are underlined and bracketed with “YES!” written next to it. There are question marks and circled words that I later look up and define (paucity = lack of, pince-nez = dark sunglasses covering).

⁵These interruptions usually began with “AHHH!” or “Yes!” or “Wait! Wait!” followed by:

⁶“Tibster”-- but DFW immediately qualifies that this is never out loud.

⁷“The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously.” (261)

⁸It literally says ,”[l]ong story, not worth it.”

⁹Though I will say, there is a particular enthusiasm Mr. Connolly seemed physically incapable of containing, that none of us could quite emulate.

¹⁰Think? Unsure of correct verb tense. 

¹¹Instead of highlighting them (the ellipses) with a comment to my future self—something along the lines of “FIGURE OUT WORDING HERE.”

¹²There is something poetic here about how in my twenties, I would leave my career as a journalist to pursue podcasting, because I was (what follows is a direct quote from a cover letter) “tired of editing everyone’s voice into Times New Roman, 12 point font.”

¹³In fact, later, when I was in a graduate program for documentary studies, I would learn that many people consider “unbiased reporting” to be impossible.