This essay examines the learning processes of writing center professionals through the lens of “networks of enterprise” (Wallace & Gruber, 1989), which reflects on the dynamic processes through which creative people, like writing center professionals (WCPs), bring together the diverse and complex tasks undertaken in their everyday work into a cohesive and satisfying career. While there is substantial turnover in the profession, some WCPs stay in writing center positions for decades. Drawing on information gathered through surveys and interviews with ten long-term WCPs (with an average of 28 years of experience), as well as reflecting on his own career, the author attempts to discern what long-term learning WCPs take away from work. This piece shares participants’ responses to the following questions: (1) What do writing center professionals learn from the diversity of their duties and long-term exposure to the ideas of writers from a multitude of disciplines? (2) Are the lessons, processes, or theories, WCPs encounter in the center of use in their own scholarly, administrative, or creative pursuits? (3) To what degree does such learning make WCPs better at their jobs and motivate them to spend years or even an entire career in the writing center? Though not unanimous, the participants’ answers indicate that WCPs do indeed gain and apply to their work —including their own creative and academic writing projects — a deep, broad, and ever-growing network of knowledge gained from tutoring, training tutors, teaching, and performing the many practical, rhetorical, political, and administrative tasks required in these positions. Most, though not all participants, cited the building of such knowledge as a key motivation for spending their career in or around writing centers.

A university employee, Nancy, recently brought to me an idea for a nonfiction book about coping with thyroid cancer.In remission and awaiting word on her latest diagnostic scan, Nancy began our tutorial by excitedly reviewing the many and sometimes amusing lessons about life and family she had learned from her ordeal.As she explained, the book gave her a chance to explore her long-dormant writing skills, work on a project worthy of her time, and pass along what she had learned to other cancer victims.Her personal investment in the project was high, and the intensity with which she listened to my every word of encouragement and advice certainly raised the stakes for me.As we discussed where to begin and the book's potential commercial appeal, I felt edgy and alert -a condition heightened by Nancy's sudden jumps from idea to idea.I wanted to offer support but not build false hope, so I tried to balance any assurance that she had good ideas with a realistic assessment.She asked hard questions about working in a mixed genre -in her case, autobiography combined with elements of a "how-to" manual that might eventually become a sort of humorous Chicken Soup for the Cancer Survivors Soul.Some of her questions I simply could not answer, in part because many of her ideas remained half-formed and success would hinge on her persistence and writing ability.But I improvised suggestions based on some experience with creative nonfiction, a slight familiarity with "how-to" books, and secondhand knowledge of cancer-survival stories.Nancy left our ninety-minute brainstorming session with an attitude of eager determination to continue working.As good sessions sometimes do, this one left me feeling used up but exhilarated -an intellectual version of runner's high.

Most of us can recall the clients who got away, the ones who needed our help but left the writing center without getting it. Perhaps my own most glaring failure was Byron, a returning student whom I suspect suffered from a number of what we now call learning disabilities. I was a new graduate student when Byron first came to see me with a paper full of starts and stops, logical inconsistencies, and randomly chosen words. He asked if he could record our conversation, explaining that an accident had left him with an impaired short-term memory. The tape recorder sounded like a good idea. But as I commented about particular aspects of his paper, Byron frequently stopped the tape, rewound and replayed my earlier remarks. These unpredictable interruptions were unnerving and derailed my train of thought. I would leave out points I'd intended to mention and lose touch with insights I'd had about his essays. I probably should have seen our fragmented sessions together, which moved with the same jolting starts and stops as his prose, as a window into Byron's thinking and writing processes (and perhaps the key to solving his problems, assuming they could be solved). Instead, Byron's eccentric use of the tape recorder unsettled and frustrated me, as did his perhaps related difficulty with modulating his voice and keeping his balance (sometimes he would literally fall out of his chair). We worked for hours at a time, over most of two academic quarters, and made little detectable progress in his writing. I had no training in helping students cope with learning disabilities, much less with the effects of a severe brain injury. With good reason, I felt incapable of assisting Byron. And so he and I suffered together until one day, after plaintively wondering if he would ever get it,

Recent scholarship wrestles with the issue of creating a setting within centers that encourages genuine collaboration between those who seek advice (or input) and those who give it. Some scholarship suggests that too often the people who fund, administer, and use centers see the facilities as primarily remedial. Among problems, this attitude promotes the us-and-them mentality that Richard Leahy cautions against (45) • Lex Runciman, too, blames misconceptions about the meaning of tutor and tutoring for assumptions made by students, administrators, and tutors themselves that writing centers serve only bad (Defining 28) and are little more than emergency rooms for critically ill grammar. Both scholars urge us to create an environment which everyone is free to develop his or her own best processes (Leahy 45), where good writers go order to make enlightened decisions about context, organization, idea development, tone, and the (Runciman, Defining 33). To create such a place, Leahy urges us to foster a community of people who love and like to share their with each other (45). As a logical first step, Runciman suggests we abandon terms that carry remedial connotations (e.g. tutor a.nd tutoring and adopt terms that more accurately describe who we are and what we do. Although I agree that we need to encourage an enlightened, collaborative environment in centers, I believe we can achieve this goal (whether or not we rename ourselves and our work) through the intelligent and humane use of humor.