The Class That Wasn’t Finished With Me
Forty-five years after a freshman writing course at William & Mary, an alumnus discovers that some lessons — and some places — have a remarkably long shelf life
November 13, 2026
By
Kelly Ronayne ’85, P ’18
I have been thinking lately about how to judge a great university.
Not by the rankings. Not by the architecture, although William & Mary has plenty of that. And certainly not by how efficiently it can find you decades after graduation.
I think a great university might be judged by something harder to measure: what stays with you after you’ve forgotten most of what you were taught.
For me, the answer began with the very first class I took at William & Mary.
I was 18 years old, which meant I knew considerably less than I thought I did. I arrived in Williamsburg in the fall of 1981 and enrolled in a freshman creative writing course taught by professor Cecil McCulley.
There were perhaps 15 students in the class. Each week, we wrote a 1,000-word essay. Then McCulley met individually with each of us for about 15 minutes to discuss our work.
I remember noticing that McCulley was quite old — perhaps in his late 70s — and moved slowly.
At 18, I made the perfectly reasonable assumption that this meant I knew more than he did.
It took approximately one class discussion to disabuse me of that notion.
McCulley’s criticism could be brutal. He had a way of finding the sentence you thought was pretty good and explaining why it wasn’t. He could point out a problem you hadn’t noticed, which was irritating. More irritating still, he was usually right.
But he also knew when something worked. And when it worked, it wasn’t because it was free of spelling or syntax errors. It worked because it connected with readers.
I remember two essays in particular that he liked.
In one, I wrote about playing in a high school racquetball tournament and discovering that my next opponent was a priest. I couldn’t resist wondering whether I would go to hell if I beat him. Or if I went to purgatory if I swore.
McCulley liked that.
He also liked an essay in which I admitted something that had surprised me: how much smarter my parents had become after I went off to college. At the time, that seemed worth writing about precisely because I hadn’t expected it.
Those weren’t exactly the sorts of essays I would have predicted a professor to single out. They weren’t trying to solve the world’s problems. They were simply me noticing something odd or unexpected about my own life and following it far enough to see where it went. All in 1,000 words or less.
I also remember what McCulley didn’t like.
A political essay, for one. Gun control, to be specific.
Not because of the position I took, but because I wasn’t going deep enough. I was writing what I thought I was supposed to write about gun control. McCulley wanted more. He wanted me to be more provocative, more exciting. He wanted me to get inside the heads of the people I was writing about — to understand what they wanted, feared, believed and perhaps even misunderstood about themselves.
Oh, and he didn’t like that I had used a Bob Dylan lyric without giving credit to the songwriter.
In other words, he was teaching me something I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to understand: Don’t just write about an idea. Write about the people inside it.
And don’t settle for the obvious version of the story.
When he liked something I’d written, his praise meant something because I knew he wasn’t handing it out for participation.
He gave me something more important than the occasional compliment: the belief that I could get better.
***
I didn’t become a professional writer after William & Mary.
In fact, I did a remarkably thorough job of avoiding becoming one.
I went into marketing and spent more than four decades working in marketing strategy, advertising and customer insights. I worked with organizations including AT&T, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), AOL, AARP and The Motley Fool. My professional life revolved around audiences, messages, positioning, persuasion and the eternal marketing question: How do we get people to pay attention to this?
It was a useful career.
It also turned out to be an oddly good apprenticeship for writing fiction.
Marketing teaches you that people are busy. They don’t owe you their attention. If you have something to say, you’d better know what it is — and you’d better say it clearly and emotionally.
McCulley had been teaching me essentially the same thing, although he had the advantage of assigning grades instead of PowerPoint decks.
For decades, I assumed that a freshman writing class was simply one of those experiences you accumulate in college. It was meaningful at the time, but eventually became part of the mental attic where old roommates, forgotten passwords and the names of people you haven’t seen since 1985 reside.
Apparently, it wasn’t finished with me.
Nearly 45 years after I sat in McCulley’s classroom, I returned to fiction. And, in a way, I returned to his classroom, too, after retiring in Williamsburg a couple of years ago.
Through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at William & Mary, I signed up for a writing class in Tucker Hall — the same building where I had taken McCulley’s class as a freshman.
I was no longer 18. I wasn’t working toward a degree, earning a grade or trying to fulfill a requirement.
I was there simply because I wanted to write.
Walking back into Tucker Hall, I couldn’t help thinking about how little I knew the first time I walked through those doors — and how much I still had to learn.
There was something wonderfully circular about it. Forty-five years earlier, a professor had been telling me that my writing could be better. Now I was voluntarily putting myself back in a classroom to see if it could be.
This time, I had a few more years behind me. And, as it turned out, a book ahead of me.
I began writing very short stories, mostly a thousand words or less. Stories about ordinary people caught in moments that suddenly become something else. I became fascinated by wit, wordplay, irony and surprise endings.
Eventually, those stories became a collection called “Flashing O. Henry: 62 Original Flash Fiction Tales of Wit, Wonder, Wordplay, and Surprise,” published under my pen name, Ronan O. Kelly.
There is something slightly ridiculous about spending four-plus decades in marketing and then deciding, in the second half of life, that what you really need to do is write 62 stories.
But perhaps that’s another thing a liberal arts education is supposed to do to you: leave you curious enough to try something that makes no obvious sense.
The book is, in part, a contemporary tip of the hat to O. Henry, whose stories I have long admired. The stories are original, but they share some of the qualities I love in his work: economy, humor, irony and the possibility that the final sentence might make you reconsider everything that came before it.
And then something happened that surprised me.
William & Mary started showing up.
I hadn’t set out to write William & Mary stories. I wasn’t sitting at my desk thinking, “The W&M Alumni Magazine will love this.”
The memories simply kept getting into the work.
One story, “Past Words,” begins with four William & Mary students playing Password in the Bryan Complex basement. They become close friends, then couples, then parents, carrying with them the easy shorthand of a friendship built over decades. But as their lives change and political differences intrude, the words that once brought them together begin to mean something very different.
Another, “United Departure,” follows a young William & Mary couple who are certain they’ll spend the rest of their lives together. Their romance unfolds around places I remembered from college — the Sunken Garden, Lake Matoaka, Swem Library and Crim Dell — before time and distance send them down separate paths. Years later, an unexpected reunion at an airport brings the past rushing back — and raises a question neither of them expected to face again.
I hadn’t planned either story as a return to campus.
Apparently, campus had other plans.
That may be one of the stranger things about memory. We tend to think of our college years as something that happened to us. We graduate, move away, begin careers, get married, raise families, change jobs, move houses and accumulate decades.
But the places remain.
So do the people.
And, occasionally, so does the freshman writing professor.
***
I can no longer remember every assignment I completed at William & Mary. I certainly don’t remember everything that was on every syllabus. There are probably entire lectures that have vanished without leaving so much as a forwarding address.
But I remember sitting across from Professor McCulley.
I remember being told that something wasn’t good enough.
I remember discovering that criticism wasn’t an insult. It was an investment.
And I remember the very different feeling of hearing, “This works.”
Those lessons followed me into a career I never could have predicted when I was 18. Then, almost four and a half decades later, they followed me into a book I never expected to write.
Maybe that’s part of the value of a university.
Not simply what it prepares you to do, but what it puts into your head before you know what you’ll need.
A professor who makes you rewrite a paragraph.
A class you took because it sounded interesting.
A friend you met in a dorm basement.
A walk across campus that becomes a memory without your realizing it.
A place you haven’t seen in decades that somehow appears, fully furnished, in your imagination when you sit down to write.
At 18, I thought I was taking a freshman writing course.
At 63, I realize I may have been taking a lesson in patience, humility and persistence — one that apparently came with a very long completion date.
I don’t know whether Cecil McCulley ever imagined that one of his students would spend more than four decades in marketing and then, nearly 45 years after entering his classroom, publish a book of short stories.
I suspect he would have made some comments. Some might even have been complimentary.
But if he were here, I think I would want to tell him something simple: You were right.
Writing and connecting with an audience is hard.
Criticism matters.
Getting better is worth the effort.
And sometimes a class isn’t finished with you when the semester ends.
Sometimes it follows you for the rest of your life.
Kelly Ronayne is a mostly retired marketing and advertising consultant. He now spends much of his time writing fiction inspired by the people and places he encounters. He occasionally gets lured back into marketing projects by people he particularly enjoys working with. After all, a writer needs people to write about. To submit a guest post or story pitch for consideration, please visit magazine.wm.edu/about/story-ideas.