We recently connected with Lisa Cheby and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Lisa thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s kick things off with a hypothetical question – if it were up to you, what would you change about the school or education system to better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career?
As a librarian, the question options here do not really seem to fit. The focus is not about sales or marketing, but empowerment. I think in education, because our mindset of success is so focused on the right marketing, a good profit (for the company or for our personal accounts) that we forget about supporting a person’s growth as a person. We do not nurture curiosity, uncertainty, compassion, and service as we should. Perhaps a biased opinion as a librarian, I would allow more time for discover, more opportunities and support for students to pursue inquiry-based learning individually and as a community.They always have questions about the “content” that we often dismiss, maybe with a kind metaphorical pat on the head, because there is a timeline we must meet of testing and graduation dates, etc. Also more time in the library to read and libraries that are fully staffed and funded so they can have the relevant material and support for independent reading activities (it can be enhanced with thoughtful and informed curation). Of course all of this implies a need to revamp our entire system,
Lisa , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I am a poet, librarian, and educator.
Like most creatives, I think being a poet is something I’ve always been, though not always aware of it and not always practicing that craft. When my mother was ill I was started writing about that in blogs (this is the time of MySpace and LiveJournal when social media was a smaller community and actually focused on connecting people in community). I started to share with other writers and poets. I was inspired by their work and by the positive feedback I received back. This led to me taking an online course with Anna Maria Hong called “By Art, Not Chance.” It was focused on building craft and happened to be poetry course — I felt I found my genre. I used the packet of poems I wrote in that class to get into Antioch University’s Masters In Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing program. At the time I was teaching high school and wanted to get my Masters, but to reconnect with my love of literature and writing, which I feel got lost in all the pedagogy and bureaucracy of teaching. The shift to being a poet, which is not how I pay my rent, led to taking a sabbatical as I finished this degree. I now have been publishing poems for over a decade and have three chapbooks.
This also changed my career trajectory from teaching English to librarianship. When I returned from my sabbatical I landed a position that was half English teacher and half Librarian. I loved the Librarian part so much, when this position lost funding I pursued finding a full-time teacher librarian position at another high school and returned to graduate school to get my Masters in Library and Information Science (MLIS). After ten years as a teacher librarian in public schools and working as an advocate for school libraries in California, which is 50th in teacher librarian to student ratios in the U.S., I decided to bring my experience and skills to the college level and am now the Dr. Karin J. Duran and Richard Nupoll Endowed Education Librarian at California State University (CSU), Northridge, which is the first endowed librarian position in the CSU system.
I suppose because the poetry led to the librarian job, I find the two inextricably linked. Librarianship is a beautiful career in that its mission is to empower people by connecting them to the information they need, whether graduate students who are seeking to create more equitable education systems or a freshmen who wants to lose themselves in the world of the latest manga series or a student of any age to seeks the world of fiction to find escape, empathy, adventure, or visibility that is lacking in their day-to-day world. I am lucky to have been a librarian in various types of libraries and now to work with future educators.
In the end, through poetry, librarianship, and education, in small and personal ways I am able to help heal and empower others through empathy, understanding, and connection. In this way, I hope, I am doing my part to create a world were all may be happy and free.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
I think most people do not understand why poets write poetry when there is no end-game for it making money or being a viable way to make a living. Even if you are full-time tenured faculty of creative writing, it is your labor as an educator or researcher, not just the poetry, that is paying your bills. There is a lot of administrative work that comes with being tenured, but of course it does have the luxury of poetry being an essential part of your job. However, that is a small minority of poets and the rest of us do it because it is a gift we want to share, it is a form of meditation, healing, and breathing that keeps us connected and healthy. And of course, it can be fun, the shaping of words and language to see all the possibilities of what it can do.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
Something I’ve had to unlearn is the scarcity mindset — this idea that there is a limited about of good things and we have to complete for them. Of course, this is something we are taught explicitly and implicitly living in a capitalist society and a government that is rooted in white supremacist ideology. Personally, this is also something i learned coming from immigrant parents whose families lived through displacements, deaths, and learning to live in a new country during and after World War II. No matter the field, it is hard to let go of the prizes, the contests, the comparisons to others, which also reinforce the idea that there is a cap on the number of people who can be successful in something. Through activist communities and meditation and yoga, I have learned to unlearn these beliefs. Years of practicing yoga, which is a never ending practice, — and not just the poses, but the philosophy — I would say i have developed more of an awareness of this mindset to keep it in check more than maybe having completely unlearned it. This is supported by communities like Women Who Submit (womenwhosubmitlit.org), a literary organization that support women-identified and non-binary writers in submitting their work. Through this organization that applauds members when they submit, when they get rejections, and when they are published I have unlearned the habit of competition and comparison that often hold us back in our work — creative or otherwise. Instead, it becomes a place where we shine a light on everyone’s gifts and efforts and we celebrate together because there is enough to celebrate for everyone.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://lisacheby.wordpress.com/ and https://library.csun.edu/lcheby
- Instagram: Poetry: https://www.instagram.com/lichee13/ Librarianship: https://www.instagram.com/librarian_cheby/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LisaChebyWriter
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacheby/
Image Credits
author photo: Amy Elizabeth Bennett
Love lesson from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Cover Design by Jason Adams.
The other two chapbooks: Cover Design by Lisa Eve Cheby