Deep Ranges

The IWCA Summer Institute has gotten off to a heady start, heightened by the sense of pilgrimage in getting here. Andrea Malouf of the Salt Lake Community College Community Writing Center and I flew into DFW, took a puddle-jumper from there to Lawton, Oklahoma, discovered a good Thai and Vietnamese restaurant amid the pawn shops and tire stores of Lawton, and then drove from there about sixty miles to the Quartz Mountain Resort and Conference Center. The center is a pretty remarkable place to hold an event like this, located by a lake in the Wichita Mountains of southwestern Oklahoma—unexpected natural beauty for those not familiar with this part of the state.

Our dinner gathering tonight was entertained by M. C. Gilbert, professor emeritus of geology at the University of Oklahoma, who told us the story of the mountains around us. As he explained, the Wichitas are old mountains (over five hundred million years) covered up by the sediments of ancient seas and now being uncovered as the surrounding plains weather away. What we see are just the tops—another fifteen hundred feet of mountain extends underground, waiting to be brought to light. That seems to be a fitting metaphor for our time here as we think about our work, our ideas, our careers, wondering what lies hidden beneath the surface and, for those of us new to the world of writing centers, how deep our roots in it go.

Introductions revealed that the International Writing Centers Association is truly living up to its name. Besides concentrations of participants from New York and Philadelphia, the Upper Midwest, the Southeast, Texas, California, and Utah (of all places), we have two from different universities in Turkey, one from Saudi Arabia, one from Qatar, and two Canadians. Our careers are at every imaginable stage, from doctoral students preparing for qualifying exams to twenty-year veterans of writing centers and comp classrooms. Multimodal literacies, issues of race, and developmental writing are shared research interests among the participants (my own interest in applying ancient and medieval rhetoric to writing center practice got a good chuckle).

I suppose all gatherings of any group that shares interests, from medievalists to Shriners, are fueled by that desire for kindred spirits and the relief of not feeling like the only one of your species. Here, though, the intimacy of the gathering, the freedom from outside distractions, and the sense that we're going to get some serious working and thinking done add to the spark. Many of us voiced surprise, relief, delight, or consternation at finding ourselves in the world of writing centers. The treat is being able to voice such revelations together.