We recently held an online event with Adam Schwartz, author of Spanish So White: Conversations on the Inconvenient Racism of a ‘Foreign’ Language Education. Our Editorial Director, Anna Roderick, spoke to Adam about the inspiration behind the book, his writing process and the book’s main takeaways. If you missed the event or want to rewatch it, you can do so on our YouTube channel:
For more information or to purchase this book, please see our website.
In this post Anna writes about her recent trip to Ghent in Belgium with Rosie for this year’s Sociolinguistics Symposium, our first in-person conference since February 2020.
This was my first in-person conference trip in nearly 3 years, and Rosie’s first (of many!) conferences for MM. It was lovely to see so many familiar faces and meet people for whom this was also their first conference. In fact, it was so exciting that we forgot to take many photos!
There was lots of interest in brand new titles Multilingual Perspectives on Translanguaging edited by Jeff MacSwan and Struggles for Multilingualism and Linguistic Citizenship edited by Quentin Williams, Ana Deumert and Tommaso M. Milani, but delegates were very enthusiastic about all of our list; after over two years of sitting at home sending emails, it was really great to be reminded of why we do what we do.
We both fell in love with Ghent and definitely would have stayed for longer had we realised Ghent Festival was starting just as we left, but we did manage to squeeze in a bit of live music on the last evening of the conference. Other highlights included the local beer and a delicious vegan tasting menu. Oh and Bookz & Booze, which is definitely a possible future direction for MM.
Rosie’s heading to EuroSLA in Fribourg soon, and we’re looking forward to catching up with authors and book-buyers in cities around the world in 2023!
As a strange and difficult year draws to a close, the CVP/MM team are trying to think positive by reflecting on what they’re most looking forward to this Christmas.
Tommi
This year Christmas will no doubt feel very different to normal in many ways, but for me the most important part of Christmas will not have changed. Our family has always celebrated Christmas eve with a sauna and a nice meal of typical Finnish Christmas foods, and spending the evening quietly and peacefully together with those closest to us. It’s a really lovely opportunity to slow down for a while and just be together with no distractions.
Rose
Despite, or perhaps because of, the challenges 2020 has brought, I am particularly looking forward to Christmas. It will be a time to stop and take stock, and really appreciate what we have managed to achieve… primarily buying and moving into our first family home (and all during a lockdown!). As an Army family, we have moved A LOT, so, this year, watching our children hanging their stockings in the fireplace, choosing the perfect spot for the tree and decorating their bedrooms feels even more special, knowing this is the first of many Merry Christmases in our own home.
Flo
I’m usually fairly militant about Christmas and its traditions – everything has to be the same as it’s always been. So it’s strangely freeing this year to just accept that it’s not going to be! Roast dinner is my absolute favourite meal so I’m looking forward to a really good one after weeks (maybe even months) without. Otherwise it’ll just be lovely to spend a couple of days with my family (inside – how novel!) and see the back of 2020…
Sarah
I am looking forward to spending my Christmas matching my decorations to those on telly! Not really (but for all those non-His Dark Materials fans this is Hester the hare meeting Hester the daemon hare, such is lockdown entertainment) – I am most grateful and thankful that my family and friends are healthy and happy this Christmas. And I’m always very excited about turkey and bread sauce sandwiches – bring on all the Christmas food! 🎄✨🍗
Anna
As with everything this year, my Christmas will be much more Somerset-focused than usual. This December, Cheddar (it’s a real place!) is participating in Window Wanderland, for which people decorate their windows and light them up during the evening. My daughters wanted a Harry Potter theme, so here are our windows and our Christmas lights. We’ll be going on lots of evening walks to enjoy the window displays and the thousands of Christmas lights that have appeared this year.
Elinor
I’m most looking forward to seeing my children’s excitement. They are at the age when Christmas is very magical and love all the lights and decorations. It’s also lovely to have a break from the usual routine and spend time as a family.
Alice
I’m most looking forward to being back in Dorset with my family and doing lots of baking, Christmas crafting, and playing ridiculous games.
Laura
We moved house last month and I am looking forward to having some time to spend working on it – for we have great plans for how we’ll make it our own. I shall enjoy learning new skills and taking out all the frustrations of 2020 on some walls which we’ll knock down! Our little Christmas tree is likely to get a dusting of debris rather than snow this year! And of course, I shall be doing plenty of Christmas baking to make sure we are well fuelled for all of this hard work.
We wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happier and healthier 2021.
Today is World Book Day! Inspired by this year’s theme, Share A Million Stories, in this post we talk about our favourite stories from childhood.
Laura
One of my favourite stories as a child was There’s No Such Thing As A Dragon. It’s a story about a little boy called Billy who wakes up to find a dragon in his bedroom, but when he tells his mum, she doesn’t believe him. The dragon, who is a rather rebellious character, gets bigger and bigger and harder and harder to ignore, yet the mum still tells Billy that the dragon doesn’t exist. It’s a funny story and a great reminder that sometimes children are right and adults are wrong. Plus, it has some really tasty looking pancakes in it, which I was always desperate for my mum to make for breakfast (she never did!).
Tommi
One of my favourite childhood stories was a book read to me in Finnish when I was laid up in bed with pneumonia. It was called Kuinka Kum-Maa on Kaikkialla and tells of a little boy called Pau who is bored and ill in bed. All of a sudden a shape in the flowery wallpaper comes to life, and princess Lilaloo takes little Pau to ‘Kum-Maa’ (a play on the Finnish word kummaa meaning strange) where all of the inhabitants are two dimensional like pictures and so eat only two dimensional foods like gingerbread and pancake. Princess Lilaloo and Pau have a number of adventures in ‘Kum-Maa’, and I vividly remember staring at the wallpaper and the various paintings at my grandparent’s house imagining my own exciting adventures. After all, as the Finnish title promises, “Kum-Maa” is everywhere…
Alice
I was considering writing about something a little less obvious, but I would be lying if I didn’t say that the Harry Potter books were hands down my favourites as a child. I distinctly remember the release of new books and the pain at these times of being the youngest in my family – this meant having to wait for every other family member to read it before I could. When it was finally mine, I would read it cover to cover without much stopping, before turning back to the beginning and starting again. So exciting!
Anna
I had a lot of favourite books when I was a child (I still do!) but what really stands out for me is the Malory Towers books by Enid Blyton. Sharing them now with my daughters (who love them as much as I did), I’m surprised at how modern they are in some ways – the girls are expected and encouraged to do great things, and to be clever and brave as well as kind. I suspect when I was a child it was the midnight feasts and the absence of parents that I enjoyed most though.
Flo
Like Anna, it’s really difficult for me to choose, but one that stands out is Dick King Smith’s Sophie Stories. I loved (and still do!) the character of Sophie – ‘small but very determined’ and no-nonsense, she loves animals and her greatest ambition is to be a ‘lady farmer’. At the beginning of the books her parents think she’s too young to have a pet, so in preparation for her future career she keeps ‘flocks and herds’ of woodlice, earwigs and snails in the garden shed, which she conscientiously tends to. As the series goes on and she grows older, she accumulates a cat (Tomboy), a rabbit (Beano), a puppy (Puddle) and eventually a pony (Lucky). My sister and I were big animal lovers and our ultimate wish was to have a pony (spoiler – it never happened), so the idea of all those pets was very appealing (less so to our parents, who had agreed to a cat and nothing more).
Sarah
One of my favourite bedtime stories (and one that has always stuck with me!) when I was young was from Enid Blyton’s Goodnight Stories. It is called Polly’s Ps and Qs. It was about an ill-mannered girl who always forgot to say please and thank you. Her mother decided that she would pin a big ‘P’ or ‘Q’ to her dress every time she forgot. I lived in horror of my parents starting this trend if I didn’t remember my manners! 😃
2020 has well and truly begun and we’re looking forward to the arrival of spring, not only for the (hopefully) slightly warmer weather, but also because it marks the beginning of our busy annual conference season.
In fact, Sarah has already been flying the flag for CVP at the CAUTHE conference in Auckland, New Zealand earlier this month, where she was able to have her yearly catch-up with our tourism contacts down under. Laura will be the next to head off, beginning our season of US conference travel with NABE in Las Vegas next week. Next on the schedule is GURT in Washington DC, which Anna will be attending in March. Following hot on her heels Tommi and Laura will be off to the back-to-back AAAL and TESOL conferences held this year in Denver. Then as April rolls around, it will be time for Laura to set off again (although not so far afield this time) for IATEFL in Manchester, our first UK conference of 2020.
As we head into summer, Sarah will be making the trip up north to attend the TEFI conference in York in June. Unfortunately the Sociolinguistics Symposium planned to take place in Hong Kong in June has had to be postponed until 2021, due to the coronavirus outbreak. We’re looking forward to catching up with everyone there next year instead. We then continue our summer travel with EuroSLA in Barcelona, Spain in July, followed by AILA in Groningen, Netherlands the following month.
As well as all these major conferences, we sometimes pop to smaller, more local meets and book launches, and send unattended displays far and wide, so wherever you’re heading this year, look out for our books!
It’s that time of year again – the CVP/MM summer holiday round up! Take a look at what the team got up to at home and away over the already distant-seeming summer months…
Tommi
The main event of this summer was celebrating Mum’s 70th birthday. My partner Sara and I travelled to Finland where my brother Sami and his family, along with mum’s brothers and their families joined us for a lovely summer party under the old apple trees that my great-grandparents planted. As well as the party we enjoyed a family boat trip to Stockholm and took part in a fell-orienteering race at Kilpisjärvi. The summer could not have been better and so lovely to have all the members of the three generations of our family all in the same place for the first time ever.
Sarah
In June I went to Cala Blanca in Menorca with my sister and some friends to collectively celebrate us all turning 40 within the year! Much fun was had 😊 I don’t know what this says about me but my biggest take away from Menorca was how lovely the gates are.
Flo
After Laura raved about Slovenia following her trip there last summer, I decided I had to see it for myself… (heavily inspired by her itinerary) we started off in Piran on the southwest coast and ended up in mountainous Bovec, near the Austrian border. It was beautiful weather and we swam almost every day of our trip, in the sea, river, lakes and waterfalls. This photo was taken from the top of St George’s Bell Tower in Piran, where you get a beautiful 360 degree view of the town, the sea and the coast of Italy.
Laura
On holiday in Italy this year, we ventured up high into the mountains to what is known as ‘The Balcony of Italy’. The view from the top is actually of Lake Lugano in Switzerland and the Alps beyond, and is absolutely stunning. What better place to sit for a couple of hours with a book?
Alice
This year I spent a week walking the Dorset coast path (my home county) with my mum and dog. I spent much of my childhood walking sections of this coast path, as well as on the beaches, so it was lovely to connect everything up in one week. The walk also happily coincided with the hottest week of the year, so there was plenty of time spent in the sea cooling off!
Anna
A sunrise swim on our last day in Kefalonia, with the beach entirely to ourselves. We had a lovely, very lazy and very hot, holiday with lots of Greek food and beer.
Laura and Anna recently made the most of a trip to Alberta for the International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB) by having a few days’ holiday in the Canadian Rockies beforehand. Highlights included bears, early morning lake swimming, a hike near Lake Louise and a drive up the Icefields Parkway. They stayed on a farm near Lake Mara and in a very secluded cabin between Jasper and Edmonton (that they’d probably never be able to find again if they tried!) It was a very pleasant way to get over the jet lag before the conference. Below are some photos of their travels!
Merry Christmas! Here’s the third instalment in our Christmassy book Q&A in which Anna talks Wind in the Willows, poetry and pulling a cracker with Professor McGonagall.
What is your favourite Christmas scene in a book?
I do really like Chapter 5 of Wind in the Willows which is about many things, but includes an impromptu party thrown for carol-singing field-mice by Ratty and Mole. The chapter ends with Mole drifting off to sleep, thinking about the importance of having a community and a place to call home, which seems especially apt at this time of year and in 2018:
He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to; this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.
Do you have any Christmas book traditions?
We have a book with a short poem or extract from a book for every day of Advent, and I try and buy a new Christmas book for the girls each year (this year is Grandpa Christmas by Michael Morpurgo). I also try and find time on Christmas Eve to read A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas aloud to Alys and Elin…
All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.
What book would you like to receive on Christmas day?
I’d be happy with just about any book to be honest, but I would really love ‘Honey and Co. at Home’ or ‘The Phantom Atlas’, which is about mistakes on maps.
Which book characters would you like to have Christmas dinner with?
Mrs Cratchit, Professor McGonagall and Becky Sharp.
Which book would you give as a Christmas present?
Jeanette Winterson’s ’Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days’
Favourite/least favourite book you read in 2018?
I hate giving up books, but I did abandon ‘Judas’ by Amos Oz this year. I felt like I had already read enough books about middle-aged men and their obsessions with beautiful and unobtainable women.
Some of my favourite authors have published new books this year, so it’s been a good year for favourite books, but I’d probably pick ‘The Underground Railroad’ by Colson Whitehead. It’s a brutal read, but utterly engrossing and the central character Cora is a force of nature.
Over the past couple of years there has been a lot of change in our office as more members of staff have started working part time and/or from home. Elinor and Anna both work part time, some of which is from home, while Sarah, who has recently moved to Dawlish, is working full time from home with a few days a month in the office. In this post they talk about the benefits and challenges of working from home.
Anna
I work at home two days a week to fit in around the school run and cut down on commuting time. We moved house earlier in the year and I now have an actual desk, instead of using the dining table. I have a lovely view of our neighbour’s huge garden (with deer!) and the bird table. I do miss being in the office when I’m working at home – I’m excessively friendly to delivery guys and the post woman – but I can listen to music as loudly as I like without anyone tutting.
Elinor
When I returned from maternity leave earlier this year I changed from working full time to 2.5 days a week. As I don’t live in Bristol it doesn’t make sense to commute in for just 4 hours in the office so I work my half day from home. It’s a lot more peaceful working at home as there’s nobody to distract me with questions or chat about what they’ve been up to. But this is what I miss most and it’s nice to go into the office on a Thursday and Friday and catch up with everyone in person. I’m glad that I can do some of my hours at home as it makes it easier to arrange childcare and it means I can avoid spending too much time waiting for delayed trains. I certainly prefer sitting in my dining room looking out at my garden and watching the squirrels running around to being bombarded by traffic noise in the centre of Bristol.
Sarah
After 16 years of mostly working in the office, working at home almost all the time has taken some getting used to. Dawlish is a big change from Bristol but everything seems a bit slower down here which helps keep me calm when I have a lot to do (and the views help)! It’s been good for my productivity but at the same time I think having people to chat to and being in a team environment can make you feel more motivated. This is where our instant messaging has been great – it’s really useful for quick work matters but we can all chat about fun things too so the team spirit comes through even though we’re not all in the same room. I miss my lovely colleagues but I’ll still be coming into the office several times a month and I’ve been able to go to the office a few times already since I moved. It’s been nice to have a catch-up with what everyone is doing and have our usual meetings, and to get to know Rose, our newest staff member at CVP.
I just feel very lucky as it feels like I have the best of both worlds 😊
Is it really mid-October already? The UK saw an unusually long, hot summer this year so autumn has come as quite a shock! Before we resign ourselves to gloves and scarves, here’s what we all got up to on our summer holidays this year…
Tommi
This summer we travelled to Oulu, where we bathed in a sauna on a raft at Tuira beach, before spending a week in the south of Finland enjoying the peace and quiet of village life and the beautiful lakes and forests of Nuuksio Forest. We then took a week to drive back to the UK, visiting the beautiful cities of Riga, Vilnius, Gdansk and Lübeck. All were very beautiful in different ways, although the Hanseatic connection meant there were certainly some similarities. I can most definitely recommend the pierogi in Gdansk!
Elinor
This summer I went to St Malo in Brittany with my family. This photo was taken on the day we took a boat trip across the river to Dinard. It was our first foreign holiday with my 1-and-a-half year old son and we all enjoyed spending our days at the beach in the sunshine and eating delicious French food!
Laura
This summer I went to Slovenia for the first time…wow! We hiked, swam, rafted, paddle-boarded and drove through the most beautiful wildflower meadows, dramatic mountains and the bluest rivers and lakes imaginable. I haven’t stopped raving about it and Slovenia has since shot to the top of my most recommended countries list!
Sarah
I didn’t go on holiday this year as I was buying a house in Dawlish! Here it is – so relieved to have the buying process completed 🙂
Rose
A week after moving to Bristol from Northumberland we took a much-needed break from unpacking, heading to our holiday house in Mallorca. This is Cala Figuera – a pretty little fishing port in the South East of the island.
Anna
Despite it being one of the sunniest summers ever in the UK, my poor timing meant that my holiday this year consisted of a rainy trip to New Zealand and a very rainy week in Wales. A lot of our time this summer has been spent gardening, either in the garden of our new house or on our allotment. The council cleared the plot for us, and then I carted 75 wheelbarrows’ worth of horse manure the 100m from the road to the plot. This is the allotment when we took it over (girls foraging for gooseberries) and this is as it looked a few weeks ago, with winter crops going in. The allotment comes with a view of Cheddar Gorge, and it’s already one of my favourite places in the world.
Flo
I had a very late “summer” holiday this year – I’ve just come back from a week in Corfu! It wasn’t my usual sort of holiday – I usually get bored with too much relaxing, but the weather was beautiful (except for one very dramatic storm) and I spent a lot of time in the sea, reading and eating way too much!
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