Exploring the Rutgers Writing Centers: Meet Professor Lallas, Douglass Writing Center Director

Curious about Rutgers Writing Center Directors? Here is an interview with Professor Demetri Lallas, Director of the Douglass Writing Center. Read below to learn about his journey towards becoming a director and how to best prepare for a career in English, as well as opportunities at the Writing Center to explore!

JA: What led you to become a writing center director?

DL: After earning my doctorate in 2009 my very first position was at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn Educational Opportunity Center, managing and training the tutoring staff. Before coming to Rutgers, I was a tutor in the international ESL program at St. Joseph’s College, also in Brooklyn.

JA: Why did you decide to choose English as a career?

DL: I’ve been preoccupied by stories for as long as I can remember. Books I still cherish helped me escape from the challenges of childhood and adolescence. Despite pre-exam jitters, I have always felt a certain luck, or intuition, in the verbal sections of standardized tests, leading to some surprising aptitude scores. All of this was wind in my sails in majoring in English and then pursuing a doctorate in literary studies.

JA: What do you love the most about being a director at the Writing Center?

DL: The same factor as at Rutgers in general – the people! Specifically in our Writing Centers, it is a privilege to work with students as intelligent and mature as those we select and train to become tutors. The students they in turn tutor, who are there after all on a voluntary basis, stand out as conscientious and engaged in learning. My Writing Center colleagues are all highest-caliber people, and it’s a pleasure collaborating with them all in such a necessary, sensitive service.

JA: What are some of your favorite books or literature pieces?

DL: Anything by Homer and Tolkien, Thomas Pynchon and George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Virginia Woolf – anyone whose stories and language I can lose myself in and laugh along to, gleaning higher wisdom.

JA: How can someone prepare for a career in English or writing?

DL: Read! Read voraciously in as wide a range of modes as feasible. Write! On your laptop, on your smart pad, on your phone, stories, essays, poems, posts, and enjoy it coming increasingly as fast as speaking itself. The earlier you insert yourself into growth situations with others who take writing “seriously” – our Targum, our undergraduate literary and writing groups, tutoring (!), readings by our professors and grad students and visiting scholars alike, all manner of opportunities in New Bruns, New Jersey, and don’t forget, New York City, capital of US letters, publishing central, just a train ride away – the better.

JA: What advice would you give to students who find their writing courses challenging?

DL: Writing is by nature “challenging” just as exercise is “tiring.” The production of written language involves simultaneous self-editing, which remains a peculiar dialectic even to this not young instructor. But I promise that the more one writes, just like the more one exercises, a stamina builds that not only makes writing feel “easier” but also, like fitness, brings its own satisfaction.

JA: What methods or strategies have you found most effective to students?

DL: I am candid about my own writerly insecurities and predilections which, ideally, enables students to take some comfort in how natural, how widespread – how not unique – their writerly insecurities are. I realize I am starting to sound like an aerobics instructor but getting students comfortable with improvement as our focus is something I always appreciated as an undergraduate, which I endeavor to replicate now that it’s my turn to teach. With that established as the overall vibe of the class, I find that even on the rare occasion when an assignment does call for ‘harsh’ grading, it’s received in a – if not happy – understanding fashion.

JA: How would you describe your teaching style?

DL: The first class I ever taught was weeks after my father’s surprise death. Those were heady days for me. I still didn’t know if I really wanted to teach in the first place. But I had a roomful of 18-year olds, living away from home most of them for the first time in their lives, who needed a teacher, not a mourner. Around Halloween I noticed I had started telling jokes again. That first holiday season I was shocked to read student evaluations that weren’t reporting pedagogical malpractice but appreciation. My teaching style, such as it is, remains conditioned by that fraught but ultimately surprisingly successful semester.

JA: How would you encourage students to take advantage of opportunities at the Rutgers Writing Center?

DL: We currently recruit tutors to be ambassadors to our Writing Program courses. You are all eligible to sign up! All it takes is contacting professors from lists we provide that hold classes when you’re free, and then, upon invitation, extoling our Writing Center virtues for about five to ten minutes. It’s an excellent way to strengthen your public speaking chops, too.

JA: What improvements or changes do you expect will come in the Rutgers Writing Centers?

DL: I foresee in the very near future more active integration of generative AI in our practices. This would likely parallel the continuing ramp-up of our digital media knowhow currently helping College Writing students prepare for Project 4. I expect that embedded tutoring will grow. Insofar as we deliberately redesigned English 101 to be a more direct gateway to writing across the University, I imagine the Writing Centers will grow increasingly open to coursework outside of the post-Expos Writing Program. We might also branch out our online services, from scheduling more remote sessions, to offering asynchronous review of student work with, say, a 24-hour turnaround deadline.