Alumni become leaders of their own college writing centers
by Jefferson Beavers
When past and present tutors from the Fresno State Writing Center gathered this past spring to celebrate the center’s 35th anniversary, alumna Tabitha Villalba felt right at home.
“It’s good to be surrounded by fellow writers,” she says.
Villalba is one of at least 10 tutor alumni from Fresno State who have gone on to run their own centers. Villalba serves as coordinator of the Writing and Reading Center at Fresno City College. Others have created or run centers at universities, community colleges and high schools throughout the West — as far away as the University of Colorado at Denver and as close as McLane High School.
Villalba says the best centers focus on the writers, not the writing. The Fresno State Writing Center, under the College of Arts and Humanities, serves all Fresno State students with any writing they’re working on, through small-group, walk-in or online tutoring.
Villalba’s center at Fresno City College sees writers from every demographic, not just different ages and ethnicities, but “students on parole, students that have been to prison, students who haven’t eaten in a couple days.” Their life needs, Villalba says, make her tutors’ jobs even more important — empowering writers to communicate.
“When I first started, the tutors had pens in their hands, which is something I discourage,” says Villalba, who tutored at Fresno State for two years while earning her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. “I said, ‘Don’t do that.’ This is a writing center, and the writer controls the paper. The writer should have the pen in their hand.”
Another alumnus, Josh Geist, now directs the Writing Center at College of the Sequoias in Visalia. Geist says many students have grammar-oriented experiences with writing. They put their hearts into a paper, and it comes back covered in red ink, as editing trumps ideas.
“We don’t work on papers, we work on writers,” says Geist, who tutored at the Fresno State Writing Center for seven years. “We certainly want the paper to get better, but it’s much more important that the writer is learning something about how to write more effectively and how to make good decisions.”
Geist, who holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing, says his center operates on the idea that all writers face the same challenges, no matter their level.
“You’re still going to have that moment when you’re going to sit down and stare at the blank page and have no idea,” he says.
Both Geist and Villalba credit the current director of the Fresno State Writing Center, Dr. Magda Gilewicz, for their professional success. Gilewicz has coordinated the center since 1993.
Villalba says, “Magda taught from the inside out rather than the outside in. I think that she prepared us to make good decisions and to think about the ways we would train others.”
—Jefferson Beavers is a communication specialist for the MFA program in creative writing at Fresno State.
