June 2002: Vol. 81, No. 3

Good neighbors

UGA Spanish students get to practice real-world translation skills while helping Athens' Latino citizens adapt to an English language world

by Nathan Long

he voice on the intercom calls her name again, and Lily Erp hurries down the hallways of Chase Street Elementary. Hired five months earlier as a bilingual liaison at the Athens school, the native Venezuelan rushes between 13 classrooms where spring parent-teacher conferences are taking place. She is not alone; she has her mother, her aunt, and two friends to help. The five of them have been working for three days to make communication possible between English-speaking teachers and Spanish-speaking parents of the school's sizable Hispanic population.

Angela Turner, a telecommunications major from Stockbridge, and Wesley Cole, an international business major from Marietta, read stories in both Spanish and English to students at Chase Street Elementary in Athens.

Erp describes her job simply: "What I do here is translate everything."

Seven years in the United States, starting with English classes in UGA's American Language Program, have prepared Erp to do just that. Overcoming the language barrier for parents of roughly 100 Hispanic students is something she enjoys doing. But, in the process, it became clear to her that 45 minutes of daily English instruction offered by the school could not prevent many Latino students from returning to their regular classrooms and feeling lost.

"What I saw as soon as I came here is that there is something more we can offer these students to help them learn English," says Erp, who came up with a great idea: If she could recruit UGA students studying Spanish and get them involved at Chase Street Elementary, she would have the volunteers she needed—not only to help Hispanic parents talk to teachers, but to help their struggling children keep up with their peers. In the process, the UGA students would get some real-world language experience as translators.

After several failed attempts, Erp was accidentally connected by a Romance language receptionist to Spanish professor Betina Kaplan, who loved the idea immediately. "She said, 'Lily, this is wonderful. Of course, we need to do something about it!'"

The timing was perfect; Kaplan had been looking for ways to give Spanish students real-world practice. "The classroom is very limited," she says, "and students are under the impression that Spanish is spoken only there, that it doesn't exist anywhere else." With the help of graduate students Monica Ruiz-Melendez and Elena Adell (MA '99), Kaplan developed a system to give class credit to students participating in the Chase Street program.

Translating, says Kaplan, is a highly sophisticated skill, which is why only students in at least their fifth semester of Spanish were asked to participate. "It's completely different from being in class," she says. "I think it's closer to the experience of being in a foreign country."

To prepare the UGA students, Erp visited a Spanish class and explained how the Chase Street parent conferences would be conducted and how to interpret the students' report cards. Her explanations were videotaped and shown to other Spanish classes. "We were very careful with this," says Erp, "because we wanted to make sure that every student knew the basics of doing a parent conference."

"I have to have the conferences, and if I didn't have the translators it would just be impossible," says kindergarten teacher Becky Hutton, whose class is about half Hispanic. Only a couple of those students, she says, have English-speaking parents.

Though some UGA students were apprehensive at first about being translators, Erp anticipated their first-time jitters. "When I saw that a student was nervous, I tried to be present," she says. "After the first conference, the attitude was changed. They proved to themselves that they could speak another language."

Knowing the UGA students weren't completely fluent in Spanish, the grateful parents made the necessary allowances. "We spoke very slowly," says Rafaela Delgada, whose child, Mildred Castillo, is in Hutton's kindergarten class. "If [the interpreter] didn't understand me one way, I would say it another way and she would understand."

The trial program was so successful last fall that in this spring's parent-teacher conferences it was expanded to include all four Clarke County elementary schools and about 40 UGA students. Using student translators is only part of UGA's broader effort to help Hispanics cope with American culture. "First of all, we want Hispanic kids to value their parents' language," says Teresa Perez-Gamboa, another UGA Spanish professor recruited by Kaplan. "Usually they try to hide the fact that they speak Spanish." At the same time, she says, UGA wants to help emphasize English skills to the Hispanic students and Spanish skills to the English-speaking students. "We want to put emphasis on the importance of being bilingual."

As part of that effort, some college students came to the Chase Street library to read stories in both English and Spanish, allowing both groups of students to learn new words. Others paired up with Hispanic students for individual tutoring. "We created tutoring," says Erp, "because I know that when these students go home, they don't have anybody to help with their homework."

Fifth-grade teacher Colette Woods has seen one of her students, who got a tutor in January, make "vast improvements" in language arts. This kind of one-on-one attention, she says, also helps "make the students more comfortable about being Latino in America."

Jennifer Blesh, a UGA junior from Connecticut who tutored an 11-year-old girl named Wendy, found that both she and her student had an easier time speaking one-on-one. "It wasn't like a teacher-student interaction as much as a sort of big sister-little sister interaction," she says. Like many of the tutors, Blesh continued to meet with her student after she completed the requirement for class, and hopes to continue working with her next year—for the benefit of both her Spanish and Wendy's English. "When you're speaking with a child in another language," says Blesh, "you're less inhibited. You're not as worried about making mistakes."

At Erp's request, Perez-Gamboa began teaching two classes to Chase Street's English-speaking teachers. The first, conceived by principal Jerri-Lynn Williams (EdS '93), prepared some of them to teach English classes to Hispanic parents. The second was a once-a-week "survival Spanish" course, designed to help them make Hispanic students and parents feel more welcome. "I put a lot of emphasis on [the fact that] they don't have to speak Spanish fluently," says Perez-Gamboa. Instead, she focused on teaching classroom instructions and basic conversation.

When teachers become students, their students become teachers. And correcting their teachers' newly learned Spanish boosts Hispanic students' confidence, says Aaron. "They become the knowledgeable person and it becomes a learning community," she says. "It's completely validating that they have something to give."

For UGA's Spanish department, whose head, Noel Fallows (MA '86), was already planing a one-credit hour practicum class for the coming fall semester, the effort has been a great help. The practicum will be centered on community involvement in the Athens area, and many of the students who worked in the elementary schools have signed up for the new course—which has filled its 25-student quota and has a waiting list of about 10, says Fallows.

Meanwhile, UGA Spanish students, eager to participate, have been knocking on Kaplan's door.

Erp has had the same experience.

"They keep calling . . . they want to come back," she says. "They want to practice—and now they know there is a place they can do it."

Double issue a first for The Georgia Review

New editor T.R. Hummer debuts with a tribute to the past

by Alex Crevar (AB '93)

he day T.R. Hummer was hired as editor of The Georgia Review, he sent for the first 80 issues of UGA's esteemed quarterly. Dusty and worn, 20 years of poetry, fiction, book reviews, and essays appeared, boxed and resting on the doorstep of his home in Richmond, Va.—like a literary time capsule.

Though not due to inhabit his office on the ground floor of Gilbert Hall—the former student infirmary—until July, Hummer felt compelled to begin work at once. The first Georgia Review under his command, scheduled to go to press almost a year later, would demand all the time he could scavenge.

Though not preordained as such, Hummer's first effort would turn out to be a double issue—Winter 2001/Spring 2002: Selected Essays, 1947-1996.

Hummer faced the enviable and yet daunting task of having to play catch-up with the other members of the editorial staff, who were already working to whittle 50 years and thousands of essay pages down to just 30 works and 400 pages.

"It dawned on me in the middle of one winter's night—yes, insomnia, alas—that it simply had to be a double issue in order to be big enough to encompass a balanced and satisfying selection of GR's history with the essay," says Hummer. "Essays have a tendency to be weighty, hefty, meaty."

The process of separating the wheat from the chaff—if one dare call anything published in The Georgia Review "the chaff"—had actually begun 17 years earlier as renowned editor Stanley W. Lindberg and current associate editor Stephen Corey discussed ways to mark The Review's 40th anniversary in 1986. They decided on two issues dedicated to selected fiction and poetry—each of which would subsequently become books published by the UGA Press: Necessary Fictions: Stories from The Georgia Review and Keener Sounds: Poems from The Georgia Review.

The fiction and poetry issues should logically have been followed by an issue devoted to essays, but scheduling and submissions concerns made that impossible. Lindberg and Corey resigned themselves to wait until the 45th or 50th anniversary to give the essay its just due.

Though the issue was postponed, belief in the importance of an essay collection did not wane. As readers can attest, The Review's non-fiction—sometimes hard-hitting, always informative—is as accurate a chronological measuring device as the journal possesses. Indeed, one might argue that essays have played a crucial role in the magazine's development into a national literary treasure that is a perennial finalist in competition for the National Magazine Award.

As Hummer points out in the introduction to the double issue, The Review's first decades were shaped by an "I'll Take My Stand ethos," an article like "A Name For the American War of 1861-1865" being a good example. But as times, agendas, and the editorial guard changed, The Review evolved. When Lindberg took control in 1977, the magazine had morphed dramatically. Again in the introductory words of Hummer, ". . . the spirit of [Lindberg's] enterprise was closer to our own than that of any of his predecessors. Stan sweated more blood, bullets and blue graphite over The Georgia Review than anyone else ever has . . . ." Hence, all but five works in the double issue are culled from Lindberg's tenure.

Those closest to Lindberg knew he was especially committed to the essay for its pulse-taking capacities and the high level of interaction it provided between its line of reasoning and the reader.

"There has recently—maybe the last 15 to 20 years—been a tremendous explosion in interest for the personal essay," says Corey, who came to The Review in 1983 and served as acting editor from 1998 to 2001. "Just go to the bookstore and see the overflowing books in the non-fiction section. The Georgia Review and especially Stan have always been ahead of the curve on this front. Very few literary journals gave the kind of prominence which The Review gave essays."

Though the essay issue was not yet published, it never left Lindberg's thoughts. Even as his health was failing during 1999, due to a long bout with emphysema, he studied old copies of The Review, making notes for an issue he would never see. He died in January 2000. When Hummer joined the staff, he thought the essay project should reach journey's end, for both its own merit and as a tribute to Lindberg.

At his Virginia home in April 2001, Hummer—armed with a box of The Review's first 20 years and Lindberg's notes on the merits and shortcomings of essays ranging from "How To Draw" to "Dairying in Georgia"—settled in to complete a project nearly two decades in the making.

or all of Terry Randolph Hummer's professional life, The Georgia Review has been his carrot on a stick. As poetry editor of Cimarron Review, and editor of The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Quarterly West, he used The Georgia Review as a primary example of what a literary magazine can be. When he left editing in 1993 (he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry the same year), he vowed not to return with one disclaimer.

"People would often ask me if I'd consider becoming an editor again, and my reply was always the same: only if I can edit The Georgia Review," says Hummer, who considered Lindberg his mentor from afar. Lindberg once published a 40-page Hummer poem, "Bluegrass Wasteland," in the Spring 1987 issue of GR. "My response to the editor question, I thought, was facetious, but there was ample truth in it. However, I never really considered it a reality until I was invited to apply for the editorship."

Hummer grew up the younger of two brothers on a farm 15 miles east of Jim Crowera Macon, Miss. His was the first family generation to attend college, and it was at the University of Southern Mississippi where Hummer "stumbled into the creative writing department," though it had been much earlier that he decided to put words together for a living.

"When I was about five, my older brother asked me what I planned to be when I grew up," says Hummer, who has written or edited nine books. "I said, 'A writer.' He said, 'No, don't do that.' 'Why?' I asked. 'Because,' he said, 'it's too risky. What if nobody wants to read what you write? How'll you make money? Don't be a writer.'"

The risk, of course, paid off. Besides the Guggenheim, Hummer has received the Hanes Poetry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His poetry has appeared in many respected publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Southern Review. He has held teaching positions at the University of Southern Mississippi, University of Utah, Oklahoma State University, and Kenyon College. He was director of creative writing programs at Middlebury College and the University of Oregon, and senior poet at Virginia Commonwealth.

Asked if he has a final destination or goal, Hummer says, "Let's pose the question another way: What do I want to accomplish as GR editor? The answer to that is clear: I want to edit this magazine in such a way that excellent writing will come into being that would not have existed had I and the staff not done this work. That is the best thing a journal can do—be a catalyst that enables or provokes writers to write beyond themselves."

The Georgia Review through the years. The first edition of each design change (clockwise from top): Spring 1947, Summer 1969, Fall 1974, and the current style which appeared in Spring 1978.

he Christian Science Monitor once critiqued The Georgia Review by stating, "The best of them all is the amazing Georgia Review: modestly priced, superbly conceived and edited, filled with unusual and colorful material . . . and much marvelous fiction and poetry. It's the supreme example of what the producers of the little magazines can accomplish."

Utne Reader's adulation is also direct: "Amid the legion of look-alike lit mags, The Georgia Review asserts a unique identity: proud, self-possessed, steeped in the tradition of literary scholarship and experimentation . . . substance in an age of surface."

That a literary quarterly with a circulation of just under 5,000 should be the center of such praise seems amazing. But the proof lies in the fact that The Georgia Review is frequently one of four or five finalists for the National Magazine Award, in both the fiction and essay categories—and against such heavyweight competition as the The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's. The secret to The Review's success is just what Hummer says it is’ which is the same thing Lindberg said before him: the discovery and nurturing of outstanding writing and writers. When The Review won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1986, few of its loyal readers were surprised: "You do it the hard way," said one subscriber from San Francisco, "like anyone who writes."

The Review is a UGA department with editorial autonomy; both of those points are important. First, under the University's umbrella, The Review has the financial freedom to create a top-flight magazine with little or no advertising. According to Hummer, "The University's support is key because the magazine costs more to make than we charge." Secondly, it has the freedom to succeed editorially through its own time-tested philosophy of tireless editing, courageous experimentation, and an even-handed approach to submissions from new talent—which many journals refuse sight unseen.

"Everything that comes to our offices is looked at by at least one set of eyes," says Corey. "We're looking for good writing, not just good writers."

The Review's full-time staffers work 10 hours a day. Two-thirds of that time is spent reading the 50 new submissions that arrive in the day's mail. From the mailbag, the manuscripts are sorted by interns into "in" baskets to be read by Hummer, Corey, assistant editor David Ingle, or the assistant to the editor—this year that is graduate student Melissa Crowe. Ingle or Crowe tend to work with lesser-known authors and sort through lesser submissions, while well-known authors or consistent contributors go directly to either Hummer's or Corey's desk. Every manuscript is logged in to assure that whether the piece is accepted or rejected (less than 1 percent make the cut), it will be returned to the author.

Meanwhile, managing editor Annette Hatton, who came to The Review five months after Corey in 1983, scours the country for photographs, etchings, woodcuts, engravings, sculpture, and paintings to fill the magazine's center art signature. A consistent feature since Hatton's arrival, this signature may complement the text but often stands alone. And as is the case on the editorial side, unknown names are not summarily dismissed. In fact, Hatton specifically searches for undiscovered genius: "There are so many good artists that we don't need to go after a big name."

All of the meticulous effort invested in The Review's daily, monthly, and quarterly routine has helped to create reputations in the world of words. Several writers have made their first splash on these acid-neutral, letterpress pages. Harold Bloom, Guy Davenport, and UGA's director of creative writing Judith Ortiz Cofer are all examples of that.

"My pieces published in The Georgia Review, especially the essay 'Silent Dancing' (chosen for the Best American Essays: 1991 collection) and short story 'Nada' (winner of the 1994 O'Henry Award) helped to start my career," says Cofer, a UGA faculty member since 1984. "Lindberg's generosity of spirit and ability to make the perfect, small changes made my piece better.

"He had what the Romans called virtú, where a person performs his calling so that it crosses into the realm of art—be it editor or fisherman. This filtered down and inspired everything at The Review . . . and still does. The exposure of being in such a journal really got me noticed."

The double issue contains two art signatures. Melissa Harshman, chair of UGA's printmaking department, contributed eight pieces, including Draw 5 Girls (2000) and Fly Away (2000).

athering for a photo in The Georgia Review's entryway, the magazine staff shows the playful anxiety of a group unused to being before a lens but used to being together.

Photographer: I need you in the back—no, not you, you—to come forward and look over the top of the group. Get closer . . . like you were trying to see a dead body on the floor.

GR staffer no. 1: Yeah, or pretend you are looking to see a great short story—hey, whose hand is that? (laughter)

Photographer: Perfect, you guys are better when you laugh.

GR staffer no. 2: You'd better get that shot quick; we can't stay happy for too long. Who's breathing on me?

GR staffer no. 3: There has got to be a great piece of fiction somewhere in all this.

Hummer's attitude toward The Review is "if it ain't broke . . ."—which hardly seems surprising. The magazine already works with the best writers in the business. At the editors' disposal are Pulitzer Prize winners and Nobel Laureates—literary heavyweights like Czeslaw Milosz, Rita Dove, and John Updike. And the essay double issue is an embarrassment of riches, a trophy case of both the living and departed: Jacques Barzun, Robert Graves, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Barry Lopez, and others.

"From the outside, I expect that readers will not notice much in the way of overt change, or I hope they won't," says Hummer. "We'll continue in our quest to get the very best writing—poetry, fiction, essays—in print that we possibly can. Of course, the definition of 'best' changes—not only from editor to editor, but from year to year (maybe even moment to moment) in the minds of individual editors. If that were not true, we'd be dead. This, though, continues to be the mission and always has been."

After the photographer tells the staffers his ideas for a final round of shots in front of the office's actual trophy case—four shelves high and stuffed with glass and metal prizes—the group shuffles like a many-legged animal into position. Another round of humorous grumbling ensues and then the photographer says, "Ok, guys, thanks a lot. I think I've got it."

A collective sigh of relief and then each person takes an armload of submissions from today's mail delivery. They disappear into their respective offices to ruminate about that afternoon's version of literature.

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