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1 I N T R O D U C T I O N And I forgot the element of chance introduced by circumstances, calm or haste, sun or cold, dawn or dusk, the taste of strawberries or abandonment , the half-understood message, the front page of newspapers, the voice on the telephone, the most anodyne conversation, the most anonymous man or woman, everything that speaks, makes noise, passes by, touches us lightly, meets us head on. Jacques Sojcher, qtd in de Certeau, xvi Walk through a morning with us—we’re out the door, heading to campus , strolling into the building, pulling out the office keys, and flipping on the lights. You know, the routine: turn on the computer, take off the coat, get to work. The voice mail message light blinks “Good Morning” in its own Morse code; the computer sings as it powers up, dinging one, two, twenty-five new email messages received. The clock continues its steady march toward the first class, and payroll must receive an accurate accounting of tutors’ hours by noon today if checks are to appear in their boxes on Friday. These kinds of needs, and dozens more, demand our attention every hour. Yet it is all too easy to leave the writing center at the end of the day feeling complacent, believing that preparing a payroll, stepping in for a sick tutor, or even planning an upcoming staff meeting comprises the extent of our writing center’s work. As necessary as these tasks are, we might be so consumed by them that we miss something else: the most interesting moments in our workday have probably not demanded our attention at all. As we shut off the lights and turn the key in the lock once more, we should wonder about the significance of all that we could have noticed in our everyday spaces: the role reversal of two of the writing center’s prized action figures, Pokey and Shakespeare—Will, on this day, uncharacteristically, giving Pokey a ride. Pokey’s skinny orange front legs are perched on the Bard’s shoulders—a real switch in human-horse relations, a quiet surprise. Who did it, and why? The culprit, when finally identified, simply replies, “Equality.” Or the scene composed of a bright red cardinal puppet, an all-too-realistic gun, and the Western literature anthology. Some kind of threat? A weapon waiting to be retrieved later? No, a “tableau,” set up by one of the tutors, called “shooting the canon.” 6 THE EVERYDAY WR ITING CENTER Our attention is constantly split between moments like these and the larger, louder issues that relentlessly nip at us, demanding our attention and response. In the face of institutional deadlines, we are tempted to relegate such moments to the backburner, to assume they are beneath consideration, amusing but not pressing. In our haste, we may fail to consider the ways these moments hint at the degree to which our tutors1 feel invested in the work of the writing center, the connections our tutors are making to their intellectual interests and to their lives outside the center. We may not capitalize, in other words, on the ability of everyday exchanges to tell us something about our writing centers as representing what Etienne Wenger calls “communities of practice.”2 Perhaps we’ve lost our ability to slow down, notice, and consider most of the specific moments within the seemingly routine demands we are so often pressed to meet as directors. Arguing that our field has become “trapped in theory,” Kurt Spellmeyer calls for us instead to turn to “an alternative so mundane that we have passed it over time after time in our scramble for sophistication and prestige. That alternative is ordinary sensuous life, which is not an ‘effect’ of how we think but the ground of thought itself” (893–894). In conversation with each other, the five of us realized that we wanted more permission, from one another, from our staffs, from our colleagues within our institutions and within our field, to practice what Michel de Certeau calls “ways of dwelling” in uncomfortable places (30), to embrace situations in which we and our tutors have been thrust. We wanted to bring the smallest moments of our work, thought about deeply, together with our largest institutional and intellectual concerns. And we sought ways to support ourselves and our staffs as we began that work. Wenger explains, “We all have our own theories and ways of understanding the world, and...

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