Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos by Nash Jenkins ’11

 The boarding school experience is like no other: rather than offering a period of the day where you are confined to classes from 8:00AM to 3:00PM, boarding school becomes your entire world. Boarding school is an adventure that heightens the intensities of life as a teenager to the fullest extent. With the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, boarding school kids undergo a rollercoaster of emotions—a bubbling cauldron of insecurity and utter happiness.

Boarding school stories had always drawn Nash Jenkins ’11, whose enduring passion for writing inspired him to capture the unique essence of the boarding school experience in a book. His time at the School solidified this aspiration of becoming a writer, as his years at Lawrenceville became some of the most meaningful of his life. He wanted to write things down and encapsulate these memories before he grew up and they became figments of the past.

Recalling (the nearing conclusion of his Lawrenceville career), Jenkins reflected on “how profoundly [he] felt about Lawrenceville” during his V Form year. Jenkins thought to himself, “if [he didn’t] write about this at some point, [he was] going to forget about it.”

During Jenkins’ sophomore year of college, the beginnings of Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos took form. What started out as a 12 page short story for Jenkins’ creative writing workshop at Johns Hopkins University developed into something worth expanding and a meaningful story to tell. A fictional novel based at the Kennedy School, an elite boarding school in New Jersey during the 2000s, the novel follows protagonist Foster Dade as he stumbles through adolescence and involves himself in a scandal that expels him. Jumping to the present day, the nameless narrator inherits Foster’s old room and begins an escapade in search for the truth of Foster’s story. 

Jenkins wanted to create a replica of Lawrenceville, an ode to the school that had affected him so greatly. The novel’s final version incorporates ideas that any Lawrentian could identify with like a House system, go-to pizza parlor across the street (TJs as we know it), weekly school meetings, and infamous Saturday night dances. 

Since his characters were fictional, Jenkins knew that the world he created also needed to be fictional. Still, he “had an impulse to write a story as a sort of love letter to the years [he] spent at boarding school.” He described his urge to “transcribe every little detail of the House system and the class schedule, fearing that otherwise, it would be a disservice to the project.”

Unexpectedly, Jenkins watched the story “take legs of its own.” He found himself writing about a school that resembles Lawrenceville in some respects, but within a very much a fictional story that captures the feelings of boarding school.

Jenkins hopes the novel’s audience can understand the story’s fictional components while recognizing familiarity in “the way the narrator and the characters feel about Kennedy'' or how “Lawrenceville seems to be this larger than life world, with its own legends and mythologies that stay with you for years. That's the sense in which the book is the most non-fictional.”

While the characters are not meant to resemble real people, certain aspects of Foster’s experience come from Jenkins’ own life. Like his character Foster Dade, Jenkins came to Kennedy as a new III Former who endured confusion and pain in his first year. Jenkins shared his own background as “an awkward kid from North Carolina” who was thrust into a new school “without really knowing left from right.” In the face of unfamiliarity and struggle, Jenkins found support and friendship in his relationship with faculty member Devondra McMillan who remains a meaningful figure in his life to this day. Like Jenkins once did, Foster too finds his people and finds his way.

While Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos is officially labeled a literary fiction, Jenkins imagined a “very specific person reading the book,” with two intended audiences. The novel’s setting in the 2000s evokes nostalgic sentiments as those in Jenkins’ own generation look back on that specific moment in history and reminisce on the cultural markers of the times, like the rise of Facebook and instant messaging. The second audience is the sentimental teenager he had once been, the kind who is drawn to the stories that reveal the emotional intensities of adolescence.

Drawing on his own experience as a young adult, Jenkins wanted to convey what it’s like “to be a sensitive 15-year-old boy that  feels alone a lot of the time. I always really loved the idea of writing an honest and sentimental portrait of being that age with the hope that some sensitive 15-year-old boy might read it and think, ‘wow, this guy gets it.’”

Jenkins, fueled by his own boarding school experience, offers a deep dive into the teenage experience as Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos reveals the story of Foster, a student Lawrentians can identify with.