This year has been a big one for the Writing Center: one filled with awards, grants, travel, and growth. As the Writing Center is celebrating its 10 year anniversary, I wanted to take some time to shine a spotlight the center, partly because of the wonderful work the center does and its recent achievements, but also because, as a new tutor myself, I’ve had the privilege to work with the amazing tutors and faculty who welcomed me into their space. 
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If you’re unfamiliar with the Writing Center, Celeste Del Russo, the Writing Center director, talked to me about its role on campus. “We work with undergrads and grad students on any type of writing project that they are working on for their coursework, or even in their own personal writing experience. We try to provide them with a space to share their work and to receive feedback in a non-judgemental environment. [We] help them to learn more about their writing process and what that looks like for them.” Any student at any stage in the writing process can come to this social space and work with tutors, who are also their peers. 

If you’ve ever visited the Writing Center before, it’s always a fun, relaxed, welcoming and social space for students to learn, something the center prides itself on. Dr. Russo explained, “...[O]ne of the more important parts of our role is that the social space itself of the Writing Center is one that we hope to be welcoming to many different students, and we hope to provide a space where they feel comfortable. [The space fosters] the social aspects of writing, the sharing of writing, ideas, and communication.” The Writing Center is an open space for all students, which is extremely valuable, especially to students who may not be confident in their work. Cate Romano, the Assistant Director of the Writing Center, echoed this point. She sees the Writing Center as “a safe space for overwhelmed students to come, and a place to boost their confidence.” When tutors are in training, there is always a focus on positive, productive feedback. Dr. Russo said, “[T]he Writing Center [is] a space where we want to talk about a student’s strengths, as well as areas they can develop. [We] look for the positives and help them build up the confidence in sharing their writing and help them identify themselves as writers.” Within my tutoring sessions, this is always a point I try to emphasize: you are a writer! Every Rowan student will encounter writing during their college experience. The Writing Center is the place to go whenever you need help. It’s what they’re there for, and it’s what they love to do! 

It’s because of the great work the center does and their commitment to inclusion that the Writing Center received the Access and Inclusion Award from the Disability Resource Center (DRC). This honor is awarded to staff and departments who strive to provide access to the resources Rowan students need to succeed and thrive in college. The center had been working with the DRC for a long time, even in events outside of the Writing Center. Donna Mehalchick-Opal, the Coordinator for the Writing Center, told me about how she and other tutors have volunteered in the College Compass program. This program provides students with disabilities a period of transition into their college and campus life. Donna and other tutors meet with students a few times during this program to inform them about the Writing Center and encouraging them to visit. Donna also shared some of the outcomes from the Writing Center’s partnership with the DRC, including training on access, inclusion, neurodiversity, and more. In asking why she felt they received the award, Dr. Russo pointed to this partnership with the DRC, but also spoke on the impact of the students they’ve worked with, saying “The students that have come to us through the [DRC] have taught me and taught all of our tutors so much about what it looks like to write from different ranges of ability. [I]t’s helped us to really think about our tutoring strategies, and our tutor training, to make sure that we are providing the best kind of access to all students.” Their approach hasn’t been to find better ways to “accommodate” students, Dr. Russo emphasised, rather it’s constantly asking “how can we provide better practices all around, provide better assistance universally.”

Dr. Russo was also awarded $1,800 to bring speaker and educator John Warner to conduct a workshop in celebration of the Writing Center’s Ten Year anniversary. This was through the STORI Award (Support for Teaching, Outreach and Research Innovations). The STORI Award provides funds for initiatives focusing on one or more of these three areas: teaching initiatives that increase student learning, outreach to the community via student or faculty led initiatives and/or recruitment efforts, and new research initiatives. The workshop, which will be held next March, will be held for Rowan faculty members and local high-school educators. 

On top of this work within the studio, the Writing Center has had an impact on the local community. Writing Center tutors have visited local Glassboro schools and Logan Township Middle school, leading writing workshops with middle school and high school students. I got to speak with Laura Kincaid, in her third year of tutoring and pursuing an MA in Writing Arts, about her experiences with local school outreach. She told me, “Last year, I went to an assisted living space where I ran a Creative Writing Nonfiction Workshop for some very nice elderly women. This year, we got a partnership with Logan Middle School. They had read an anthology over the summer which included a narrative poem, so they wanted us to come in to something on poetry.” The first day, tutors worked with the students on their poems, providing encouragement and constructive feedback. The second day, tutors and students shared their works in a poetry reading. “The kids really liked that, and all the feedback that we got from the teachers was that it got [the students] excited and talking about their assignments.” Logan Middle School is looking to have tutors come back and lead more writing lessons next year!
Writing Center tutors and staff also had the opportunity to present at this years International Writing Association conference (IWA). Nicole Tota, a junior English major and third-semester tutor, discussed their presentation on using collages as a multimodal form of essay creation and peer review. “Our participants were really interested,” she told me, “and they really enjoyed our ideas.” On top of the successful presentation, Cate Romano said she gained information from other sessions that she has since used in her classes. Cate learned of a PechaKucha, an online visual presentation service used by creators and schools. “My class just used it last week for their critical engagement, and they really liked it. I think it was really successful.” Moving forward, the Writing Center is in the process of submitting their proposal to present at next year’s Mid-Atlantic Writing Centers Association (MAWCA), held at Towson University, Maryland in March 2020. 

It’s only my first semester in the Writing Center, but I already feel like I’ve grown so much through my sessions with students and tutor trainings. The Writing Center is more than a place to bring your paper, it’s a thriving community of students and faculty dedicated to helping students learn and grow as writers. When asked about the Writing Center’s plans for the future, Dr. Russo explained, “Moving forward, we’ll continue to think about issues like access and inclusion, how we can implement some of the First Year Writing goals of language diversity and social justice, and how we can continue to advocate for our students and our student writers.” As new developments in writing continue to advance, and as more students in Rowan are required to produce and analyze multimodal works, so to will the Writing Center. “[We’ll] think about how to continually adapt our practices to support students across different modalities.” It’s an honor to grow alongside their talented team of tutors.

If you haven’t visited the center, I highly recommend stopping by room 131 in the Campbell Library. Also, follow the Writing Center on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to get the latest updates on upcoming events (like Friday movie-and-pizza nights or kickball) and writing workshops!​

The next interview was with Dr. Jordan Howell, who is coordinator of Environmental and Sustainability Studies, studies environmental issues and ways of improving how environmental policy is developed and applied, has research supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and previously by the US Environmental Protection Agency, and teaches several courses on environmental & sustainability topics at intro, intermediate, and upper levels including the Writing for the Environment course “Human Nature: Introduction to Environmental and Sustainability Studies”. ​

There were many more challenging questions like these, but in the end, my team won! Before the party was over, the winners for the costume contest were announced. The winner for the most creative costume was Laura Kincaid. The winner for best in show was Laura Fowley. And the winner for funniest costume...was me! 

The Writing Center’s Halloween celebration was a success! Tutors and students had a great time all day long. Activities like these bring our writing community closer together, and I was really honored to be apart of it. Beyond the celebrations, the Writing Center is a fantastic place to work with your peers at any stage of the writing process, for any class. Click here to register for an appointment. I hope to see you there! ​

Heather Lanier is the author of Teaching in the Terrordome: Two Years in West Baltimore with Teach For America, and two award-winning poetry chapbooks: Heart-Shaped Bed in Hiroshima (Standing Rock, 2015), and The Story You Tell Yourself (Kent State U, 2012), winner of the Wick Poetry Open Chapbook Competition. Her work has been noted in The Best American Essays Series and The Pushcart Anthology Series. She has published poems and essays in many places, including Salon, The Sun, Vela Magazine, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, and more. She has a forthcoming book about raising her daughter with a rare chromosomal syndrome, and she is a new teacher here for the Rowan University Writing Department. 

​In this podcast, we talked about her approach to teaching and writing, her publishing journey, and her future plans at Rowan University. Below is a transcript taken from parts of the podcast. 

Connor: Did you always know you wanted to be a teacher, or was that a later stage? (2:14)

Lanier: I was probably a writer before I was a teacher, but I was a writer early. I was writing in high school, kind of seriously. I was taking seriously the writing of poems and studying poems. So I knew that I loved writing as a way to make sense of the world, and that writing was a big part of my being in the world. Then I went through college and was a serious writer in college. I went to the University of Delaware and there wasn’t a creative writing major at the time. So I studied english literature and I took all the creative writing classes I could take. Back then a lot of universities didn’t have creative nonfiction at all. So I was studying poetry and fiction, and also writing memoir on the side. [...] I was always writing as an undergraduate. When I was twenty two and graduating I didn’t know what to do, because I loved writing and I really loved learning. So I thought, what if I stood on the other side of the classroom, would I like that too? And I did! I really loved teaching. I like fostering curiosity and exploration in the classroom, whether that’s as a student or as a teacher. I’ve been doing it on the other side for a while, but I consider myself a “co-conspirator” in exploration and curiosity for my students. 

Connor: What are you teaching here at Rowan University? (5:38)

Lanier: I have been hired to teach creative nonfiction of all kinds, and multi-genre creative writing. I’m also a poet, so I’ll probably teach poetry at some point. Right now I’m teaching Special Topics in Nonfiction, which is focused on explorations of experiments and innovations in the contemporary essay, the weird things that people are doing in the essay in the last few decades. I also teach Creative Writing I, which is multi-genre, poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, for undergraduates. 
Connor: Do you want to expand upon the special topics class into another semester, or would you like to do something different? (6:26)

Lanier: Next semester, they’ve signed me up already for Writing the Memoir, which I’m excited about. I write memoir, and there’s lots of interest around memoir. In that class we’ll look at more traditional nonfiction approaches, not that memoir always has to be traditional, but we’ll talk about traditional narrative arch, storytelling, point of view, characterization.

Connor: Talking about this story stuff, I’d like to get into your new book that’s coming out. Can you tell me a little bit about that? (7:01)

Lanier: The book is called Raising a Rare Girl, and it is a memoir about my first child. Eight years ago I had my first child, and she was born very tiny. The doctors were really concerned that something was wrong. We found out that she has this very rare chromosomal syndrome called Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome, which is the name that they’ve given because the scientist Wolf and Hirschhorn found that this particular syndrome corresponds to a certain kind of deletion in certain chromosomes. She has different chromosomes; her fourth chromosome is different than most other people’s. That manifests in a lot of different differences but also challenges, developmental delays, and a lot of uncertainty in her developmental trajectory. 

And so this book is about what it means to parent a person who is so different from what people expect, who culturally and historically has been dehumanized—it wasn’t until 1975 that children with disabilities were guaranteed a right to education—but also what it means to parent at all, how hard it is, how much surrender and letting go you have to do, and opening yourself up to the unexpected. 

Connor: I read a little bit of your book Teaching in the Terrordome, and that also deals with cultural biases. It also deals with the hardships that minorities and people that are considered “the other” face. It’s a similar thing that you’re touching on in your new book, these cultural pressures and stories that we tell. I’m wondering how you came to these topics and how you try to tackle them in your writing. (8:52)

Lanier: I think I’ve always been interested in the way that ableism expresses itself in our culture, I studied under disability scholars as a graduate student, and certainly writing about a primarily black school in the city and also writing about racism. I guess I am a little interested in systemic oppression of marginalized groups, but my child sort of found me. So it ended up being that I was writing about ableism from this very deep, heartfelt place. 
There’s a quote, and I forget who says it, which says “having a child is like your heart walking around outside of you”, because you love this person so much. It was shocking to have people comment, really early on, about my daughter, and her life, and her worth when she was just a few days old, because she had this syndrome. Saying things about her they would never think to say about a child who didn’t present as having potential intellectual disabilities.So that subject kind of just landed in my lap, I suppose. 

Connor:  I watched your TED talk, and in it you go into detail about those beginning phases of raising your daughter and the stories that you heard from other people. I was wondering if you still think of that phrase, “good or bad, hard to say.” It’s an interesting topic to think of in terms of writing, but also in life, the stories we are telling ourselves, and how we are trying to put together our narrative—if that phrase was something you thought of writing this new book? (10:11)

Lanier: Any time I write something that’s partly what I’m thinking about, asking “what is the story here?” And any writer has to think about that. Joan Didian’s line from The White Album, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” is famous because every writer has to contend with the fact that we desire to make meaning of our lives, but the meaning that we make often falls flat, or is cliché, or is unfair to others, or is not the whole picture. 
And so I am really interested in the stories that are told, and sort of flipping them around, in investigating our modern mythology. Often my work will do that. I think with both books I’m attempting to question some of the stories we tell. 

Connor: Speaking of your works, I wanted to talk a little bit about your publishing journey. When did you first try to get into publishing? As you were starting, what’s something you wished you knew? (12:09)

Lanier: I started trying to publish after I graduated as an undergraduate, and I tried to publish poems. And, you know, poetry is really hard to place too—acceptance rates are often like one percent. So mostly I didn't publish any poems, but I would send them out. I was told by a professor of poetry to make it just a thing that you do and to be proud of the rejections that you receive, because the rejections are proof that you are in some ways making public your work; you finished something, your sharing something with an editor, and that editor read it! Even if the answer is no, good work!

This was a poetry professor, Jeanne Murray Walker, who said, “Do something funny with your rejection letters, like cover your kitty litter box with them.” And I always took that as more of a metaphor than anything, the idea being, “don't weep over your rejections too much.” That was really good advice.

Connor: Where were you primarily trying to submit to? (13:39)

Lanier: Literary journals! And this was my thinking: I’ll just submit to prestigious literary journals. The Southern Review was my first publication, they Published two of my poems. My first creative nonfiction, I can't quite remember, maybe Colorado Review. These prestigious literary journals is where I started publishing.

My publishing life has changed quite a bit, though. When I had my daughter and wanted to write essays to parents who were in similar situations, or wanted to write essays about the strange stories that people put would put on top of my life or my daughter’s life because of her syndrome, I just felt like I wasn't going to reach my audience through tiny literary journals, as prestigious as they were in the graduate creative writing world. So I started a blog! Which was unprestigious in some ways—anybody can start a blog. But it ended up being some of the most rewarding writing because I just reached anybody I wanted, and anybody who could find me could find me, I could reach them quickly. It was really fun. And some of the blog writing created attention for the book, so self-publishing can then lead to a good book deal. 

Connor: And one final question, as you're new here at Rowan, and we’re really excited to have you, what are you looking forward to accomplishing here at Rowan? (22:12)

Lanier: The one thing I'm really excited about is building energy and interest in creative nonfiction, which already is here; writers are already coming in with that interest. But also creating a space for people to find a home in a genre that I think everybody can find a home in. Everybody has some nonfiction that they want to write, whether it's personal or researched. Every writer I know eventually starts dipping their toes into nonfiction. So I want to create that space for people to find a home in a genre that I love so much, and then be a support person for them. In some ways, being a writing professor is a bit like being a coach or a midwife, helping people give birth to something rather than being strict about how they should write. I really see my role as helping people foster people's own projects. So that involves listening closely to what the graduate students are interested in and supporting the projects that they are drawn to—and at the undergraduate level, building interest in the genre.

Being a member of this amazing faculty, which is filled with all kinds of writers, is so exciting!  This is the department that I would have loved as an undergraduate student. I think studying literature was great for me, but I would have been excited to be a Writing Arts major as an undergrad. 

Connor: Well we are excited to have you here, thank you so much for having this conversation with me!

Lanier: Thank you! Thanks for having me!

I had the unique experience of interacting with both students and faculty, discussing internship opportunities and my own experience, as well as graduate options for myself as a senior student in the Writing Arts Major. In particular, I had a conversation with Writing Arts Learning Community students who had transferred to Rowan this semester; Daria, a creative writing major interested in publishing, and Champagne who was an Education major with interest in teaching writing. I had the chance to tell Daria about the publishing experience I am gaining through my Writing Arts internship and work with Rowan’s Singularity Press, as we share the same career interests. Champagne and I discussed her goals as a Writing Arts student, and I was able to aid her by peer reviewing some of her writing. 

​The Meet and Greet also served as a chance to discuss upcoming events. Professor Katie Budris passed out flyers and recommended students attend Glassworks’ Issue 19 Launch Reading on October 24th at the High St. Art Gallery, and I was able to discuss plans for Rowan’s involvement in the Collingswood Book Festival with Professor Stephen Royek who ran the Writing Arts booth at the festival and Dr. Luther who ran a booth there for his Self-Publishing course. To hear more about that annual event, be sure to read next week’s article! The last event that the faculty-student meet and greet provided an informational platform for is the “newest winter session opportunity,” the Winter Writing Retreat to the beautiful Pendle Hill retreat center in Wallingford, PA. 

​Creative Writing Professor Jade Jones held a presentation on what this creative writing retreat, presented and priced as a 1 credit course, has to offer Writing students. She highlighted that herself, Megan Atwood, Lanre Akinsiku, and Heather Lanier will be sharing their creative writing expertise as published faculty. Jones made sure to mention that this writing focused retreat will allow students “the chance to use the January break productively and gain writing tools that’ll help them in the years to come” and later expressed her excitement for the event mentioning that she is “looking forward to exploring multiple creative genres with students in January." If you are interested in the retreat this winter, as Dr. Kopp and Professor Haruch have stated, “While the retreat is primarily for [Writing Arts Learning Community students], other Writing Arts majors are invited to the retreat, though they will need to move fast” because “there are now already eight students from the meet and greet registered to attend!” If you would like to be one of the other twelve students to attend this first retreat, contact Dr. Drew Kopp by email asap. 

​In the end, all of the students and faculty were able to engage in productive conversations that were enlightening to what that Writing Arts Department has to offer students. The main concern expressed across the board for future meet and greets was the hope for more upper-class students to attend as well, not just Freshman. However, Professor Haruch included with this suggestion the notion that “being able to access freshman students and begin to build those bonds so early in their Writing Arts Journey was priceless." Still, more upper-classman participation would ultimately provide freshman students a view of their future as Writing Arts students, and could benefit themselves as I did in learning about their opportunities post-graduation, catching up with their previous professors, and meeting those they never had the opportunity to take courses with. Despite the event including mostly students new to the program, faculty left the event feeling much the same as Dr. Kopp, who was “thrilled with how our first meet and greet went." As a representative of the student viewpoint, I agree with Dr. Kopp that the event was a great success and share the same sentiment as Professor Haruch: “My hope is that this is the first of many faculty and student meet and greets”.