English Department
Writing Center

Aileen

Aileen was born and raised in Spokane, Washington, but now considers Seattle to be home (no offense, Mom and Dad). She enjoys drawing, painting, hanging out with friends, and spending time outdoors. She is also trying to wean herself off her shameful addictions to ice cream and Desperate Housewives, but without much luck. Aileen wanted to be an author and illustrator when she was a kid, and though she has since changed her mind (she is a graphic design major), she still really enjoys writing.

Christine

Christine is a senior English major and has attended the UW since Fall 2006. In the vast major of English she is particularly passionate about critical theory, queer studies, and modernist literature. Christine is drawn to tutoring at the writing center because she values critical conversations among writers and believes these conversations produce more confidant students. Outside of school Christine enjoys watching French films, listening to metal and doom music, and having proper British tea parties.

Erina

Erina is a senior International Studies major minoring in Japanese. She began her work at the EWC in Autumn 2005, then spent last year studying in Tokyo, where she worked at the Writing Center at Waseda University. Now back in Seattle, Erina is excited to return to her tutoring job. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling, knitting, baking, and learning new languages.

Ethan

Ethan would like to call himself, "The Pride of Everett, WA," where he was born and raised. Unfortunately, that distinction already belongs to singer Kenny Loggins. Though Ethan is yet to write a hit pop song as renowned as "Danger Zone," he enjoys songwriting in addition to the academic writing and news writing he does so frequently. When he's not tutoring in the EWC, freelancing for the Seattle P-I, or reading endlessly for his graduate English courses, Ethan can be found trying to write the next "Footloose."

Lauren

Lauren grew up in Bellingham, Washington, and while she is having fun in Seattle, her heart remains in the parks, foothills, and quirky restaurants of that beautiful town. Lauren generally enjoys any outdoor activity, but especially kayaking, sailing, hiking, and biking. Traveling for adventure and helping others is a huge goal in Lauren's life. Writing is important to her because it is a creative outlet that balances math and science. She plans to major in Nursing and English and spend her life in healthcare and teaching in order to help people in need.

Margaret

Margaret was born in Georgia, moved around a bit and ended up living in central Indiana until she reached the tender age of fifteen and a half. Promptly after receiving her driver's license, she began making frequent sojourns to Bloomington, IN and Chicago. She has lived in Seattle for six years, making a living off of women's insecurities involving grey hair and their desperate need to be blonde. After much apprehension about an uncertain future, she graduated from Seattle Central Community College and chose to major in Linguistics. Eventually her love of English literature prevailed, and guided by a paralyzing fear of morphology, she changed her major. She can frequently be seen (via her blonde ambition tour) strutting the hallways of Padelford, navigating a now well-worn path from the coffee pot in the CHID office down into the depths of the English department, though she might still want to minor in Linguistics. Provided she can overcome her fear of being a grown-up, she aspires to go to law school and, conscience permitting, will spend all of next spring and summer laboring over LSAT prep books, constantly reviewing Legally Blond for inspiration. She currently works to support herself, her two cats (Mr. Servo and Mr. Crow), and her aspiring "enginerd" boyfriend. She has no free time, but if she did, she'd be watching MST3K or LOTR (extended versions only plz), knitting, cooking delicious vegan food and riding her sweet (non-fixed-geared) Peugeot around Capitol Hill.

Matthew

Born and raised in Aberdeen, WA, Matthew is endlessly fascinated by language and communication. He loves world travel, mountain adventures, and generally experiencing the new and exotic. As a student at the UW, Matthew is majoring in both English and Asian Languages and Literature (with an emphasis in Sanskrit). Eventually, he hopes to conduct research in the field of Indological studies and possibly do some work in translation. Listening to too much music, wandering aimlessly, and conversing on everything from the films of Ingmar Bergman to the challenges involved in translating the Pali Canon are just a few of his most frequent pastimes.

Michelle

Michelle is from Union Lake, Michigan, a paradise with a post office where other people vacationed, although she went to school in Detroit. In kindergarten, she delighted in fairy tales, and years later her English teachers sighed as she put away Dostoyevski to pick up Tolkien and Asimov. In her love of all things magical, of course she wound up in India, watching monks practice Lama dance around monsoon puddles, and spending five months in solitary retreat. Now she's an Asian Studies and English major with a stack of over a hundred short stories and three novels. How many has she sent to publishers? Only one. She published her first science fiction story last June.

Nichole

After escaping California, Nichole chose to attend the University of Washington to study Comparative Literature. She enjoys school a little too much, and has this crazy ambition to one day obtain her PhD in English. She is a nerd for Modernism, enjoys dancing in her kitchen while cooking, and swears by Vivace coffee.

Sarah

Sarah was born while her parents were vacationing in Houston, Texas, and since then has suburb-hopped across the country from Texas to Michigan to Washington. She is a junior majoring in English and Economics, and hopes to one day research and work with families. She loves good Mexican food, colored markers, reading (most books and sadly all magazines), creepily people watching and listening to the same song on repeat for weeks at a time.

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Louisa Peck, Administrative Director

Louisa loves to talk about writing and motivate others to explore and improve their written self-expression. She's a Seattle native who spent 10 years living in upstate New York, NYC, and Boston before deciding her true home lay in the Pacific Northwest. With a BA in English from Vassar and MA from the UW Creative Writing program, she has taught writing and literature for 22 years at five universities and colleges in the Puget Sound area. Once a publishing writer of literary short fiction (ten stories, Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, and a Pushcart Prize nomination, UW Milliman), she now focuses the majority of her energies on climbing mountains (only Glacier Peak left on her Washington volcanoes to-do list) and raising her delightful seven-year-old son, though she plans decisively to return to writing as soon as he becomes too cool to hang out with her.

In Louisa's view, the English Department Writing Center's goal is to provide a relaxed yet intellectually stimulating environment where writers of varied disciplines and abilities can work with knowledgeable, qualified peers to tap into new sources of energy, ideas, and inspiration.