As part of National Library Week, we’re highlighting one of our senior student workers, Tyla Parks. Tyla has been with us for her four years at Susquehanna University, working as an Interlibrary Loan and Archives student assistant, and is planning on relaying that work into a Library Science degree next year.

Currently, Tyla is a senior creative writing and publishing & editing double major with a film minor. She is also a writing tutor for the CAS. She is actively involved with the literary community on campus, also. For the Susquehanna Review, she is the co-managing editor and has had pieces published in Rivercraft and Essay Magazine. She is a recent recipient of the prestigious Gary Fincke Prize for Creative Writing. When her time is not spent in the library, she is in her room watching old Hollywood movies with her roommate.

Q: What are your favorite things about working at the library?

A: I really enjoy the people, the community at the library, working with all the staff members and the student library workers are fun too. Being surrounded by books. I’ve worked at the library since the second semester of my freshman year in March. I started in Interlibrary Loan. I still do that now but then I moved to archives assistant. I did an internship at the library my junior year.

Q: What is a little-known fact about the library?

A: Downstairs in the basement there’s the V.I.P. Center. I feel like not a lot of people know. The V.I.P. Center has a book club too. Also, there’s a really huge microfilm and microfiche collection with magazines and journals you can look at. You can use the machine to look through the pages and stuff. That’s a good resource that the library has.

Also, I think the basement of the library is haunted, that’s just me. I work down there in the archives, and I do get a sense that something is watching me, nothing malevolent, it just feels like it’s there. I think the basement is part of the original building so maybe that’s why. It feels like an older entity to me, maybe a professor.

Q: What is your go-to Scholarly Grounds order?

A: My regular is a yogurt bowl with Greek yogurt, strawberries, granola, coconut flakes, and sometimes a drizzle of honey if I’m feeling it.

Q: Who is your favorite author(s)?

A: I really like Christine Schutt who came to SU last spring. I just like how she plays with language a lot. She’s a fiction writer, but she’s also kind of a poet too. I read her novel Florida and it’s not a novel but a novel at the same time because it has the structure of a story, but it conceals things a little bit. Very lyrical. I really enjoy that because I like puzzles. She’s a recent author I like at the moment. I think my all time favorite author is probably James Baldwin because he was the first writer that I read that made me cry. I like the way he uses language because it hits you in a spot and you really feel it.

Q: Have you been reading anything lately?

A: It comes and goes in waves especially with college stuff. I feel like I’m reading more academic things which kind of diminishes my will to read for leisure. I have just ordered a bunch of interlibrary loan books that I need to read and they’re just sitting on my bedroom floor looking at me, so I’ve got to read those.

Q: What book first inspired you?

A: I read Inkheart by Cornelia Funke. I really enjoyed that book a lot because writing was a central part to it, and it showed me about the power of writing. And I thought, ‘oh, I want to do that!’ That was a book that propelled me.

Q: What got you writing in the first place?

A: There was a dollar store down the street from my house and I went there and got a five subject notebook and a packet of pens. That’s how I started. I was able to escape to my own world through writing. I read a lot as a kid too. I think it’s cool how writing is a release for people, it’s an outlet for words that you might not be able to express through your voice.

Q: What do you enjoy doing in your free time?

A: When I have it! I enjoy crocheting. I also watch a lot of movies, I read. I drink tea. I hang out with my roommate’s cat, Lily.

Q: What do you plan on doing after your graduate?

A: I plan on getting my master’s in library science with an archival concentration. I hope I’ll be able to work either in a museum or another university library, or maybe a historical society and I could do genealogy work. That sounds like fun. Because I did that with my own family history, and I really enjoyed the history behind it.

Q: If you were to tell your past self some advice at the beginning of your college career what would it be?

A: I would probably tell myself to not be afraid to go out into the world. It’s okay to branch out and break out of your shell. It’s a beautiful world out there and there’s nothing to be afraid of.