By Jessie Reeder.

Jessie was an instructor in the UW-Madison Writing Center from 2010-2013. Last year (2012-2013) she served as TA Assistant Director. She can’t wait to return to work in the Writing Center soon, but this semester she’s fortunate to be on a research fellowship as she finishes her dissertation (!!!).

This is not what our staff meetings typically look like.

In this photo our Writing Center tutors (all Ph.D. students, mostly in English) are huddled over their own writing projects, faces taut with expressions of deep concentration. It’s a Friday afternoon in April. Light pours in from our coveted sixth-floor windows overlooking Lake Mendota, which has finally thawed after a long winter. Can you hear the photo? It’s silent except for the soft clack of laptop keyboards, the occasional shuffle of a chair, and the once-per-minute THOCK of the ancient clock that watches over these writers. This is a staff meeting of the 50+ consultants who work in UW-Madison’s Writing Center. (Our 55 undergraduate Writing Fellows have separate staff meetings, though we do all come together once per year to learn from each other.) I say that this meeting is atypical in part because of the silence (we’re a talkative bunch, by nature) but more so because we’re fully inhabiting our own roles as writers, not just instructors, mentors, tutors, or TAs.

In addition to our regular Ongoing Education sessions and other professional development, the Writing Center staff at UW-Madison meets approximately once per month to deepen our community and develop our practice as tutors. We hear from experts in other disciplines who help us work with writers in philosophy, biology, or social work. We discuss new research on working with differently-abled students. Or we brainstorm ways to handle particularly challenging tutoring sessions. While we can never shake off our own experience as writers that informs these discussions, we are primarily wearing our teacher hats.

So what are we doing in the above photo?

In short, we’re having a “writer’s retreat.” This is in part to help our staff experience one kind of opportunity the Writing Center regularly offers to UW-Madison students. Three times per semester we offer a four-hour “Writer’s Retreat,” where, guided by some goal-setting and group discussion to begin and end the session, writers essentially come together in solidarity—an effort to ward off solitariness—and put words on the page. These have been immensely popular, and I encourage you to read John Bradley’s blog post about them. The Writing Center has also been running “dissertation boot camps” in the summers, led by Associate Director Nancy Linh Karls. These are designed on a similar model but last for a week or more, and slots in the boot camps are competitive and coveted. (I did one this summer and wrote an entire dissertation chapter in one week!) You should definitely check out Nmachi Nwokeabia’s blog post narrating her own experience as a boot camper.

These kinds of “retreats” or “boot camps” are special: they honor the effort and duration of writing; they motivate the attendees by allowing them to share a typically lonely activity; and they eschew distraction and provide strategies for getting through the labor of writing a long project.

So, in part, we decided to dedicate one of our staff meetings to “retreating” our own writing so that our staff could get to know the ins and outs of one of our most popular and growing student offerings. We wanted them to be able to chat knowledgeably with their own students about the benefits of attending these events.

But it was more than that.

As TA Assistant Director of the Writing Center last year, I was tasked with designing and orchestrating this staff meeting. In the weeks leading up to it, I began circulating information about the meeting—what to expect, what to bring, etc. TAs were startled that we were going to dedicate a two-hour staff meeting to our own writing projects… Startled, and thrilled. Enthusiasm came pouring back to me about the meeting. Sure, it was great to get these two hours to write during the busiest time of the semester. But as became clear in the meeting, it was also exciting to acknowledge the bridge between our teacher-selves and our writer-selves.

People were abuzz as we gathered. By being writerly in a space where we’re usually teacherly, we were using space differently, which can unleash energy and reawaken attention. I asked everyone to set goals for the two-hour session, making concrete plans for how much they could reasonably accomplish. We talked about strategies for getting stuck, agreed to turn off our internet connections, and toured the writing (and  snacking) spaces available. With the following gentle admonition projected over the writers, they hunkered down to work.

The time flew by. When we reconvened with fifteen minutes left for wrap-up discussion, this was on everyone’s lips. It went so fast! Who knew you could lose yourself in writing for two whole, uninterrupted hours??

In closing conversation we talked about why these retreat formats are so effective. This is, I think, the question that links our writerly and teacherly selves–it gets after the process of writing. To have an answer to this question is to be able to speak to our students as a fellow-writer from the trenches.

The answers were immediate, blurted out in excited tones:

1. Being around other writers, who are sitting at the work of writing, matters. There’s a potent mixture of shame (they’re writing–I should, too!) and energy (it’s like everyone is cheering me on!) arising in a room that, to an outside observer, looks like a quiet study space. Think about all those students packed into study rooms in the library. They’ve got the magic of shared space figured out.

2. 

   Setting concrete goals for a writing session makes a big difference. Our writers filled out hand-written goal sheets about what they wanted to accomplish in that session, on that day. (I will write three pages. I will finish outlining my chapter. I will make it through the first four critics in my lit review.) They said that these concrete goals pushed them to keep going when ordinarily they might just call it quits at any particular moment. They wanted to meet those goals, because they knew there would be a feeling of accomplishment in it.

3. You can write more than you think you can. (Especially when you turn off the internet.) Almost everyone in the room was amazed at how much they got done when they actually put fingers to the keyboard for two uninterrupted hours. They were jazzed about future writing sessions, too–knowing what’s possible in two hours makes it more fun to get down to the business of writing. It helps push aside that sense of ennui that comes from feeling like all you’re doing is pushing a rock up a hill where you can’t see the top and the scenery never changes.
4. Writing a lot affects more than just your project. Like the attendees at our retreats and boot camps, our staff left at 5pm that Friday ready to cook dinner, sit by the lake, turn on the television, or open a beer with a guilt-free conscience. Meeting goals–even modest ones–is a powerful way to improve the way you feel about the the things you do in the rest of your time.

This meeting also resonated with the arguments Paul Silvia makes in his book, How to Write a Lot, which he came to talk with us about last spring. Silvia points out that you can write “a lot” no matter how much time you have, as long as you work every day, in the little spaces you can find. But he also stresses the necessity of setting aside writing time, and protecting it like a mama bear. Writing is our job, after all!

So this was a chance to take Silvia’s motivating words and put them into action. Not only did the TAs leave excited to make their own writing processes more rigorous, but they felt they had concrete ideas to motivate their students–and that they could talk from experience about why they work.

I have to say, though, my favorite part of this staff meeting was breaking down the barriers that separate our teaching from our writing, and that separate each writer from her fellows. Our work in the Writing Center is by its nature collaborative, whether we’re talking with a student about their writing, or meeting with each other to sharpen our pedagogy. The Writing Center is always humming with talk, and I love that. But as a writer, I often feel terribly isolated. What better space than the Writing Center to fix that?

We at UW-Madison are very aware that other Writing Centers structure their staff meetings differently, invite more writing and sharing of writing amongst staff, and already offer similar writer’s retreats. We’d love to hear about how you incorporate your writerly and teacherly identities, so leave a comment!!