Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers

Acknowledgments

aCk noWledgMents I’d be remiss not to acknowledge all of the support and encouragement that helped turn a blurry vision into the book you now read. First of all, I acknowledge my deep gratitude for the administrators, tutors, and writers who I’ve come to know working in three different writing centers over the last two decades. These centers have been places of chaos and respite, inspiration and routine, collaboration and conflict— indeed, spaces of radical possibility, to borrow bell hooks’s phrase. From my very first email to Utah State University Press, editor Michael Spooner has been generous with praise, encouragement, and advice. Michael was more than patient with my first-time author questions and worries. In addition, Laura Furney and her team at University Press of Colorado were wonderful to work with and made the production process painless. The anonymous reviewers of my manuscript were likewise generous with their enthusiasm for the project and their detailed, spot-on revision suggestions. Thank you. Though many fields are permeated with a cutthroat, competitive ethos, writing center studies, luckily, is usually not. I’m so grateful for the encouragement of many writing center scholars I admire. Clint Gardner’s and Neal Lerner’s early praise for “Leaving Home Sweet Home” made me believe I was onto something. Patron Saint of Writing Centers Mickey Harris’s general faith in my work gave me buoyancy: one of her encouraging emails is printed and taped in my office at eye-level, a virtual pep talk for difficult days. Attending the 2008 IWCA Summer Institute to learn from leaders Brad Hughes, Lisa Ede, Neal Lerner, Nancy Grimm, Paula Gillespie, among others was the best professional experience I’ve ever had and in more ways than one pushed me to follow through with this project. I’m thankful for my mentors and teachers—classroom and otherwise —who helped me improve as a scholar, critic, writer, and human over the years, especially Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater, Hepsie Roskelly, Nancy Myers, Rebecca Jackson, and Kris Fleckenstein. I’m equally thankful for my grad student colleagues who continue to exchange ideas, drafts, successes , and tales of woe with me. Over the last nine years, I’ve been lucky to have the warm support of my friends and colleagues in the English Department at Ball State x P ErIP HErAl VISIonS for WrITIng CEnTErS University. I stayed sane with help of the ladies, especially Debbie Mix and Jill Christman, who can talk me up and talk me down (from the edge) better than any friends I’ve ever had. I’m also grateful for the university ’s research support and especially for the research assistants who have helped with this project—Claire Luktewitte, Erin Banks-Kirkham, and Ashley Ellison Murphy. My sweet little boys, Bennett and Spencer, deserve thanks for sharing me with this project for the last couple of years. Mama owes you ice cream. With sprinkles. Finally, it is not an exaggeration to say the book would not exist without Todd McKinney. My partner and best friend, Todd literally and figuratively wheeled me back in front of my writing desk, faithfully read pages and pages of drafts, and allowed me to interrupt him for impromptu writing conferences over and over again. Alabadoo. “Every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship: it prevents the telling of other tales.” —Salman Rushdie (2000), Shame ...