Spider Ghost Town

As we finished a semester of remote learning, I wanted to both commemorate the work of our Richmond Spiders and preserve the work done in my class to train undergraduate Writing Consultants. Thus this site for student essays about how the COVID-19 pandemic changed their lives. You'll find them in our menu to the left.

The students' final assignment morphed, from one about a partnership with students at Deep Run High School, an effort halted by the pandemic and the end of graded work for the high-school partners. I shifted our focus to the prospects for our Writing Center, as we spend a strangely busy summer to prepare for the coming academic year.

Our target audience remains writing-center professionals and peer-tutors, yet colleagues, administrators in higher education, and perhaps other students will find these essays, edited yet uncensored, revealing. They describe the hopes and trauma of what has probably been the most unsettling event in our scholastic lives. There's a lot of good advice there for writings centers, as well as a record of a semester badly interrupted and a world changed.

As I still have campus access, I've shot photos that bear mute witness to a surreal, emptied-out campus, our "Spider Ghost Town."