Community Writing Center Pilot Project
Geoffrey Bateman with Eliana Schonberg

Its Tuesday morning, 10:15 am to be exact, and Im sitting in the dining room of The Gathering Place (TGP), a day shelter for women and children who are experiencing homelessness or poverty. A few women linger over their coffee from breakfast; others are wiping down tables and sweeping the floor, doing their chores for the day as a way to give a little back to an organization that has obviously given them so much.

Ive been coming here about once a week since the middle of June, meeting with clients or staff members to help them with any number of writing tasks. Some days Ive been joined by Dani Rado, a second-year graduate student in DUs doctoral program in English. Weve met with a range of writers working on a number of different pieces letters to judges, resumes, an artist statement that will accompany a public mural, essays for a writing contest for young women who are struggling to make it. Some women just stop by, wanting to talk about their stories and tell me about the books they hope to write about their lives. With staff members, weve consulted on press releases, letters to major donors soliciting support, PowerPoint presentations, monthly program reports, and most recently a book project.

This work is part of a larger project developed with Eliana Schonberg, the director of DUs Writing Center, and John Tiedemann, a faculty member in DUs Writing Program. Eager to find ways to develop the Writing Center's and Writing Programs public presence and to build an engaged component to our work on campus, the three of us applied for and were awarded a Center for Community Engagement & Service Learning Public Good Grant.

During the summer of 2008, we used the Public Good Grant to pilot a community-based writing center. For six weeks, Tiedemann was joined by Chris Newton, one of our undergraduate Writing Center consultants, at the St. Francis Center (SFC), another Denver day shelter that services individuals, mostly men, experiencing homelessness. While Tiedemann and Newton were holding twice-weekly drop-in hours at the SFC, Rado and I worked primarily at TGP. Each team, along with Schonberg, averaged about two to three consultations a week, and our weekly presence laid the beginning of a foundation for community partnerships that has become the bedrock of our evolving work in the community. Over the summer, we also developed three workshops for staff members. At TGP, two of the workshops gave employees the chance to fine tune their email communication and develop their skills in using personal narratives in their writing. At SFC we held a similar workshop, helping staff writers with their skills in writing objective case notes.

At the end of the summer, the work had proved so satisfying for both us and our community partners that we decided to continue holding drop-in hours in the fall while applying for funding to continue the project. Since September, Tiedemann and Newton have continued to meet with clients and staff members for a few hours on Friday afternoons at SFC, while Rado, Schonberg, and I have done similar work on Tuesday mornings at TGP.

Weve learned a lot. As one can imagine, working at these sites can be both profoundly humbling and very rewarding. Both clients and staff bring an investment to their writing projects more pronounced than we see with many of our students, with the exception of some dissertation students. In addition to a greater investment, however, there is often also a greater sense of urgency.

The pressures these writers face are daunting. Listening to their stories and the experiences that precede and deeply inform their writing can be moving, sometimes disturbing. Attending to these stories also provides a complex and exciting application of our rhetorical skills, as well as a much-welcomed moment of validation for the writers. We give these clients moments of reflective clarity, and even if these moments fail to resolve their immediate material needs, its hard not to feel as if theyve made one small step in finding their voices as writers and ultimately, a bit more agency.

Like our writers on campus, these writers do not leave any particular consultation with quick fixes or immediate, sudden transformations. Writing doesnt work that way. Nor does finding a way out of poverty or homelessness, drug addiction or domestic violence. But our work in the past six months has reinforced our sense that attending to the writing needs of these people may work as one small piece of a much larger puzzle that will help them on this path.

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