This article explores an incident of microaggression experienced by an Asian American female professional writing tutor working in a predominantly white institution (PWI). Using the genre of counterstory, the author hopes to show a racial Other’s processing of emotional trauma and its larger implications for anti-racist pedagogies in writing center work. Keywords : Counterstory, Imposter Syndrome, racial Other, anti-racist pedagogies I felt validated when the Rocky Mountain Writing Centers Association (RMWCA) chose to read Counterstories from the Writing Center edited by Wonderful Faison and Frankie Condon for its Summer 2022 Book Club. I had voted for it in RMWCA’s online survey because I believed it would serve as a timely reflection of where the field of writing center is heading in the future. As a feminist of color and a professional writing tutor working in higher education, I am especially interested in exploring the genre of counterstory and its rhetorical purposes in combating institutional racism on all levels. Aja Y. Martinez incorporates this concept and method of counterstory from critical race theory (CRT) to center the “lived and embodied experiences of people of color” (p. 33). Although people of color must confront interlocking systems of oppression on a daily basis, the stories of our struggles are hardly ever heard in a white supremacist society that tends to dismiss such lived experiences, leading to “the everyday erasures, exclusions and repression of narratives…that trouble, challenge, [disrupt] and destabilize ‘meaning in the service of power,’ its frames, its style, or rhetoric” (Faison & Condon, 2022, p.7).  Therefore, Faison and Condon claim that telling counterstories is enacting anti-racist praxis for the following reason: Counterstory insists on the legibility and intelligibility of that which has been treated as illegible and unintelligible under the aegis of white supremacist discourse: the racial Other, her lived experience, her resistance, refusal, survival, her brilliance–and the languages, discourses, genres in which she speaks her being. (p.7) After I re-read this statement word for word, over and over again, it seemed like Faison and Condon were calling out to me to tell my very own counterstory.  In her article “Asians Are at the Writing Center,” Jasmine K. Tang (2022) invites “fellow Asians and Asian Americans at the writing center… [to join] in a conversation we can have together about the multiplicity of our experiences at writing centers” (p. 11).  Although I cannot claim to work in a place called “a writing center,” I hope to use my personal experience to contribute to this critical dialogue, thus continuing Tang’s work. Similar to Martinez’s counterstory that explores Alejandra’s fit in the academy (Martinez, 2014), I explore how well I, as an Asian American woman, fit in my role as a professional writing tutor at a small, private predominantly white institution (PWI).  The conclusion I have reached through exploring my experience of microaggression is that certain historically marginalized bodies do not fit well in the academy, at least not in prescribed roles of authority. Thus, their uncommon presence is manifested through imposter syndrome. What follows is my account of how this incident of microaggression has profoundly transformed me. In Spring 2022, the coordinator at my college’s academic support and tutoring center distributed copies of the manual How Tutoring Works: Six Steps to Grow Motivation & Accelerate Student Learning, for tutors and teachers (Frey et al., 2022) to all the professional math and writing tutors. We were supposed to read the manual in our down time, when we were not working with students, to enhance our tutoring skills. Later in the semester, we would have a staff development meeting to discuss the manual. However, for whatever reason(s), that meeting was never scheduled. Moreover, during the Summer 2022 break, the coordinator informed the tutors through email of his abrupt departure from the center because he had decided to accept another (better) position within the college. As a result, I was left “hanging,” having read the manual but not having had the opportunity to discuss my criticisms of it with the coordinator and my fellow tutors, with whom I had hardly any (in-person) contact since the disruption caused by the COVID 19 pandemic. Although I found that the manual did offer some useful, objective strategies for tutoring in general, I observed that the master narrative embedded in the manual did not address critical factors such as how tutors’ and tutees’ embodied subjectivities could dynamically affect the outcome of a tutoring session. For example, in Chapter One “Effective Tutoring Begins with Relationships and Credibility,” the authors claim that the teacher/tutor’s credibility greatly affects student learning outcomes, and that it is consequently imperative to establish mutual trust between the tutor and tutee.  The authors define teacher/tutor credibility as “a measure of the student’s belief that you are trustworthy, competent, dynamic and approachable” (Frey et al., 2022, p. 20). Furthermore, they elaborate that students are the ones who determine a teacher/tutor’s credibility: “We don’t get to decide if we’re credible. It is perceptual, on the part of the learner. They decide if we are credible” (emphasis in original, p. 20). Finally, the authors offer some cogent suggestions to teachers/tutors to show them how they can effectively try to boost their credibility in their students’ eyes. However, what happens when a student walks into the center with preconceived notions of who is trustworthy and competent based on his own implicit (unexamined) biases? In such a challenging scenario, what can the tutor really do to effectively and efficiently gain the student’s trust when the student is suspicious of the tutor’s competency from the start of the session? As an Asian American woman working as a professional writing tutor at a small, predominantly white liberal arts college, I found myself in such a thorny situation with a young white, male student several years ago. I recall that after I had briefly introduced myself as the writing tutor he would be working with for that hour, the student immediately asked me, “Do you even know what you are doing?” Within the cultural context of the Chinese immigrant community I was raised in, it would be considered extremely rude and inappropriate for a student to question the teacher’s authority.  Therefore, I was very surprised when I was confronted with the doubtful tone in his awkward question.  I was particularly disturbed by the connotation of the adverb “even,” which according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary may be “used as an intensive to stress an extreme or highly unlikely condition or instance,” which implied in that case he did not believe I was even knowledgeable enough to assist him with his written assignment. However, I confidently reassured him of the fine quality of the services offered by the center. (The center has a very strict policy of only hiring professional writing tutors with advanced degrees, although this policy does not extend to math and other subject area tutoring, where there are both professional and peer tutors.) Despite my elaborate explanation, the student still did not seem too convinced of my expertise because he kept repeating the same nagging question throughout our session: “Do you even know what you are doing?” Since the writing consultation was supposed to be a collaborative process, I had to figure out how I should navigate the rest of the session with a student who was stubbornly unwilling to work with me in the first place. After that session was finally over, I had to craft a meticulous note in my client report form on WC Online stating that the writer seemed very reluctant to work with me, harboring serious reservations even after I had explained to him that I was indeed an experienced professional writing tutor with expertise in composition. The client report form would serve as my best and only real defense in case the student ever did file a formal complaint against me, claiming that I was incompetent, or that I failed to address his needs during the session. Since the center, as a designated student support service, is supposed to be student-centered, its most important policy is that the tutor must always strive to reasonably accommodate all the student/client’s needs first and foremost. Simply put, we, the tutors, exist to serve the students who visit the center. At the beginning of every academic year when we complete our hiring paperwork, all tutors must sign the tutor’s responsibilities agreement to acknowledge that we would comply with all of the center’s policies as a condition of employment. As a result, that client report form might be used as written evidence, a record of accountability that would document what occurred during the session, which I could use to support my claims in case of any disputes.

Amidst the jarring backdrop of spring 2020, we asked ourselves how, after years of attention to the making of our writing center community, would we not only embark upon the labor of a suddenly online writing center, but continue to make one another matter (Gellar et al., 2007, p. 8)?  Writing centers are messy because they are a confluence of overlapping boundaries, identities, and relationships (Brooks-Gillies, 2018, Gellar et al., 2007, Dixon, 2017), as well as sites of persistent and necessary emotion work that create place alongside the space (Boquet, 2002, p. 4). Therefore, our relationships between one another make and shape reality (Wilson, 2008, p. 7). This makes writing center communities central to writing center labor, but also underscores the excessive (Boquet, 1999, p. 478) complexity and nuanced nature of our communities. Using Jackson and McKinney as inspiration to consider how Discord allows us to “view the writing center from a different angle,” (2011) we consider how digital communities are constructed and intervene in writing center practice, especially during times of upheaval. This article focuses on five main concepts that emerged for us as we shared our experiences with Discord with one another: Space and Place, Embodiment and Relationships, Power and Power Dynamics, Signs and Symbols, and Stories and Archives. We will use these concepts to illustrate how having a writing center Discord server enabled us to negotiate both rosy and messy interactions during the fall 2020 and spring 2021 semesters, when our university was still predominantly online and our writing center was fully online. We will highlight the ways these interactions worked to (re)make community, offer some experiences that foreground the drawbacks of the server, and share insights into starting a Discord server. Keywords : community, online writing centers, Discord, digital spaces, digital community, COVID-19, emotional labor

The writing center (WC) is simultaneously an educational space and a specific place co-created by the consultants and students using it. Dedicated as it is to writing, the center offers an academic location physically distinct from home and the classroom. The COVID-19 pandemic drastically altered this separation of spaces and places, collapsing many (or all) of them into the virtual realm, all to be accessed from (often) one place: home. This paper considers the theoretical discussion surrounding notions of home in the WC and recontextualizes said discussion in the wake of the WC gone virtual during a pandemic. Reflections on the authors’ experiences in this new space and the resulting sense of place are included, resulting in a framework that considers the nature of online synchronous WC work being undertaken in our home and a call for WCs to not simply seek to return to a supposed normal when our institutions call us back to campus. Keywords : space, place, virtual asynchronous tutoring, online writing centers As writing consultants working during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have become very familiar with the feeling of brewing tea in the kitchen between appointments, shushing loud housemates, and angling our computers’ cameras to frame ourselves against the one clean(er) corner of our rooms. We have long since decamped from the physical writing center (WCs), a workspace for writing consultants, for an altogether different place: home. Space is open and undifferentiated; place is known and associated (Tuan, 1977). And WCs are themselves designed to be welcoming places, to set students at ease, to evoke that which they cannot be—home (McKinney, 2005). What, then, are the impacts of moving the WC into the home? For all that they promise the capability for connections across vast distances, digital spaces are still inherently material. They are built on infrastructures of wires, cables, metals, and plastics; we connect to them through devices made of the same materials. The work that we do is mediated by the spaces and places in which we exist, something made all the more apparent by the pandemic. Digital spaces have allowed us to keep in contact with friends and family throughout the pandemic, valuable lifelines in deeply uncertain times. Such spaces have the capacity to foster new intimacies (Gallagher et al., 2020), but the prevalence of “Zoom fatigue” serves as a reminder that digital methods affect us differently. We take up the question of how a WC formed through the space of digital infrastructures, server rooms, and homes (or the various places we find ourselves and our clients videoconferencing in from) alters the sense of place that WCs evoke and the consequences of this alteration. To do so, this work pulls from a theoretical framework to inform later personal reflections on our experiences as writing consultants gone online during a pandemic. We find this to be a kairotic moment for WCs to reconsider and reform our thinking on and understanding of place, a moment wherein consultants and administration alike can and should reconsider what the space of a WC can/should aspire to be. Space and place are frequent subjects of debate—partially because of their inherent resistance to concrete definition, partially because of the terms’ prevalence in understandings of the world. Space, broadly speaking, is open, potential, abstract; place is known, (more) defined, (more) concrete (Tuan, 1977). Further, “space is unstable, uncertain because of the possibilities it contains for occupation. Space is yet-to-be written” (Dobrin, 2011, p. 41). “Home,” for example, is a place that has become so through occupation of and association with space. In Arendt’s (1958) words, “[to] live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it” (p. 52); Tuan (1977) argued that the presence of any other human beings (even just one) “has the effect of curtailing space and its threat of openness” (p. 59). Any discussion of solitude and openness is now (doubly) grimly ironic in light of the ongoing mental and physical effects of prolonged separation and isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Tuan (1977) invited his readers to consider “the sense of an “inside” and an “outside,” of intimacy and exposure, of private life and public space” (p. 107). The home is (generally) understood to be the place in which we live our private lives, while outside in other spaces (and places) we live our public lives, occluding—even masking—elements of ourselves. The distinction between public and private life is inherently a problematic one because there is no neat separation (Arendt, 1958, p. 72). Elements of both intrude on each other in ways both tangible and intangible, but there was previously a semblance of spatial separation that allowed for the maintenance of veneers, however fragile, unreal, occluding, and deeply problematic they could be. Yet, home is not mere association with that space (i.e., the space we occupy for housing), but associated with various place-based ideals beyond faulty notions of privacy. These place-based ideals are essential to forming the notion of home. As bell hooks (2009) established, “A true home is the place—any place—where growth is nurtured, where there is constancy. As much as change is always happening whether we want it or not, there is still a need we have for constancy” (p. 203). The association of constancy with home that hooks established here is troubled further when considering the idea of being at home during a pandemic. Assuming an individual even has the necessary means and ability to conduct education and consulting work from where they live, the notion that they are taking appointments from the comfort of their own home ignores the way that bringing the many spheres of life into their lodgings disrupts the constancy that they wish for when occupying their home. Further, the physical and mental stressors of trying to do much of anything during a pandemic seep into and destabilize our sense of home. Our conceptualization of constancy often hinges on the sensory experiences that come to define our perceptions of home. Jenny Odell (2020) has written about the importance of attentiveness to one’s time, space, and place, advocating for deliberate use of the five senses. She approached this through a multi-scalar lens and a deep concern for the impact(s) of social media and the attention economy, which thrive on constant intrusion, constant interaction, and superficial engagement. These methods manifest as a constant fracturing of attention and energy; equally problematic in both public and private – although it is important to note that Odell is not uniformly negative in her view of social media. In keeping with her overall argument, she argues that it can be a positive force, but should be used and engaged with deliberately. These issues of deliberate intent, attention, and focus are also very much at play in WCs. The places in which we write and consult have become increasingly of interest to WC scholars and practitioners in recent years; however, many of these discussions focus on the practical aspects of the objects that make up a space. Despite the work that has been done by WC scholars who have taken up this mantle through their research on digital studies and multiliteracy centers (e.g. Fitzgerald and Ianetta, 2015; Del Russo et al., 2019; Balester et al., 2012; Dunn and Dunn de Mers, 2002; Hamel, 2002; Hitt, 2012; Naydan, 2013; Sheridan and Inman, 2010; Trimbur, 2016), there remains a need for WC practitioners to recognize and consider WC spaces as something we both experience and create as opposed to something we simply take in visually. Hadfield et al. (2003) explained that “the environment where interaction between and among people occurs is crucial as it affects the way people feel and, therefore, the way people interact. A well-designed writing center has an identity that speaks implicitly to its patrons” (p. 175). Echoing this idea and building upon it further in her call for a more critical examination of WC spaces, McKinney (2005) specified that “In terms of the writing center, critical geographies would not merely state what objects occupy the space. In addition, the focus would include the human experience in use of space and objects” (pp. 10-11). This need to think critically about how our WC spaces are experienced becomes all the more urgent as we pause to consider various ways that spaces shape our experiences as complex and dynamic individuals. This phenomenon is often intensified in academic spaces, especially when they are utilized for the vulnerable act of sharing one’s writing. For example, Lockett (2019) argued location “must be considered as one of the major factors that obscures the relationship between race and how students are socialized to understand graduate writing conventions.” She continued, contending that, for graduate students, learning how to write “depends on moving through clandestine places like faculty offices, selective reading groups, and brief cubicle chats among peers, as well as publicly sanctioned intimate spaces like coffee shops where graduate students may be meeting with their mentors and colleagues.” This audience awareness that Lockett spoke to extends to the question of how WCs construct a sense of place in the midst of a pandemic. Further, it points to the need to recognize that those logging into our virtual WCs may not have access to the assumed space of their living space. Factors like race, class, and residency status can greatly impact whether that is indeed possible. These are variables that need to be structurally addressed, but what can WCs do? Boquet (1999) asked whether the WC is “primarily a space , a “laundry” where work is dropped off and picked up, where students are brushed off and cleaned up? Or is it primarily a temporality, an interaction between people over time, in which the nature of the interaction is determined not by site but by method?” (p. 464, emphasis in original). Lockett (2019) argued that it is both, following her academic ghetto metaphor; “[the] kind of place a writing center is perceived to be—by its tutors, clients, director, and administrative assistants—affects what will happen there”. We agree with this assessment, with the added valences that have arisen due to the pandemic and the move to wholly online consultations. At least one of us has been managing laundry timing around scheduled appointments, and the question of time’s “realness” continues to haunt conversations, calendars, and affects as we continue to cope with the dissolution of, and attempts to reimpose, flimsy and inflexible external structures. As a result, these issues of space, when compounded with the additional variables of race, class, residency status, sexual orientation, and ability, culminate to become inextricably linked to issues of labor in the WC, a correlation that has become painfully real for many of us consulting and writing during the COVID-19 pandemic. That space relates to labor concerns is well established in considering how the planning of space can subconsciously reinforce the exploitation of laborers (Harvey, 2010). Although discussions of labor have been taking place for quite some time among WC practitioners and scholars, the COVID-19 pandemic has made these all the more salient and unignorable. Labor is a complex concept in WCs as it takes many forms—emotional, mental, and even sometimes physical (moving to a new space, rearranging furniture, cleaning at the end of the day, etc.). This labor, especially the emotional and mental labor that is so often exerted by WC consultants and administrators, is often invisible and thankless, and although the labor itself is often unseen, the symptoms of an over-exertion of labor are often all too real and visible. As Giaimo (2020) pointed out, “Labor and wellness are inextricably bound. In an ideal situation, our work would be Meaningful, Engaging, Stable, Safe, Ethical, Fairly compensated.” However, even in the most ideal WC, operating with full funding and without the chaos of a pandemic, labor is never all of these at once, and this can have substantial impacts on those of us working as consultants. Giaimo (2020) clarified that labor concerns are wellness concerns, as the precariousness of one’s labor conditions can lead to physiological problems and different manifestations of human suffering. Further, Giamo was explicit in making the connection between precarious labor and “minorities and minimum wage workers.” One of the primary casualties of the pandemic has been so-called “third spaces.” These are not instances of Soja’s notion of thirdspace (e.g., 1996, 1999), but rather a division of spaces into spheres (e.g., Sloterdijk, 2011, 2014, 2016), with home as primary, work as secondary, and then third as elsewhere, such as in coffee shops or libraries. Indeed, for a not insignificant portion of the population—including many students—the pandemic effectively collapsed many (or all) of these spaces into one physical place: home. As people distanced from each other, their senses of space and place (sometimes simultaneously) contracted, expanded, and fragmented. Digital spaces, especially virtual meeting software and social media, experienced massive surges in engagement and numbers of active users as many aspects of life shifted to be mostly online. The nature of—and divide between—social relations via digital modalities vs. physical ones is frequently presented in generational terms, with Millennials and younger generations stereotypically preferring everything digital, while older generations favor the “real” world. Regardless of the actual truthfulness of this presentation, people from all generations have had to navigate the complexities of virtual platforms, even as others have had to contend with the necessities and present dangers of being “essential” workers. Quarantine entails a curtailing and control of movement and mobility, especially as empirical reality and embodied experience. It is a (re)definition of many spaces—particularly public or communal—as hostile/dangerous. Russell (2020) has proposed envisioning this shift as a sphere eversion, a rather complex topological concept that has interesting implications for notions of exposure. Eversion is the process of turning something inside out, in this case squishing and folding a sphere. Spheres are inherently boundaries, things capable of being seen by external observers, while observers of everted spheres must, by definition, “take up a position on it” (p. 276). Within this framework, she pondered hands and elbows as “touched touchers;” hands are more likely to touch the world than elbows, but both are part(s) of the body, covered in the same skin, exposed to the same air (p. 276). We can wash our hands diligently, but what about the rest of the body, or clothing, or the air introduced to an enclosed structure or common area through doors or windows? The core idea of the commons is that of a shared public space which can become a public place through interaction and association. Since the commons is shared, it remains inherently open, able to be engaged with and left alone easily. In much the same way, digital places are inherently permeable due to the configuration of digital space. For the user, this is simultaneously a strength and a weakness, especially with the heavily increased use of video chat platforms by businesses, schools, friends, and families. Interaction through a screen is not the same as in-person interaction, even from a safe distance. It can feel awkward and impersonal at times as physical distance creates emotional distance, making it difficult to read and interpret body language. However, despite these limitations, screen-to-screen interaction has offered important opportunities for (re)connection. Indeed, digital means’ capacities for connection, what Gallagher et al. (2020) have called “new intimacies,” allow people to interact, link, and communicate across counties, states, and countries. These connections can also be extremely beneficial for students for whom the normalized physical classroom environment is difficult, including students with anxiety, disabilities, or off-campus jobs. Of course, as with any technology, digital spaces carry the capacity to reproduce some existing inequalities and introduce others. Users become dependent on connection speed and stability, compression algorithms, and server/software uptime (Burroughs and Rugg 2014). Digital access takes place over (fractions of) milliseconds, accelerating time and decoupling it from physical concerns (Barlow and Drew 2020; Chan 2020). Care and intent are key. Through our dependence and constant use of these digital spaces, the issue of Zoom fatigue has become a commonplace point of discussion in day-to-day life for the authors. Our days feel full of Zoom or Microsoft Teams meetings, WC Online appointments, and emails. Our homeplaces become saturated not only with work concerns, but also the digital platforms that convey them. To return to hooks’ (2009) discussion of home as constancy, labor in the home breaks up that constancy that informs our homeplaces. In a sense, it breaks into the ambient sense of calm and security that we strive for our home to be, instead saturating it with workplace concerns. This discussion of saturation connects well to Sidney Dobrin’s (2011) discussion of saturation as it “suggests a sense of overwhelming (as in saturation bombing)” (p. 183). The ambience of our homeplaces has been, essentially, saturation bombed with a different place context, thereby disrupting and recontextualizing our living rooms and bedrooms into a space of workplace activity. As mentioned in the introduction, we consider this to be a kairotic moment for reflecting on understandings of space and place in WCs. Particularly as many of us begin to transition back to hybrid (or wholly in-person) modalities, we should be deliberate and careful in just how we effect that return. To that end we offer these individual discussions both as reflections on our own experiences and as considerations of place and community in remote and hybrid WCs. For the first two months of lockdown, my scheduled writing consultations were one of the primary things I relied on to keep myself going (those, and my weekly movie nights with my roommate). I joined our WC partway through the fall 2019 semester and immediately received training in using WCOnline for consultations. I primarily consulted in-person, but I was already used to a hybrid modality so the switch to fully online was, for me at least, not a huge practical shift. It was just that it felt like everything around me shifted too; I was probably in a constant state of mild shock for the first couple weeks. In the Before Times, all of my work with clients, face to face and online, took place within the physical place of the WC. Its building was (and is) not adjacent to my department, so even if I was already on campus, I had to budget a few minutes to walk there if I was already on campus, or about 30 minutes if I was walking from home. Once I retreated into my home and lost all of that interstitial time, I fully realized how much I’d been relying on it to help physically and mentally organize my day. I was fortunate enough to live with roommates who I generally got along with, but being thrown into a situation where they were the only people I felt comfortable physically being around was a major adjustment, as was realizing the true thinness of the house’s walls and doors (accidentally dueling phone and Zoom call speaking volumes were a weekly occurrence). The time I’d spend walking was one of the primary ways I’d move myself into and out of my consulting (or more generally academic) headspace and back into a “home” mentality – one in which I was more agreeable to working with and around my roommates. I have since slowly (and, I will admit, grumpily) adjusted to this “new” situation. This has partially been a mundanely practical matter, since the pandemic is still a long way from being resolved, but it was primarily a matter of replacing old mental habits and spatial pathways with new(er), (more) specific, (intensely) local habits and pathways. I have a browser that I use almost exclusively for consultations, so that opening it signifies in some small way that I am going into “consultant mode.” I will usually make a cup of tea before my first appointment so that I have something to keep my hands occupied, which also gives me a ready-made excuse to stand up from my chair and walk to the kitchen after each appointment to make more tea and unplug for the brief window of time between consultations. And while I certainly miss the opportunity to hang out with my colleagues in the break room in between appointments, I feel that we’ve still been able to maintain a semblance of community through our weekly colloquium. It was very difficult at the beginning; I felt like I was consoling clients as much as they consoled me. In some ways it’s still difficult, just in different ways. Realistically, I barely made it to the end of the spring semester, and still don’t know how I finished papers and tests. Somehow, I did, and I kept consulting through it all. For better and for worse this fall semester seemed like an improvement, which I’ll attribute mostly to the fact that I could prepare (to a certain extent) for a fully online modality and the mental weight of the pandemic before it even started, as opposed to having to adjust in the middle of everything. The current spring semester has been overall better for me, perhaps because I’ve adjusted to conducting classes fully online – an alarming thought – and perhaps because I’ve finally started feeling the slightest bit optimistic about vaccination rates. But I’m still exhausted, still worried, just doing my best to muddle through. My fellow consultants have been integral to my persevering, as they’ve variously offered advice, support, commiseration, and openness to frank discussion. For me, the online space has felt simultaneously too lonely and too crowded. Thankfully, my graduate program had always been hybrid, allowing the flexibility for students to meet in-person and online in the same place by incorporating Zoom as a fundamental component of the course. However, I was someone who had never consulted synchronously online before, so when the COVID-19 pandemic halted life as we knew it, I was thrown into the (new to me) online place of WCOnline. And like many writing consultants (and people around the world in general) as quickly as I settled into a new rhythm of working and learning online from home, I became acutely aware of challenges posed by the online space. For one, the notion of working from a “homeplace” had become a little complicated for me. My partner had been unlucky enough to finish his graduate degree the spring semester that COVID-19 rearranged the world. After struggling with unemployment, we were forced to move days before the beginning of the fall semester to a new city with a better job market to stay afloat. This move was a culture shock to me as I had always been a small-town gal. Additionally, the pandemic made it challenging for me to get out and participate in my new community. Ultimately, I was cooped up in an unfamiliar apartment in an unfamiliar city, feeling isolated as I tried to conduct writing consultations through an unfamiliar modality in a home that did not feel like home. As I did my best to adapt to a new consulting modality, feeling a bit lonely in my new home, a feeling familiar to many these days began to creep in: Zoom fatigue. Although video conferencing had become the primary way for me to relieve my feelings of isolation by connecting with clients and colleagues, I began to feel isolated and socially overloaded at the same time. I felt I was expending much more emotional labor than I had when consulting face-to-face, checking in with students and doing my best to encourage and support them during these trying times. This became problematic for me, however, as I began expending emotional energy that I did not have. Unfortunately, at the end of the previous spring semester, the semester that everything got rearranged, life as I knew it was rocked by my mother’s death. I had finished that the spring semester and begun the subsequent fall semester in the midst of enormous grief. Consequently, I would lie down after even just one online writing consultation, emotionally exhausted. Before COVID-19, I did not consider myself as someone who was that affected by space and place. Although I was consciously aware that our spaces and places indeed have a great influence on us, I was lacking the context to really discover how these affected me personally. The pandemic made this all too clear for me. Place has immense power to shape feelings, attitudes, and even behaviors. This is true for us as students, colleagues, and writing consultants. Knowing this, WC practitioners should take care to create space for these influences, especially as we continue to contend with a pandemic. Losing the connection with clients and colleagues that many consultants experience from face-to-face consulting, we must be mindful to acknowledge and embrace feelings of isolation and burnout. Our goal as WC practitioners must not be for things to return to normal, but to normalize the oftentimes taboo yet all too familiar feelings of emotional exhaustion that academia has become increasingly hostile to. Right before lockdown began, my partner and I signed a lease in Lubbock, Texas. The plan was for me to move onsite for my doctoral program (Technical Communication & Rhetoric) that I’d be entering my second year of. While I had enjoyed being a distance student my first year of said program, I hoped that moving onsite would allow me to reduce my workload (I was working full-time as a lecturer and WC coordinator at Texas State University), increase my class load (I was taking two courses a semester, instead of three), and give me more time for projects. The reality of course was that, while my class load certainly increased, the Graduate Part-time Instructor (GPTI) and Graduate Writing Center (GWC) work I took on felt not all that different in time commitment when navigating teaching and consulting in a virtual environment. In Spring 2020, the potential of a lockdown led to me and the directors of the Texas State University Writing Center building out what the WC would look like when gone virtual. We did not have WCOnline in the WC for scheduling or synchronous online appointments, though we had started piloting Zoom for our limited synchronous appointments (that were, prior to this, held with the consultant in the WC). This experience coupled with my own use of Zoom in my doctoral studies resulted in our building the center’s plans around a common Zoom link with a main area (the virtual front desk) that could check writers in before moving them to their appointments (using the breakout rooms function). That it was all under one Zoom meeting link created a sense that we were still part of the center, even though we were video conferencing in from our home offices, bedrooms, living rooms, and backyards. That I had a small part to play in forming this system made the transition to online WC administration work smooth for me. This is not to suggest that there was not a shock to the system for me, as academia’s demand for continued productivity left me feeling even more frustrated with the world around me. I would say that it took me a while to shake it off and return to a sense of normalcy, but that would suggest that I ever have fully shook it off. Then, I started at Texas Tech University as a GWC consultant. The system was different (WC Online). There was no clicking over to someone’s breakout room when they weren’t in an appointment. We do have a weekly colloquium over Zoom which has helped get a sense of my fellow consultants, but in WC Online there is no sense of the space of the WC; there is only the sense of WC Online, the video feed of me with my mess of a kitchen behind me and the video feed of the client’s surroundings. As for those clients, those writers seeking to bounce ideas and strategies off me? I often find myself rushing through appointments, distracted by the need to later attend to household labor demands that surround me and are even at times clearly reflected in my video feed. Likewise, writers once willing to sit through the entirety of an appointment to discuss and strategize are seemingly also distracted as they have to deal with internet concerns and cooped up children. That’s assuming they can videoconference from their home, as I have had appointments where clients have been driven to whatever open space with decent internet connection they can access; cars, bars, and cafes are now normal backgrounds I spot in appointments. All of this is in the context of me feeling what some would call Zoom fatigue (let’s call it that, though it is a mix of videoconferencing platforms that I use daily). My partner and I moved to a new city in the middle of a pandemic. They still haven’t found work. We’re coming up on the deadline to renew our lease and we haven’t even seen the inside of our favorite local restaurants. Everything social we do is via videoconferencing. All my classes that I take are via videoconferencing. All my appointments are via videoconferencing. The conference I attended recently was via videoconferencing. Funerals are via videoconferencing. These are necessary precautions, but I am tired. And that tired is only heightened as academia pushes us to keep going on like this is all perfectly normal, to proverbially be the person jogging through a pandemic. In doing so, though, we are creating a damaging new normal where the homeplace can easily and readily be overtaken and replaced by the workplace. Although the three authors’ experiences discussed here are deeply personal, they reflect issues dealing with labor that many writing center workers have dealt with working from “home” during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pressure to continue to perform within the various academic, WC, and personal communities in which each of us participates has felt unbearable and unreasonable for many. Oftentimes this pressure stems from a societal desire to keep on working as if nothing is wrong because acknowledging that, in fact, so much is wrong can be incredibly painful. Much of the messaging in academic spaces encourages us that if we just log onto the home computer and smile, then class, work, happy hour, funerals, etc. can continue as usual. However, we must accept the reality that these are highly unusual circumstances, and that ignoring the painful reality of this situation only serves to compound and invalidate the mental and emotional labor being extended by WC workers. Because of the collapsing of learning, working, social, and private spaces into the homeplace due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ideas of space and place in the WC have only become more complex. As we attempt to mediate professional and personal identities through our laptops and phones, framed against the clean(er) areas our rooms, we are reminded that “[labor] is shaped/motivated by complex and unique combinations of requirements, expectations, values, perceived strengths, interests and desires, identities, and knowledge” (Caswell et al., 2016, p. 10). COVID-19 has made it impossible to ignore the way that our spaces shape and are shaped by our experiences, and we must acknowledge and address these issues in our WCs, whether in-person, online, or somewhere in between. While WC consultants and administrators struggle with increased workloads and personal stress, oftentimes in isolation, we must take steps to create WC places that are not just safer physically, but emotionally and mentally as well. As Degner et al. (2015) found years before the COVID-19 pandemic ever began, the fact is that “mental health concerns and illnesses are indeed affecting our centers… 56% of respondents said their symptoms affected their tutoring abilities (either slightly, moderately, or significantly).” The creation of safer places in the WC must involve resisting the urge for life and work to go back to “normal;” instead, it must involve normalizing and embracing the feelings that make our consultants, administrators, and clients human—in an echo of Illich’s (1973) conviviality. Simply trying to make our spaces feel like home will prove all the more problematic as many of us begin to transition back to our distinct physical spaces and have the residual exhaustion of our homeplaces being saturated by workplace activities. Giaimo (2020) has established solid moves we can make—lean on the larger WC community through online resources and organizational supports; be more flexible with technology alternatives and time off; share resources on wellness, mental health, and labor; and advocate for consultants. That said, this must be a learning opportunity for the WC community, one in which we can and should ensure that the different spheres that inform our lives as consultants and WC administrators are better protected from the threat of our workplaces saturating our homeplaces. There is certainly a need for further method-driven work to ascertain sustainable and equitable approaches toward this, work that needs much more room than the size of this piece allows. That said, we hope this will serve as a call for such work to find what is sustainable in writing centers of all types and sizes. As Claire speaks to above, our goal must not be to simply return to a supposed normal. We must work to transform our WCs to better value the placeness of our spaces and ensure that the various stakeholders of WCs (e.g., consultants, clients, and administrators) are valued as not just productive laborers and ready consumers, but also as whole people deserving of emotional, physical, and mental wellbeing.

This reflection offers an example of how one Writing Center director decided to approach antiracism through practices of mindfulness. Rather than a “how-to guide,” it encourages practitioners to think about what would work best for their contexts and offers a couple flexible activities one could adapt for their center at any given time. On June 19, 2020, Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts observed Juneteenth for the very first time in its 100-year history. There was music, guest speakers, and about 300 virtual attendees who not only listened but also participated in challenging break-out discussions. Although I had only been hired as the Director of the Writing Center for less than a year at the time, I could tell it was an important historic moment for the Babson community, and it further cemented my commitment to ensuring that our Writing Center be an explicitly antiracist space on campus. Essentially, like many of us have felt over the course of 2020, it was another one of those “What can I do?” moments, and it felt incredibly urgent. With so much feeling out of my control and so much energy going towards immediate concerns over funding and safety, I turned to practices of mindfulness to ground the clouds of thought that were continually generating questions of what and how . I turned to breathing and writing, eventually making lists of the steps I could take: review the literature, talk to colleagues, survey my staff’s interest in pursuing this work with me, and reflect on my own position and motivations. For each task on the list, I broke it down into smaller steps I could take, realizing that, while the exigence was there, it didn’t have to happen in a day. That’s when it hit me: perhaps mindfulness could be the key. When hearing the word mindfulness, one might imagine a practice of “clearing your mind”; however, rather than pushing thoughts away, the goal of mindfulness is to be fully present—to be fully aware of one’s thoughts, feelings, and sensations of the body. This can be difficult, especially when experiencing difficult emotions, but our bodies are built with internal rhythms to help us relax and reduce spikes in cortisol (the stress hormone). Certainly, tools like guided meditation and movement can help when we cannot focus, but mindfulness offers something much simpler and accessible: slowing down and allowing space for your mind and body to connect, which could involve taking three intentional breaths or pausing for a few minutes to notice the sound outside your window. Mindfulness involves an intention and a goal to self-regulate—to honor one’s embodied thoughts and feelings before acting. Theories and practices of mindfulness complement many of the tenets of writing center work in important ways regarding student emotion (see Johnson, 2018; Kervin & Barrett, 2018), mentoring current tutors (see Concannon et al., 2020; Mack & Hupp, 2017), and training new tutors (see Emmelhainz, 2020; Featherstone, Barrett, & Chandler, 2019; Godbee, Ozias, & Tang, 2015). Although the scholarship cited here paints a picture of something relatively new, we understand that contemplative practices have been a part of human existence for millennia. In times of trouble, it is not uncommon for a person to deeply reflect on a situation whether through breathing, meditation, prayer, writing, or other modes of thought. Similarly, a review of the literature may suggest that attention paid to writing centers and antiracism is relatively new (see especially the International Writing Centers Association’s antiracism annotated bibliography prepared by Godbee, Olson, & the SIG Collective, 2014) though we’ve long known in this field that the same systems that have allowed writing centers to flourish are some of the very same systems that perpetuate oppression. As a POC, I have had to think about my own complacency in such systems and consider how I can do better. Can we have a “cathartic repudiation of white supremacy” at Babson (Coenen et al., 2019)? How do I embrace the “willingness to be disturbed” (Diab et. al, 2013)? What informs an explicitly antiracist center? Given this topic explicitly centers around bodies, and thoughts and emotions associated with bodies, a potential entrance into this conversation could start from within our own bodies. In their article “Reflections on/of Embodiment: Bringing Our Whole Selves to Class,” Trixie Smith et al. (2017) explain that embodiment scholarship “works to continually remind readers, writers, researchers, and pedagogues that bodies matter to the paradigms, perspectives, relations, and decisions one has in a given situation” (p. 46). Like with teaching—and perhaps even more given the interpersonal proximity and less hierarchical relationship—tutoring professionals cannot separate the mind from the body in this work. Since bodies feel and then act on those emotions, it is important to reiterate Micciche’s (2007) argument that bodies do emotions; emotions do not just happen. Moreover, Micciche (2002) reminds us that writing projects are “a training ground for emotional dispositions that coincide with gender, race, class, and other locations in the social structure” (p. 438). In essence, writing tutors are always engaging in an emotional space when collaborating with students, which has only furthered my thinking that perhaps mindfulness could be a way to honor our emotions and work together through both the joys and difficulties. As Christie I. Wenger (2020) writes in her chapter on mindfulness from The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration , “Mindfulness helps develop resilience because it emphasizes agency; we practice mindfulness to cultivate resilience as a rhetorical choice and action in collective and communal networks” (p. 262). While I’m certainly not the first to do so, I do find an emphasis on embodiment and mindfulness to be a radical move for our writing center, which I view as a fruitful place for social justice work for reasons articulated by Laura Greenfield (2019) given the ways we are able to question ideas of power, negotiate identities and experiences, and have meaningful engagements wherein we recognize, particularly when working with multilingual students, that “we all stand in some kind of relationship to each other—indeed that our experiences are mutually constituted—but that our experiences differ because we are positioned differently within the systems of power in which we all operate (globally and locally)” (p. 123). That being said, I do think this is easier said than done and that we need more spaces that allow for students and administrators to start from within. In Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy: Social Justice in Higher Education , Beth Berila (2016) discusses the necessity for embodying knowledge. She writes, “One can be an expert on the sociopolitical factors that cause something to happen and still not know how it manifests deep in one’s body or why it produces certain responses in others” (p. 45). In order to undo systemic issues, we need both knowledge and presence; we need both body and mind. We can read articles from scholars like Romeo Garcia (2017) and Asao B. Inoue (2016); we can try to understand the “new racism” that scholars like Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan (2011) have put forth for us; but how do we embody the work especially as non-BIPOCs? Could, as Berila suggests, we make room to excavate ourselves in order to begin to recognize the power dynamics that we benefit from or that sustain our oppression? I started developing a way to do just that—to help our students look inward, perhaps uncomfortably, at the self in relation to our larger goals and communities. This ongoing project draws from practices of mindfulness to engage tutors and students in more-holistic approaches to antiracism in the writing center. It’s based on the idea that shifting a culture takes time, and I share its goals here now—in the middle of it all—not to showcase the findings of such a project but to perhaps inspire those who, like I had been, just aren’t sure where to start (particularly of the mind that we already try to design writing centers to be some of the most welcoming, most inclusive spaces). What are some small, concrete steps we could take based on the contexts of our own centers given the constraints of a global pandemic? As we weren’t building an antiracist center from the ground up, my first step was to get a sense of how my writing consultants viewed race in the Writing Center. When creating the fall schedule, in addition to the typical questions I ask about preferences for hours and if they’d be interested in visiting first-year writing classrooms, I asked consultants to freewrite on a few questions relevant to Fall 2020. Here are the instructions and questions I gave: Please freewrite on the following questions for 2-3 minutes each. With freewriting, I want you to just jot down what comes to your mind—no need to worry about spelling, grammar, or getting it “perfect”; rather, I just want to get a sense of where your head is at before we start working together this fall. Please set a timer so that you don’t spend too much time on this! That being said, if you feel particularly compelled to keep writing, that is fine with me. The answers to the social question elicited some very thoughtful responses as one might imagine when thinking of their own thoughtful consultants, and, as suspected, there seemed to be a spectrum of students who were clearly interested in talking more and some who weren’t sure what to say. With Berila’s idea of embodying knowledge for social justice in mind, I planned to have consultants look inward by examining their own thoughts on race before moving our way to examining the larger forces at work within our institutional context. I had my first decision to make: do I fold this work into our regularly scheduled staff meetings, or should this be a separate series of workshops? As no one was studying abroad or otherwise taking time away from the Writing Center, I had already decided that having more small-group staff meetings for our much larger staff would be helpful in keeping a sense of community and giving everyone the space to speak, and I took my own advice to start small. When creating our small groups that would meet every other week to talk about tutoring, I asked for preferences on foci, which included antiracism, marketing, and online tutoring strategies. We had a core group of students who wanted to talk about antiracism and the Writing Center, and I figured we could co-construct ways to talk about race on a larger level with the whole staff eventually. Inspired by the article “Talking Justice: The Role of Antiracism in the Writing Center” (Coenen et al., 2019), I recreated a version of an activity from the antiracist workshop the authors described. I asked my consultants to freewrite on when they first became aware of race as a concept. After the time was up, I then asked that everyone turn their writing into a six-word story (or thereabouts) that we would share anonymously. In the workshop described by Coenen et. al (2019), participants wrote their six-word stories anonymously on sticky notes, which were stuck along the walls of the room; participants then walked around the room and responded to the stories, again anonymously with sticky notes, before having a larger conversation. Given our online environment, I used Pinup , a free online sticky note generator that allowed participants to be anonymous . Each participant typed their story onto their own individual sticky note. Then I let them comment on each other’s posts by simply typing below the original story. With permission, here are some of the stories we shared: Again, imagining your own consultants, you might have a sense of how compassionate they were with one another’s words and how much thought these short, gentle excavations could reveal when we started thinking about them more deeply. While my intention was to simply talk about what we noticed overall, some students took ownership over their stories—“Okay, that one was mine”—and generously answered questions. As my main goal for this project is to start by meeting consultants where they are in terms of their discomfort with looking inward and gently excavating to better understand the larger systems of oppression that most likely benefit the majority of our staff and students, my expected goal is for all individuals involved with the Writing Center to take one small step forward in being mindful of their current contexts. To meet this goal, we’ll continue integrating writing and discussion activities to investigate the role that race plays in writing and interpersonal communication. Although we do need staff meeting time to talk about tutoring, I have to prioritize these types of discussions to slowly shift the culture of students currently working there. The end goal is to gently excavate our embodied experiences surrounding social justice issues in order to challenge our own practices while potentially also implementing more structural shifts in our center. I see this happening on three levels to start—in our ongoing professional development (staff meetings) for current tutors, in our sessions with students, and in our training for new tutors—though I could see this being of interest to those beyond the center’s immediate reach. In addition to the steps outlined above for current consultants, for students coming in to work on writing assignments, another goal will be to see if a mindful turn inward to thinking of self (i.e. excavating on the fly) will complement their writing processes especially as we see an increase in assignments grounded in social justice. Based on what we learn from our consultants and students, we should eventually be in position to implement changes into the tutor-training practicum—a full semester, advanced course—thus developing an antiracist curriculum that comes from the ongoing experiences of those living and working within the context of our institution as opposed to assuming a one-size-fits-all approach. As a team, we will keep reading, writing, discussing, and excavating in order to develop the kind of center that continually looks in and mindfully builds out.