Writing unites Logan community
“Literacy is power,” said English teaching senior Hilary Webb, and literacy is the power she is cultivating through the Logan Community Writing Center.
The Logan Community Writing Center is a service provided by trained writing tutors every Wednesday from 5-7 p.m. in the Logan Library Juniper Room.
“To help someone become a student through writing and to help them convince someone that they deserve to be here is really rewarding,” Webb said.
The center is open to all community members, Webb said, including Utah State University students, novelists, poets, scholarship essay applicants and more.
“While I was at the center, we got to help a mom with a scholarship essay for going back to school,” Webb said. “That’s something that I feel is really rewarding and something I wouldn’t be able to do on campus.”
Angela Turnbow, an adjunct professor of English 2010 and volunteer writing tutor, said that a community writing center would bridge the gap between USU students with the Logan community.
“We have students that come to Logan for school, but you want to try and make it so they can give to the community,” Turnbow said. “It’s not just giving to the school itself, but to the community by having this writing center at the Logan Library, which is part of the community. I think it really helps weave the two entities together.”
USU Writing Center Director Star Coulbrooke also said she saw another way that the center could unite the community.
“Just to be able to help people come up in their literacy so they can be welcomed more readily into the community,” Coulbrooke said. “Language is such a barrier when you’re working on a driver’s license test, for example, or working on applying for a job. So we want the community writing center to be for the community. Students, yes, because they are part of the community, but we would also like to help people from all walks of life just to be able to express themselves the best they can.”
Experiences like these were what Webb said she hoped she could leave as her legacy.
The idea of a community writing center first came to Webb when she was a sophomore at a tutoring conference in Salt Lake City, she said. At the conference, Webb said she noticed the Salt Lake community writing center and began the long process of organizing one center for Logan. After years of research and driving to Salt Lake to spend time studying their center, Webb said she “finally had to jump in and just start.”
Coulbrooke agreed.
“We thought, ‘This is such a great opportunity for students to do things like, oh, scholarship applications or cover letters or any kind of memoir writing or poetry writing,” she said. “Any kind of writing that they want to do over and above one of their classes, the community writing center would be a great place for them to go. It just gives them an extra option.”
After obtaining the Logan Library as a venue, Webb said the transition was smooth. This was due to taking trained volunteers from USU’s writing center and flowing them into the community center.
Coulbrooke said rounding up volunteers to send to the center was a way of extending writing services to students, especially because the center at USU is “stuffed to the gills,” Coulbrooke said.
“I know that there are a lot students that work on things besides academic writing,” Coulbrooke said. “They work on blogs, for instance, and sometimes the blogs are not as polished as they should be. And just because this is a blog, it doesn’t mean that it can be so casual that it’s error-filled, not as appealing as it should be. So we can definitely help with something like that. That would be really fun — blogs and even Facebook posts.”
Coulbrooke said those who seek the center’s services can bring their electronic devices and work to work on.
“At Helicon West, people read their work right off their tablets or smartphones,” Coulbrooke said. “If they were to bring it to the Writing Center first and get some polish on it, imagine what kind of response they would get from the audience. The audience, when you read your work, tell if your work is any good or not. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you got the most applause of anyone that presented?”
Webb said a certain level of writing skills, or the lack thereof, is not a requisite when it comes to visiting the center.
“You don’t have to be struggling at all to use the Writing Center,” Webb said. “Professional, published writers talk to other people about their writing, so that’s what we’re here for. We don’t want people to be lonely while they are writing.”
— katherine.l.larsen@gmail.com