Stories

The English Department is very happy to celebrate the work of this year’s Canterbury scholars, Nate Metz and Tavi De Leon, who will present their phenomenal projects at the Canterbury Reading and Awards Ceremony on May 23. To celebrate their achievements, we would like to highlight their work, their advice to future students, and their personal hopes for carrying these learnings into the future.

By Julia von Gersdorff

Nate’s project, a 50-page original poetry manuscript titled "How to Grow Blurry" was written all over the course of 2022-23, “either at the various workshops and conferences the Canterbury gave [him] the resources to attend… or during the SCU school year and with the helpful guidance provided by [his] faculty advisors, Prof. Glaser and Prof. Jeffra”. Nate’s manuscript, in his words, “explores the relationships between language, art, and touch -- there is a great distance between what a word is trying to say and the immediacy and oftentimes clarity of touch or visual art”. He hopes that his work resonates in that way, and can “close a bit of that distance”. His project additionally includes around 15 pages of translated poetry from their original Japanese, French, and Haitian Creole. He attributes his experiences as an English major at SCU, weekly workshops with faculty and his advisors (who he thanks extensively!), creative writing courses, being a HUB Writing Partner, and his work as Poetry Editor of the Santa Clara Review to being invaluable in his work on Canterbury, stating very profoundly that “we are readers well before we are ever writers.” He encourages future students to take risks above all, that they should “practice taking risks over the course of [their] college career so that [they] can be fully comfortable taking advantage of the freedom and resources that Canterbury can provide.” He is hoping that, in the future, he can apply his Canterbury work as a “backbone for [his] first full-length published manuscript”, and will be sending his poems out individually for publishing in several literary journals. He is also planning to use parts from the manuscripts as a creative supplement for his upcoming applications to Masters of Fine Arts programs next winter.

Tavi’s project, titled "Teaching Writing Instruction Equitably to Multilingual Students at SCU", gives a glimpse into the work he’s done advocating for multilingual students here at SCU. Tavi explains how he, with the help of HUB Writing Center Director, Denise Krane, developed the project through his experiences tutoring at the Writing HUB here on campus, and that he “wanted to empower the students [he] had met to share their experiences with learning writing in English that could be impactful on campus and course designs.” His project was born out of noticing how multilingual students “generally lack the necessary direction and feedback on their papers–feedback that other students receive in their instruction all of the time”. In order to address this, he proposed a project where he could investigate how students could be better supported, and “interviewed 8 students (6 of whom speak more than one language) and 4 professors”. With this data, Tavi has been “developing a website to be a comprehensible document of where SCU is (at this moment) in terms of multilingual instruction”. He greatly encourages all students of the English department to apply to the Canterbury program, as there is “so much freedom to choose a direction–whether that be creative, research, or professional.” In this, he mentions his excitement to hear about the work Nate has done on his project, as they have “such different directions”, with Nate going the more creative route, and Tavi engaging in the research process. Tavi had also been awarded a Fulbright teaching award for 2023-24, and will be traveling to Mexico to teach English. Tavi looks forward to being able to use his research from his Canterbury project and continue to explore the intersections of the work he’s done in teaching writing in future discussions and endeavors.

Both Nate and Tavi have done excellent, moving work for the program, culminating in these outstanding projects, and we are honored to recognize them as our 2023 Canterbury Scholars!