The Writing Center as Last Best Place:

Six Easy Pieces on Montana, Bears, Love, Missions, and Tutoring

Kevin Davis

Writing Center Director, Eastern Oklahoma State University

 

I. Summer Vacation

          I use my August vacation for escape, getting away from the heat of the central plains, traveling to places that let me reboot my head for the upcoming semester, seeking to rediscover the Kevin that works loose during a year of dealing with warped expectations, broken perspectives, close attachments.  On these journeys, I’ve mentally recomposed syllabi while hiking, redesigned the writing center while looking at a glacier, rediscovered a sense of rhythm and flow while cruising the inside passage.  For me, August is rollover time, a chance to look back and forward, a chance to cool down (mentally and physically).

          To these ends, Annie and I spent part of August in northwest Montana, where we lived 20 years ago, a place where I met my first writing center, my first grizzly bear, and, to a great extent, my first real sense of myself.  I seem to be place-attached to the Flathead Valley, a location which speaks to me in a common language, which shares my nature if not my past, the mystery chemical to which my elements naturally bond.  The first day I drove into the Valley, I felt it instantly: a sense of returning, a sense of belonging, a rootedness in my soul which attached me to a place I had never before seen, a place where no ancestor had set foot or tire.

          When we lived in Montana, I spent afternoons working in my first writing center, a place that immediately felt like my home, the place I belonged within this place I belonged.  Evenings I spent teaching an odd combination of English and photography courses and, after-class hours, drinking a beer with the other young teachers who followed similar schedules, Jack and Donna, Peter and ‘Asta.

          One February night in northwest Montana–-the snow coming in like a movie fade--out, the cold so intense the gear shifter wouldn’t, the clouds hanging so low the ski lights weren’t visible on the mountain north of town–-one February night I headed after class to the Stockman’s Bar with Jack and ‘Asta to share a pitcher of Black-and-Tan and to listen to a few of Jack’s stories.  That evening, as Jack’s memories became more and more fantasy laced, his stories captured the attention of a woman at the bar, lanky, brown hair, cowboy boots, Camels.  With each of her attentions, Jack’s stories became more fantastic; with each of Jack’s stories, the woman’s attentions became more fantastic.  And soon the two of them were planning a winter camping trip into the Great Bear Wilderness. Eventually, though, Jack’s stories moved from describing incredible adventures to warning of unspeakable dangers: butchering horses to stay alive from the heat of their carcasses, carving make-shift snow forts for blizzard shelter, accidentally waking car-sized grizzlies, hungry from sleep.  ‘Asta and I knew Jack well enough to laugh at the stories, but the brown-haired woman breathed shallow, wincing anxiety with each new embellishment, eventually asking  “Jack, what would you do if we came across a grizzly?”

          “Why, I’d turn tail and run as fast as I could,” Jack replied.

          “But,” she stammered, “I didn’t think people could out race a grizz.”

          “I don’t have to outrun the bear,” Jack replied calmly.  “I only have to outrun you.”

 

II. Outrunning Bears

          I’m always reminded of this story when I visit Montana, and of its apocryphal value.  All of us in writing centers, it seems to me, spend a lot of time trying to outrun bears when we really don’t have to.  For example, I recently did a little bear-racing myself when called upon to write a mission statement for the ECU Writing Center.  After 23 years of existence (18 under my direction), we clearly had a mission, but no one had ever asked us to write it down before, and the task at first froze me, leaving me feeling stranded on a narrow trail with a grizzly sniffing down on me, appearing in the form of expectations I should meet.

          What did the administration want to see?  What is the “right” mission for a Writing Center to have? What have I done over the years and, more significantly, which of those actions can I admit in a mission statement?  What are we really talking about when we talk about the Writing Center?  How can I rationalize this thing we have become against the backdrop of my comp/rhet studies?  For days, I sat frozen, unable to start this mission statement, the grizzly growing larger and larger in my angst.

          The problem, of course, is that what started out as a theoretically valid writing center model has over the years become diluted by an often a-theoretical reality.  I took this job ABD, fresh out of classes with Don McAndrew and Patrick Hartwell, two of the original writing center gurus, and I designed our center to be faithful to all of the best theory and research into composing practices.  For example, we profess that we do not proof read; and we don’t, at least not until some desperate student, smacked down by repeated encounters with intolerant professors, comes to us, distressed and desperate, searching for help, at which time we throw philosophy out the door and do what needs to be done.  I have strived to create the most theoretically perfect, practically flexible Writing Center on the planet, simultaneously particle and field.  How could I admit that on a mission statement?

          Or how could I admit in a mission statement that our actions frequently serve to undermine the professor’s authority?  Or that we sometimes walk a thin line on textual ownership?  Or that our writing “center” really functions on the writing “fringe”?  Or that the true mission of our center is to comfort the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable?

          In Montana, six miles out the Highline Trail, not a bear in sight, I realized, finally, that my own anxiety made the task much more difficult that it needed to be, that I only needed to outrun the academic VP who had made the request, that those bears in my head were critters I didn’t need to outrun, out smart, or out maneuver.  We don’t really ever have to outrun bears; we only have to learn how to redefine the race. 

 

III. The Last Best Place

          Montana likes to call itself “The Last Best Place,” a moniker which first appeared on a 1988 anthology of Montana writing (and a title which has recently come under conflict, what with a real estate developer having copyrighted the pilfered  phrase right from under Montana’s collective nose and at least two writers now claiming to have been the inventors of the nickname).  For me, however, Montana--and the writing center world I discovered while there--exists as not only the Last Best Place but also the First Best Place.   

          As we drove into Montana that first time, late July of 1983, we were struck first by the openness, the great uninhabited spaces that suggested opportunity within isolation, the sky as big as advertised, more expansive than any we’d ever seen, the Sweet Grass Hills visible on the horizon for hours and hours of cruising on US 2. It seemed to be a place of unrealized promises, of dreams we didn’t even know we had dreamed, all embedded in Montana’s rugged rawness, the breezed grasslands extending like waves into the horizon, the mountains rising jagged and daunting, the locals leather skinned from hours beneath the incredible canopy of the sky, every town with a Stagger or Come On or Do Drop Inn.  And always, always the sky. 

          To outsiders, Montana is a different kind of civilization, a place where individuality is extolled and nurtured by community.  The natives prize their independence, their ruggedness, their staying power, and, incongruously, their simultaneous devotion to their mismatched community of isolationists.  (Anyone who has spent time in Montana was surprised neither that unabomber Ted Kaczynski lived an isolated life there nor that the local citizenry found him to be an ideal neighbor.) This world view, once common in America, I think, and still seen in some of the older dirt farmers and small time cattle ranchers of our mid-south region, has grown rare in the currently homogenized American society, a guild which emphasizes a commonness of countenance and an isolation of spirit.  But most of Montana still operates the old way,  emphasizing an individual warrant which is meant to mask a spirit of community, a reclusiveness that misrepresents the underlying fellowship of citizenry.

          A part of the greater whole, yet somehow different from it, Montana is that rarest of entities in America: a place with personality, a place with independence, a place that functions in relative isolation, a place which somehow embodies the misplaced character of the larger nation,

a place where independence is complimented by community but never, never consumed by it.  In a way, Montana is the place Texas ideally, erroneously believes itself to be, the last best place.

 

IV. Outrunning More Bears

          Grizzlies, I have learned, are likely to appear when you least expect them.  The first time I saw one, while watching a grazing big horn sheep through my zoom lens, a grizzly appeared from the corner of the viewfinder and stilled the sheep with a single blow.  Another time, we found one sprawled, belly down in fresh mud, halfway up the Avalanche Trail.  My friend ‘Asta once looked up from picking huckleberries to find that a grizzly had joined her in the huck patch, picking and munching great bunches of berries.  I wasn’t too surprised, then, to find that another grizzly had moved into my head in the form of the writing center consultant training classes I teach each semestert.

          When I first started the course, I kept trying to outrun the composition/rhetoric grizzly.  Those first years, I had my 19 year old charges reading Stephen North and Mickey Harris, Kenneth Bruffee and Linda Flower.  Because my composition studies had greatly affected my own practice, I reasoned that these youngsters needed to have the same theoretical grounding that I had.   But my minions struggled and balked, weighed down by the vapor of theory.  Alas, this bear started to eat away at the writing center as the consultants, strangled by abstract confusions, fell to channeling their high school teachers in their tutoring sessions, becoming in the process teacher-centered, proof reading tyrants.

          After a couple of struggling years of being bear food, I managed to elude the theory based grizzly, only to replace it with a bear of a different color: pragmatics.  Instead of asking the tutors to digest and apply the theories I held dear, I started to teach the tutors how to apply the conceptual models they were never to actually read.  In this model, we spent a lot of time talking about how to sit, how to read, what to say.  We modeled tutoring and role-played the problematic client.   In this era, I refocused the tutor’s task from finding their way out of a foggy haze to following a set of rigid instructions, turning them into rubric robots in the process.  The bear had changed, but the claws of this latter bear were just as dangerous as those of the former, as the tutors became unfeeling automatons.

          More recently, I’ve figured out, once again, that I have to outrun neither the bear of theory nor the pragmatics grizzly.  And, most certainly, I don’t need to train my employees to outrun either of those bears.  In fact, I don’t even have to outrun the new writing consultants I’m training.   My only necessary task, I have belatedly discovered, is to teach the new tutors how to outrun the writers they will be helping.  To that end, I’ve moved on to a more affective based training model.

           My acceptance of this affective model came from my rediscovery that most writers come to the center not as much for improving their writing as for validating themselves: their abilities, their thoughts, their values.  Now, instead of theory, we take personality tests.  Instead of pragmatics, we talk about compassion.  Instead of role playing, we just play.  Instead of reading old student essays, we seek to read ourselves.  In a great sense, I discovered myself in a writing center in Montana, and my only goal now is to facilitate a center where someone else might find herself, where someone else can consider himself to have finally come home.

 

V.  Love Theory

          We all assume many roles in our writing centers: tutors, mentors, counselors, coaches, bosses, educators, the list goes on and on, parents, priests, philosophers.

          I was in this last role, philosopher, the day that one of my current tutors, Audry, announced to me that she didn’t want to graduate because she loved just being in the writing center.   Audry, 25 and a single mom, continued, “I don’t think I’ve ever been in love before.  I’ve never loved a man, not even my ex-husband.  I’ve never felt this way about any one, but I feel this way about this place.”  She paused for a while, looked up at me, and asked “How can that be?” 

          “Let me tell you my theory of love,” I replied. Some of you have heard me speak about love before, but it’s something I’ve come to think is very important in education, something very under appreciated. 

          The older I get, the surer I am that we can never know enough to truly love another.   Annie and I have been together since 1971, married since 1973, and everyday I realize just how little she knows about me, how little I understand her.  This woman I have known for two-thirds of my life is a forever mystery to me, as I am to her.

          What, then, do we mean when we say we love?  I think we mean “I love the person I am when I am in this place or with this person; I love the me I become when I am under the influence of this person or place.”  When Audry says “I love the writing center,” she is suggesting that she loves the person the center turns her into, she loves this person she’s never before had a chance to be.

          “I love it here, too,” I confessed.  We’ve reached the point in our careers where Annie has begun to talk about retirement but I, to be honest, I cannot imagine leaving behind the me the writing center makes possible.  Love, I think, is being happy with who we are, and I am never happier with myself than on a day when I get to spend about six hours hanging out in the writing center.  For many of us–and I hope for many more, both workers and clients–the writing center established the mythical truth of possibility: be someone more; be someone you never expected to be.

 

VI. The Writing Center as Last Best Place

          Now comes the tricky part.  By now, most of you are wondering how I’m going to pull all of this together.  So am I, friends, so am I.

          I’ve spent a lot of time the last couple of weeks conferencing with first-semester writers who are trying to make their first essays happen.  “You should be able to paraphrase your entire essay in a single sentence,” I tell them.  My sentence, I think, is something like this: “We can learn a great deal from the two places I love most in life, Montana and my Writing Center, which share many common characteristics, including the occasionally disturbing grizzly bear.”  See, that part wasn’t too hard.

          The writing center, like Montana, is certainly not a perfect place; both are populated with the occasionally disturbing grizzly bear (though, of course, some grizzly bears are more metaphorical than others.)  A couple of years ago, Annie and I took our friends John and Rita to Montana with us.  It was their first trip west, and Rita, who is the kind who does a lot of reading before she actually experiences anything, had pretty much driven herself into a bear-fearing frenzy long before we even left Oklahoma.  I don’t know about you, but I have a tendency to be like Rita, to make my bears scarier than they actually need to be, to blow them out of proportion.  More importantly, I tend to try to out run my bears, rather than redefining the opposition, and that usually gets me into trouble.   To make our writing centers the Last Best Place, we need our grizzlies, but we also need to recognize them for what they are: more myth than reality, more avoidable than defeatable, more creatures of our own worst imaginations than beasts of reality.

          Both Montana and my writing center represent home to me.  Less than people or locale, home is a sense of well being, a connection between ourselves and our surroundings, a place that we can love because it brings out the best in us.  Building a writing center that brought out the best in me was a little tricky: at the time I was building, I don’t know that I could have told you what the best of me was.  But building a writing center that brings out the best in a wide variety of individuals, workers and clients alike, is trickier still, and I’m not sure that I can even suggest where to start.  But at ECU, it’s a feeling we’re after in our writing center, a place of friendliness and caring, of helpfulness, of personal support and mental challenges.  Last December, a non-traditional student whom none of us recognized brought in a big box of cookies to thank us for having encouraged her one dark day in late September when she was ready to throw in the towel and go back to her laundry and cooking.  “This is the best place,” she told me; “I just come here when I feel like I need someone to believe in me.”  Me too, I said, me too.

          Part of the reason the writing center can provide this belief in the individual, I think, is that we maintain an existence on the edge of the university.  Writing centers do not, traditionally, emphasize top down learning; we need to be sure that we continue to focus on the kinds of learning we do best: developmental, experiential, collaborative, individual.  For some reason, I’ve noticed, new tutors always want to get right down to work, to begin a session with the paper that’s in front of them.  As they gain experience, they spend more and more time with the writer, less and less time with the text.  I have tried to bring that into the training I do, the affective dimension which must precede any intellectual work we must do.  When students look at their instructors, they see professors eager to do their own research; they see graduate assistants more worried about the classes they take than the classes they teach; they see adjuncts packing up hurriedly for their next adjunct appointment, 10 or 20 or 50 miles on down the road; or, increasingly, they see a television or a computer monitor.  When students look at our writing center, they should see consultants, unhurried and undistracted,  who will learn their names and their fears, who will come to know them as something more than a chair and a paper.  When students look at our writing center, they should see a different kind of world view--a Montana view--one which values the individual within the community.