Here's a Q & A with Cheryl Zoll by the Gazette's Steve Pfarrer followed by a little story about her and the center by me.
"Cheryl Zoll has planted trees in Senegal, studied linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, and taught African languages and forms of English with African influences, such as Jamaican Creole. But in April she added a new chapter to her career -- management -- when she became executive director of the Amherst Survival Shelter.
Zoll, a native of Salem, taught linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge for eight years before moving with her family to Amherst about five years ago. Though she did some teaching at both Hampshire and Amherst colleges after arriving in the Valley, Zoll says the opportunity to try something different appealed to her: "I realized my heart was really in social services. I call this my 'mid-life epiphany.' "
She says she filled in her skill gaps by doing considerable volunteer work, eventually becoming the site director for The Literacy Project in Orange. Zoll, who's also vice-chair of Amherst's Comprehensive Planning Committee, adds that moving from teaching to management "is not as dramatic as it might seem ... the fact that 'All the world's a classroom, and all the men and women merely students' has made it easy to take skills acquired through teaching and apply them in a practical manner to broader social issues.'"
Full name: Cheryl Zoll
People know you as: Cheryl
Date and place of birth: May 31, 1962, Salem
Address: Amherst
Job: Director, Amherst Survival Center
Who lives under the same roof as you? My husband, Eric Sawyer, and our daughter, Lydia Sawyer
Children: Lydia, 8
Education: Salem High School, 1980; Harvard University, B.A. in biology, 1984; Brandeis University, M.A. in linguistics, 1992; University of California at Berkeley, Ph.D. in linguistics, 1996
Pets: A guinea pig, Sir Seth Skwekoms Hwounkee Zowhoir
Books you'd recommend: "Motherless Brooklyn," by Jonathan Lethem; "Spoken Soul," by John Rickford and Russell Rickford
Favorite movie: "Afterlife," a film directed by Hirokazu Koreeda. It's a vision of purgatory where you get to preserve on film one incident (and only one) from your life to take with you into eternity
Favorite television shows: "NYPD Blues" and "Seinfeld," neither of which I get to watch anymore!
Favorite singer or group: Girl Howdy, an all-women honky-tonk band based in Greenfield
What do you waste your money on? Old-timey music CDs, especially vocal duos like Stecher & Brislin, Hawker & Justice, Hazel & Alice
Guilty pleasure: Occasional dips into East Heaven Hot Tubs in Northampton with my husband and daughter on cold winter nights
Life-changing experience: Two years doing forestry as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small rural village in Senegal
Funniest memory: Being stranded with a friend for several days on the border between Senegal and Guinea. We ending up having to sleep on the dirt floor of a restaurant run by young boys, who in exchange asked us to translate the book "Treasure Island" into Pulaar, one of the local languages
Strangest job you ever held: I once worked the graveyard shift at a psychiatric hospital, supplying study subjects with schnapps in exchange for "points" they earned by constantly pressing a little red button they held in their hands
Bumper-sticker statements? "I love North Quabbin" (until recently I worked in Orange)
A little-known fact about you: I play the banjo
Dumbest thing you ever did: Spent 15 years playing and paying off a bassoon, and then quit the day it became fully mine
One product, trend or fashion you'd like to see return: A person at the other end of the phone!
What really sets you off? Faulty logic
Favorite Web sites: www.people.umass.edu/support/asc/ and www.ouramericancousin.com
One thing you would change about yourself: I would fold laundry immediately out of the dryer
People who knew you in school thought you were: An egghead
Whom do you most admire? I've been lucky to have been mentored by a lot of strong, wonderful women. Locally, Jenifer McKenna of Northampton, co-founder of the California Women's Law Center, and Rhonda Cobham-Sander at Amherst College are two people for whom I have boundless admiration
Parting shot: In the words of Jane O'Reilly -- "We must remember the past, define the future and challenge the present, wherever and however we can"
-- Compiled by Steve Pfarrer
By MARY CAREY
The Amherst Survival Center has probably never been a boring place, but some new things happening there --a monthly open mike night and a monthly "kvetch," for instance -- just might make it a more interesting place yet.
Picture Cheryl Zoll, the new director, playing the banjo while two guys tell jokes, for instance. You could also see it for real at open mike night. They're scheduled the third Thursday of every month at the 1200 North Pleasant St. drop-in center. The next one is June 21 at 6:30 a.m.
As for the monthly "kvetch," it's pretty much what it sounds like it is. " We want to make sure that people have an opportunity to complain (kvetch) in a safe environment at least once a month," Zoll said.
"It's not that we won’t take complaints any day, and it's not like we don't take the complaints seriously. But we try to make people feel like it’s not a big deal and people should tell us what's on their mind."
The kvetching has ranged from observations about there being too few bags in the free store to people talking about not getting along with each other. " It usually ends up in a discussion about how we can improve things around here," Zoll said. "Everybody should have it."
Photos from the last open mike night -- no kvetch photos yet -- are posted on the center's Web site at http://people.umass.edu/support/asc/, where Survival Center supporters are also advertising the auction of two front-row seats at Fenway Park for the July 4 Red Sox vs. Tampa Bay Devil Rays game. Red Sox fans can email their bids to starr@langlab.umass.edu. Bidding begins at $50.
Or click on Zoll's blog either at the Website or directly at http://amherstsurvivalcenter.blogspot.com/. In her most recent entry, she muses on "the vastness of space" in connection with the layout of the kitchen, hall and free store at the center.
"In 1961, JFK vowed that the US would 'put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade,'" Zoll writes. "At ASC, our parallel goal for 2007 is 'to move a client from the Free Store to the Kitchen and return her happily by the end of the day.' Sure, the moon is 238,855 miles from Earth, and we're only talking about roughly 238 feet here, but in many ways the challenge is as great."
The center is shaped like a barbell, Zoll explains, including a photograph of a shiny barbell to help readers visualize it. There's the big kitchen and dining area, which is connected by a narrow hall to the free store. It's a layout that contributes to peoples' general impression of cramped space -- not the vastness of space, says Zoll.
"We are beginning now to work with our community to find a new home adequate to our current needs but with space to initiate new programs as well," she concludes. "If JFK could put a man on the moon, then we can surely hope to succeed in meeting our own small challenge."
Zoll enjoys a challenge to hear her tell it. A native of Salem, she spent two years with the Peace Corps in Senegal and was an associate professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving with her husband Eric Sawyer, an Amherst College music professor, and daughter Lydia to Amherst about five years ago. She taught at Amherst and Hampshire colleges but decided she preferred social work. That led her to The Literacy
Project, in Orange, and, in April, to the Survival Center.
The function and behavior of tone patterns in African languages and their implications for linguistic theory is her academic specialty. In 2005, she co-authored a book with Sharon Inkelas titled "Reduplication: Doubling in Morphology." (Reduplication, she explained to Around Amherst is the process by which speakers of some languages create the plural of a word by saying the word more than once.)
"That was my last act as a linguistic professor," Zoll said of the book. " I feel like I did that and now I'm now I'm doing this."
Young Sarah Palin from the Web site PopCrunch, which is collecting Palin photos.
