I had an appointment in the UNL Writing Center on Monday, November 12th with Matt W. to work on a chapter from my MA thesis. The chapter is a creative nonfiction essay about rural migration, educational opportunities, and internet access, and I wanted to bring it in to the writing center because I’m working on revising it for publication. I also wanted to use this appointment as an excuse to actually have the time to talk about my creative work, because that’s something that gets shifted to the back burner when I’m not in creative writing classes.
Matt and I are friends, so we have an already-established rapport. This meant that we didn’t spend a lot of time chatting at the beginning of the session–we dove right it and started talking about the essay. I brought a list of areas I wanted to focus on, and I’d already made a reverse outline of the essay because I knew it was likely we wouldn’t be able to read through the entire thing in a one-hour appointment (it’s 20 pages). I think this preparatory work and our already-established mutual understand of what the session would entail helped things go smoothly.
Our prior relationship and the fact that we’re both graduate students in the same program meant, I think, that we could be a lot more honest and blunt in the session–for example, as the writer, I felt comfortable asking Matt to be honest and tell me whether the beginning of the essay was a little boring. In turn, I think he felt fairly comfortable responding honestly and talking with me about how “long of a leash” I think my audience will give me to introduce the topic (i.e., how long can you spend setting the scene with all this imagery before the audience will be like “I’m not gonna read anymore”).
What I wanted most out of the session was 1) feedback from a new audience, since I’d only previously shared the essay with a few friends, my thesis advisor, and some family, and 2) some help figuring out the pacing and organization of the piece. At various points in the session, I checked in with Matt about whether the content was holding his attention and felt relevant to someone with an outside perspective. We also talked about the flow of the essay, and Matt gave me feedback about what an outside reader might think the essay was about at certain points.
Overall, the session was really useful, and I felt that Matt’s feedback was helpful and valuable in two ways. First, he helped me work through the specific questions that I’d asked at the beginning of the session. Second, working with this essay again after 6+ months away from it helped me focus my attention on it again and motivated me to keep working on it alongside the work I’m currently doing as a teacher/academic at UNL. (It was also just very personally gratifying to be able to share this work with someone in my program!)
The one thing I wish could be different about writing center sessions is that they could be longer. I absolutely understand why they’re not and I agree with the reasoning behind that decision. However, for writers working with longer pieces that are further along in the drafting process, sometimes an hour isn’t enough to actually read the entire piece and consider larger structural questions. For example, in my case, my questions about pacing and organization involved the entire essay, but we were only able to go through about half of it (and I summarized the rest using my reverse outline). I know this is a less common situation, and again, I think the policies about appointment length make a lot of sense–this was just one situation where I experienced firsthand how those policies can also present problems for writers.
Writing Center/Writing Charlotte 