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Morris, Janine, and Kelly Concannon, editors. Emotions and Affect in Writing Centers, Parlor Press, 2022. 344 pp.
Webster, Travis. Queerly Centered: LGBTQA Writing Center Directors Navigate the Workplace. Utah State UP, 2021. 158 pp.
Faison, Wonderful, and Frankie Condon, editors. CounterStories From the Writing Center. Utah State UP, 2022. 180 pp.
Writing is thinking made manifest; thinking is the mind made manifest; the mind is the brain made manifest; the brain is a body made manifest; a body is a life made manifest. Inextricable from the challenges and successes ofbodies are the challenges and successes of the ways that bodies tell stories-or, for the purposes of writing center professionals, write them. And bodies do write: our nervous systems, our vagal brake systems, our corporeal selves are as integral to our writing process as our cognition. Try as we may, we cannot outrun the ways physiology and sociology interact within us-and those interactions shape discourse, shape learning, shape how we write. As educators and students alike reel from the impact of the global pandemic, a writers relationship to their culture and to their body seems more connected to their academic work than ever, and several new publications in writing center studies spotlight the ways in which our bodies do, as Bessel Van Der Kolk might say, "keep the score."
Emotions and Affect in Writing Centers (Morris and Concannon), Queerly Centered (Webster), and CounterStories from the Writing Center (Faison and Condon) explore the connections between our lives and our writing-particularly as that work appears in writing center labor. Writing centers have long been attuned to the relationships among culture, histories, identities, and writing. Without directly examining the science that informs these relationships, writing centers have documented and focused on the outcomes of various combinations of experiences as they pertain to writing: for example, queerness (Denny; Rylander), first generation status (Bond), race (Rowan and Greenfield), gender (McNamee and Miley), institutional power (McKinney; Caswell; Jackson). The texts in this review contribute to this ongoing conversation within the field of writing center studies and take the conversation into modern and important dimensions. Each marks a deliberate evolution of thought in the work of considering embodiment in writing center work; each serves as a meaningful intervention into reconsidering who we are...