Upper Peninsula Writing Center

01/29/2024

My Facebook Memories alerted me to the fact that we opened the Upper Peninsula five years ago today! This is a selfie I took and Prismaed while sitting in the brick and mortar Upper Peninsula Writing Center. With an invitation for collaboration with the we opened our doors on a stormy January day and had the honor of working with a wide diversity of community members in person and online.

We went completely online during the COVID-19 lockdowns and then our building was sold to be turned into yet another hotel in our tourist money hungry town, so we stayed online.

I became the sole consultant during this time and as a chronically ill person who experiences a lot of fatigue, including neuro fatigue, and as someone for whom staying as healthy as possible has become a full time job, continuing on alone became difficult and I realized I could not do justice to this enterprise.

There has been no social media presence promoting the UPWC because of this, and because I was making attempts to pass on what I and my cofounders had built.

Those attempts have fallen through, so I am here to shutter the UPWC. To those of you who supported its inception and continuation, thank you for all you did. To those of you who patronized it and would have continued to, my apologies. Whether as an instructor, professor, writing center director, tutor, or consultant, I have always felt privileged to play a small part in helping people find the power in their words, the words for their purpose, helping facilitate communication and understanding in any way I could. If I was still well enough to do this mission justice on my own, the UPWC would continue.

If you are working in community literacy and you’re interested in the books we kept in our writing center, please message me. I have a nice collection of scholarly and reference works. If you donated any books and would like them back, let me know and I’ll make sure they get back to you. I’ll give first dibs on the rest to former students and colleagues.

Thanks again for everything, everyone. This was a positive and valuable experience for me. I hope it was for some of you, too.

07/04/2020

03/15/2020

Just a reminder as we all practice responsible behavior to avoid giving this guy a home or a ride: the staff is trained, ready, and waiting to work with writers of all ages and writing of all stages.

Whether you’re passing your time at home with a writing project of personal significance or you or your children are wrangling writing intensive school assignments at home, we’re here to help! Email us any time at [email protected].

03/05/2020

Let’s give Chekhov what he’s asking for and take our minds off this snowstorm, Upper Peninsula.

Did you know that when someone reads words describing an activity or scene, the parts of their brain that would engage with that activity or scene in real life are engaged? If we write with enough description, our readers can live through our writing. There’s a link to some of the research that discovered this in our bio if you’re reading this on Instagram, in the comments if you’re reading it on Facebook.

Don’t tell us spring is coming; show us the spring scene you’ve been dreaming of in the comments.

Focus on sensory detail—what you want to see, hear, taste, touch, and smell—and describe it in enough detail that your readers are transported there. Your description does not need to be long to be impactful, just descriptive!

02/17/2020

Advice for dealing with compliments of and the .

02/13/2020

The invites you to write a description of another everyday event and make it metal. 🤘⚡️ Rock our socks off in the comments!

02/01/2020

Happy from the !

01/29/2020

Have you ever consulted a chart like the one in the first slide here? We live in a time rich with media, and that’s ultimately a very good thing, but sorting through sources and knowing what to trust can be confusing and time consuming.

If you struggle with this in general, you are not alone. Many of us were done with our formal schooling before this issue existed, and we never learned the skills crucial to assessing multiple media sources and leaving the process with a fairly objective understanding of the truth. For just as many of us, this was touched on in our education, but inadequately for the times we now live in.

The can help with this! Writing and reading the writing of others are parts of the same endeavor: understanding each other and the world we share. We all breathe in, and we all breathe out. None of us want to breathe polluted air, and none of us want to fill our minds with inaccurate or incomplete information. We do a real disservice to ourselves and those around us when we do, as we’ll inevitably breathe that toxicity back out when we subsequently act based on misinformation.

Email us at [email protected] with questions about finding credible information on any topic, about assessing one source of information like a news site, fact checking site, specific topic, article, etc., or with any other questions you may have in your quest to inform yourself well. We can teach you how to find credible sources, and we can teach you how to find the credible information in less reliable sources.

01/17/2020

Congratulations to Mary Antonia and the Comunitaria Language School, our host organization!

MARQUETTE — Connect Marquette recently awarded two local women with the 2019 Tom Baldini Scholarship. The scholarship recognizes individuals who demonstrate an interest in the...

01/08/2020

It’s been awhile since we hosted an thread, so let’s remedy that! What would you like to know about the and its services? Ask us anything.

12/04/2019

Big news from the !

We’ve been open for 10 months now—can you believe it? We’ve loved serving some of the Upper Peninsula’s writing-related needs in that time, and that time has also taught us a lot about how to best serve the Upper Peninsula.

One thing we’ve learned is that regular drop-in hours in the location we’re lucky enough to share with the don’t always serve you so well.

So effective immediately, we’re operating primarily online. Please email any and all questions about any and all kinds of writing to [email protected] , no matter where you are. Chances are, we’ll be able to help you online.

If it becomes clear a face-to-face meeting would be helpful, we’ll be happy to schedule some sit down time with you, too.

And don’t forget our Marquette location still houses our writing library! Email us if you’re looking for a reference book or something else writing-related.

Any questions? Leave them in the comments and we’ll answer them asap.

11/26/2019

If you’re planning to take advantage of our 4-5pm drop-in hour today, hurry! The help is already well on its way to eating all the complimentary snacks.