Rebecca Hallman Martini, University of Georgia
Dear TPR Readers,
As I prepared to write my final piece as a TPR editorial team member, I read the other letters and reflections written by the incoming team. I am excited by their smart, progressive guidance, and cannot help but feel especially inspired by the strong voices of the two graduate co-editors, Morgan Banville and Yanar Hashlamon. When I started this journal in 2014, I envisioned TPR as a place for new and emerging scholars, not only to publish their work, but also to learn more about the publishing process in writing center studies. As these voices became more prominent, TPR’s mission seemed to shift, to also become about social justice and about, as Yanar explains it, “dwelling in discomfort.” In this way, TPR is not simply a place for emerging scholars to learn; it is a place for them to speak and for the rest of us to listen.
When we listen, we can learn so much about how our field operates and how we need to change. It is my hope that TPR continues to be a place for these scholars in our field. I hope TPR continues to publish the messy and the risky, the research that calls out and demands accountability, and the writers who are not initially ready for publication but can be through mentorship and guidance. I hope TPR will be transparent about its publication process and give writers the benefit of the doubt as they are recognized as people learning how to make their way through the odd and often unsupportive experience of academic publishing. I hope TPR will be a space for the experimental rather than the safe, the new rather than the familiar.
I owe much gratitude to many people who believed in TPR from the beginning, especially Kevin Dvorak, the president of IWCA when the journal started, and to all of the attendees of the 2014 IWCA Summer Institute. What I originally pitched as a blog for graduate students became TPR. Thanks to Sherry Wynn Perdue for serving as the first professional co-editor and for her early support and guidance; to Kelsey Hixson-Bowles for teaching me a great deal about editorial organization and professionalism; to Ashley Cerku for being the first Managing Editor and for staying on board well beyond her original term (she is the kind of person I wish I had with me for every project I do, as her careful eye is what kept TPR afloat in the early days and on top things it later down the road); and to Travis DuBose for saving the journal’s platform almost single-handedly. Without him, TPR would not have been open-access and multimodal, and his cleverness and skill helped establish the journal as more accessible and inclusive venue. Thanks to my dear friend and collaborator, Travis Webster, whose work in developing and co-editing TPR’s first special issue with me, “Writing Centers as Brave/r Spaces,” helped me to realize all that TPR could become. Thank you to all of the authors who have trusted TPR with their work, the reviewers whose selfless work over the years and commitment to TPR’s vision has made the journal possible, and to IWCA for supporting the journal since its beginning.
Above all, thank you to TPR’s current editorial team: Nikki Caswell, Yanar Hashlamon, Morgan Banville, Randall Monty, and Karen Moroski-Rigney. I am so thrilled that you have all chosen to invest your time, energy, and creativity in TPR, and I cannot wait to see what comes next.
Thank you,
Becky