Mason’s 2022 Writer-in-Residence speaks about the wonders of language and poetry

Shayla Brown — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 15:47:20 +0000

Mason’s 2022 Writer-in-Residence speaks about the wonders of language and poetry Shayla Brown Thu, 11/03/2022 - 11:47

Photo by Leeya Mehta/Cheuse Center

Elena Medel published her first book of poetry at the age of 16. Now she’s the editorial director of La Bella Varsovia, a publishing house in Madrid that focuses on poetry as well as a successful poet and author.

Medel was hosted by the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center from September 25 to October 15 as ��AV’s 2022 International Writer-in-Residence. She attended four events during her time at Mason and got to interact with both students and faculty. 

“I was telling the students about my experience as a writer. It’s obviously not a universal experience, but maybe it could be useful or interesting to them,” said Medel. “I am a full-time worker, not a professional writer. I spoke about the problems I have when I want to write [but don’t have the time].” 

Medel’s favorite poet from whom she finds inspiration is Federico Garcia Lorca. Her favorite work of Lorca’s, a book of his poetry, is titled “Poet in New York.”  

“When I was a teenager, his poems were really important for me as a writer and also for me as a person,” said Medel. “I think I write poetry because of Lorca.” 

Medel spoke with Spanish language professor Rei Berroa and some of his students about her writing process and her debut novel, “The Wonders.” 

The novel is told through the perspectives of María and Alicia, two women generations apart who face many similar experiences in different ways with different attitudes.  

“When we read a novel with a male main character, we think that the book speaks about the great subjects of humanity. But in the same story told by female voices, it’s like it’s only for female readers; we have this prejudice,” said Medel. “I wanted to talk about universal things like money and social classes, but told by the voices of these women.” 

Medel and Berroa have worked together before when Berroa invited Medel to the Maratón de Poesía del Teatro de la Luna in 2017, a poetry marathon that he and his colleagues began in 1992 to bring together the Spanish poets of the Washington, D.C., area before expanding to include international poets as well.

“We need poetry to survive,” said Berroa. “[I had my] class read ‘The Wonders’ as well as some of her poetry.”

“This is the first time I’ve attended a symposium or book reading anywhere,” said Frankie Romero, a senior foreign languages major with a concentration in Spanish, and one of Berroa’s students. “I found it complemented the class. We got to see a real-world scenario of somebody involved in the writing process and how they go about creating the products they put out there, be it a book, a poem, a short story.”

Students got the opportunity to ask Medel questions during their conversations. “I asked her if she ever suffers writer’s block, and I didn’t quite expect the answer given,” said Romero. “She said that she experiences writer's block every day.”

Her process for overcoming writer’s block is writing about things she remembers, he said. “She would say ‘I remember... when I was a child or when it was raining’ and then all of a sudden, she starts writing naturally.”

“I think poetry is in everything that I write because it’s in the language and the attitude of the writing,” said Medel. “When you write a poem you have to go to the essence of the poem, and I’m trying to do the same in fiction. I try to go to the heart of the story.”

Medel’s residency was sponsored by the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain. 

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Research project aims to document and support the Yupik language

Shayla Brown — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 21:02:56 +0000

Research project aims to document and support the Yupik language Shayla Brown Fri, 10/21/2022 - 17:02

Sylvia Schreiner is on a mission to record and help maintain the Yupik language on St. Lawrence Island, and she has the support of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER grant to do it.

Sylvia Schreiner. Photo provided

Schreiner, an assistant professor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, works on language documentation, which is making a record of the different grammatical structures of a language. The Faculty Early Career Development Award supports early-career faculty who can serve as academic role models, according to NSF.

“The project on Yupik started when my colleague, Lane Schwartz, a computational linguist and computer scientist came to me,” she explained. “He spent years in this village as a child and knew the language was under threat. He asked if I wanted to try and get something going on this.”

The project, Documenting temporal contrasts in an endangered language via community linguistics, is part of a wider collaborative effort to support the language.

Schreiner and Schwartz, a computational linguist and computer scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, are also principal investigators on a pair of collaborative Documenting Endangered Languages NSF grants.

The St. Lawrence Island villages Gambell and Savoonga (Sivuquq and Sivungaq, respectively, in Yupik) are the main location of the Yupik language. Yupik is also present in the Chukotka Peninsula in Russia.

“I wanted to offer what I can to this community that welcomed me as a child,” said Schwartz, who lived in the Gambell village.

The name of the language when spoken natively is Akuzipik. When translated, “Akuzi” means speech. However, both Yupik and Akuzipik end in “pik,” which means authentic in the language.

Schreiner said the grant has two sides to it: research and education.

“The research portion is working on parts of language that tell us about when something happens. The tenses in different languages show up in very different ways,” said Schreiner. “The educational part is to be able to train others in the community to do this kind of documentation and revitalization work to make it more organic from the community.”

There are roughly 1,400 people on the Alaskan island, about 700 in each village, and speaking Yupik is somewhat generational, which is in part why it’s in danger. “The language has been declining in use over time, especially among the younger people,” said Schwartz.

Sylvia Schreiner. Photo provided

Schreiner and her team are also working to digitize the legacy and archived materials that are available to them. One of her research assistants, Mason PhD student Ben Hunt, taught himself code and is in the process of building an online dictionary for Yupik.

“When I suggested this tool, Lane said, ‘Well, why don't you build it?’” said Hunt, who had minimal experience with web development. “I started learning to code web apps from a variety of online sources mostly starting from scratch, but I ended up getting pretty comfortable with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, and other scripting languages.”

These tools will allow the people of this community to authentically maintain their language from within. “In an ideal world, [Sylvia and my] roles would disappear because we wouldn’t be needed anymore,” said Schwartz.

“If you’re going to have a language survive, it can’t be dependent on people from the outside. It has to come organically from the communities and grow from inside. These kinds of things have to come from a grassroots movement,” said Schreiner.

“If it dies with the older folks who still speak it, there it goes. This is their language and they can let it die if they want to, but they don’t.”

In addition to her research, Schreiner runs the Language Documentation Lab and teaches several linguistics courses at Mason.

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Mason’s 2022 Writer-in-Residence speaks about the wonders of language and poetry

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