School's Out!

Claudia Heymach (10th from the left, in back) with Davila Elementary School students, dropping off children’s books.

Many HSPVA students are dedicated to their art area, whether it be music, writing, dance, visual art, or theatre, even when school lets out for summer. For instance, Conny Egozi, a junior piano student, attended the piano summer program at the American Festival for the Arts (AFA).

“I went to AFA to meet other musicians from other departments,” she tells me. “And I especially love chamber music, which we [pianists] don’t have the opportunity to participate in at HSPVA. As for the staff, they’re wonderful, and they all seem to live for teaching and listening to music.”

Likewise, many students have a diverse range of interests outside of their specific field. Matthew Toffoletto, a senior in creative writing, is equally passionate about musical composition, exalting the “ridiculous uncertainty about dots and lines” that doesn’t come with mere textual writing, and basking in the exciting sentiment of “I hope this works.”

“The thing with the writing department, and with writers,” he expounds to me, gesticulating with his hands, “is that they’re generally not performers; they’re not a face or a person to display. They’re the directors, the creators: the people who work backstage and orchestrate events and creations and have eyes and ears and noses that can help guide works of art to the proper smell. So this goes hand-in-hand with music why not write both? At that stage, the process involves lots of literal orchestration and lines and dots, but the essential concept being a creator, a manager, a designer who thinks with impressions and concepts is still the same.”

Meanwhile, Claudia Heymach is a senior creative writer working on a project to promote reading in the schools known as the Literacy Club, whose membership includes Conny and yours truly, among others from various departments. “I founded the Literacy Club to encourage children in elementary and middle school to read,” Claudia explains enthusiastically. "Reading has played a central role in my academic and artistic development, and I hope to spread this interest in books, especially in a time when TV and video games have become so prominent. Without books, I would not be part of HSPVA or its creative writing program. I first became interested in starting the club after attending a literacy event called ‘Read and Seed’ in Galveston, which combined reading to children and planting a garden in a local elementary school, hosted by a fantastic organization called SMART Family Literacy."

Another creative writer, Jackson Hassell, has an interest that may seem distant from his art area, but is in fact deeply rooted in a love of language: Japanese. This summer he attended a two-week Japanese immersion camp called Mori no Ike (“pond in the forest”), one of the Concordia Language Villages, in which he was linguistically forced to sink or swim.

“From the moment you get off the bus, every adult speaks to you in Japanese,” he reminisces with no easily penetrable expression. “They mime a lot, though, so you can figure out what they’re saying pretty easily. The theme was Japanese culture, apparently, so we had classes like kendo (Japanese fencing) and calligraphy. Plus, we had language classes, but because the teachers had to speak only Japanese, it wasn’t super helpful. Still, it’s amazing how much you can learn just by listening to them speak it.”

Jackson and I attended a three-day biotechnology program at the University of Houston, where we learned how to isolate human DNA, and later, to turn E. Coli into a glow-in-the-dark bioluminescent organism, among other experiments. Jackson, a devout student of biology, was more than impressed by its polished, high-quality equipment, and its well thought-out labs. While at U of H, we ran into Liza Anderson, a junior at HSPVA specializing in the visual arts and a self-described cinephile, who was there for the university’s film program Wonder Works.

“Wonder Works is a six-week film class at U of H,” Liza says, “where we work on student-written-and-directed films for the first half of the day and watch and discuss notable films after lunch. I absolutely loved the program. I had a lot of fun with the people there; and the amount of personal and artistic freedom they give you makes for an excellent learning environment.” 

The Auschwitz Memorial in Poland. (Photo: Steffani Alter)

Steffannie Alter, a senior in creative writing, went on a student tour encompassing parts of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. “Over the summer, I went to Poland, Amsterdam, and Israel with a group of 43 students,” she recounts. “We were in Israel when the missile fire in Gaza started, so our normal plans to tour the country were altered for the sake of our safety. While it was odd to have a constantly changing schedule, and difficult to be surrounded by such a tense atmosphere at times, I feel that I got a lot out of the trip because it was such an authentic and important situation to be exposed to.”

Anticipating my next question, Steffannie goes on: “We never heard sirens or had to go to a bomb shelter because they changed our schedule a ton. At one point there was rocket fire in the city next to us that some people heard; but we were never in any physical danger.”