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14 o n t h e e d g e s Black maleness, Degrees of Racism, and Community on the Boundaries of the Writing Center Jason B. Esters I’m an untenured junior faculty member, and I am building a writing center. Right now, I spend a significant amount of time sitting in the room that will become our writing center (we call it the “Writer’s Studio”) in the basement of my department’s newly renovated edifice. The lights are off most of the time. The room looks less empty that way, less harsh. Even in its unfinished, partially renovated state, it is already a great place to think and to daydream. Even write. And while I have been thinking about implementing our strategic plan, securing funding, and training tutors, I have been thinking a lot lately about the influence of writing centers in my life and academic career. I entered the writing center on a lark. My graduate university’s writing center was in one of the older buildings on campus. I entered the doors to the building, walked down a flight of stairs that felt disproportionately large for a normal human’s stride, and into a basement area, seemingly forgotten. I found the writing center nestled between what seemed to be an empty storeroom and a broken vending machine. The door, which I was told was usually propped open, was closed on this particular day. It was a large door, made of dark metal, which made its small glass window of grid-etched glass look even more repressive. But when I opened that door, I felt a spark. Maybe it was the warmth with which the writing center director greeted me, maybe it was hearing how she talked about writing and listened to my thoughts about the same. Or maybe it was catching snippets of a conversation a seasoned tutor was having with a student, exploring ways for him to “find his voice.” Whatever the reason, I knew that I had entered a transformative space, a liberating space. On the Edges 291 My writing center director was not only warm and friendly, but she showed trust in me as a writer and a teacher of writing. Though I walked onto campus with a teaching certification in secondary English education , I still felt that my being a black man teaching writing at a Research One university placed me on an unsettling proving ground, one where I would have to navigate the identity politics at play. As a graduate student instructor, it was strange, seeing some of my colleagues walk into a classroom wearing t-shirts and shorts and being called by their first names, knowing I couldn’t forgo any of the accoutrements attached to authority and run the risk of being seen unprofessional or unprepared. For me, the writing center didn’t have the same burdens or inconsistencies ; it was a haven of sorts during my first year of graduate school. I felt at home as a writer and a tutor. Within its physical boundaries, it was a place that was often democratic, ecumenical, tolerant. Admittedly, I experienced wonderful community as a graduate tutor and workshop facilitator. Not because it was a place for me to receive help in my own writing, but because it was one of the few places where it seemed acceptable for me to give it. I could liken the experiences of the writing center to an intense church service or revival. Students come in with their problems and questions, downtrodden, confused. Wanting and waiting to be inspired. And then the bringers of the Word come—in the form of tutors and writing program administrators. We meet students where they are, the Word goes forth, differences (for the most part) are largely forgotten in the joys of better writing. And though most sessions don’t lead to throes of ecstatic jubilee and spiritual awakening (though some do), most students get the encouragement they need. And yet, at the benediction, while student-clients, our parishioners, file out of the sanctuary that is the writing center, one cannot help but feel the slow, steady, diminishing power of that mountaintop experience , especially in the face of the realities of the daily grind. Students notice the subsiding feeling, too. They have dynamite sessions with tutors and walk out feeling supremely confident as their wellwishing tutors bid farewell, satisfied with a job well done, only to run across said student twenty minutes later sitting on a bench staring...

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