Won’t You Be (More Than) My Neighbor? Writing Center/Library Partnerships

When a writing center is located inside of a library, it can be easy to feel like a renter: an interloper in someone else’s space rather than a partner in building and inhabiting that space. And it can be a challenge to develop professional relationships that shift this feeling. Here at Marquette, we feel lucky. That “we” is both of us—Rebecca (the writing center director) and Heather (a research and instruction librarian). Our jobs are busy ones—intellectually demanding and constantly in motion—but over the years we have developed a relationship that allows us to rely on each other, share the load, make each other laugh, and be our best professional selves. People often speak colloquially of their “work spouses” and we’re happy to report that our “marriage” is three years strong.

The focus of our post is the ongoing and deeply rewarding collaboration that has emerged between the writing center and the library at Marquette University: it began as a somewhat impromptu bit of cooperation based on an idiosyncratic personal connection, but has grown into a collaboration that informs in very deep and often ambitious ways our ideas about how both of our programs can continue to grow within our university community. We recognize, of course, that there’s a fair amount of scholarship on the relationships between writing centers and libraries—both published (O’Kelly, Garrison, Meyer, & Torreano; Elmborg and Hook) and unpublished (we’ve attended panels at the International Writing Centers Association, Conference on College Composition and Communication, Association of Research Libraries, and LOEX); the common motive in these publications and presentations is to share the structures of and conditions for successful collaborations. We’re hardly the first to experience such a positive collaboration and while we won’t make the claim that what we’ve experienced is unique, we aim to share in this post the circumstances that have fostered our collaboration, the forms this collaboration has taken, and the ways in which this collaboration influences how we think about the future of both our programs.