Recognizing the power of storytelling as an influencing writing centre practice (McKinney), this paper examines my near-decade long relationship with writing centres and explores stories I have told about writing centre work. Using analytic autoethnography, I analyze three reflective narratives from my writing centre history across two countries, through multiple disciplines.  Despite the differing contextual factors of these narratives and the stories they feature, my analysis reveals institutional neoliberalism as the guiding influence on my storytelling. This finding is discussed alongside literature on emotional labour, contingent employment, and institutional interference. Ultimately, this paper highlights the untapped potential of autoethnography as an accessible methodology for precariously employed writing centre scholars and calls on the field to consider the influence of neoliberalism on our communication with students and tutees.

This case study examines how collaboration between a writing centre manager and an educational developer created new opportunities to advance writing pedagogy at a mid-sized Canadian university. Initially born from our university’s response to generative artificial intelligence, our effort both responds to perceived threats to the future of writing studies and attempts to preserve our work through new opportunities. Collaboration between writing centres and faculty development is under-represented in the literature, yet we have found the marginality of the third space to be a productive one from which to grow our campus’ writing community from “under the curriculum” (Hunt, 2006, p. 371). In this paper, we present three examples of collaborations between a writing centre manager and an educational developer—creating a community of practice, facilitating workshops for graduate students, and presenting to our university’s Senate. The outcomes of our reflections offer perspectives on AI and writing pedagogy, highlight the importance of cross-unit partnerships, and illustrate how third space professionals can offer critical writing-related perspectives to institutions where formal writing programs do not exist—ultimately helping make visible the often decentralized work of writing studies professionals in Canada.