Wayward Stories: A Rhetoric of Community in Writing Center Administration

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Six weeks in to my position as assistant director of the writing center and suddenly I was confronted by a cluster bombing of issues and concerns – microaggressions, depression, confusion, suspicion – each one separate but related, and threatening to tear a new hole in the already fragile foundation of community in my writing center. How do we feel, what do we do, how does a community survive when the story we’re experiencing isn’t the story we want or expected - when it is, in a word, terrible? After McKinney’s Peripheral Visions, we know our labor and our centers do not look, act, and feel cozy, iconoclastic, or focused on one-on-one tutoring all of the time. And yet, if we are going to continue to move beyond the grand narrative, a deep and meaningful understanding of community is essential. When we put our story in relation to our communities, then our story becomes just one thread in a much more complex tapestry. We cannot separate one person’s story from the story of the writing center. Each person, each story, is a stitch in the rhetorical fabric of community. Using critically reflexive stories to change and shape practice, this thesis highlights the grand narrative of community and shows how that narrative serves to stymie community growth. These stories resist boundaries. They are wayward. They are counter to the narratives around which we construct our lives. When we share stories and write together, we begin to understand the threads we’re all weaving into the tapestry – our community, stitched together through shared practice; a process that will never end, as each person comes and goes. The community will never be resolved, and in the ambiguity of boundlessness, comes a new way of seeing the world - through constellations and the dwelling in inbetween