Victoria Fridley: Writing Center Director

It was right above “ Be the next LBCC Student Poet Laureate” sign and across from a list of the “most persuasive words.” Someone had scrawled it in blue on the white of the board.

“Art is always talking. A good artist just listens.”

If that is the case then Victoria Fridley, Writing Center director, is an amazing artist. For the last three and a half years she has been striving to find out what students need for writing success and making that available to them as soon as possible.


Fridley reigns over the Writing Center gracefully from the desk in the corner that has her name on it. The files are impeccable. The tea cup has a little plate over the top to keep out dust and sits on a table coaster. Even her pencils are organized. 


This is the person that made the Writing Center what it is. Her efficiency and her talent for making things run smoothly has turned her job into something so quietly organized no one seems to notice what's going on. She's always in control. Even on the days the Center overflows with students her voice is still quiet and she gives the same enthusiastic interest in your work as she would on an easy day. 

Danyelle Sullivan, a student who uses the Writing Center for help with her hybrid class, said if the Writing Center closed, “It would be horrible.”

One of Fridley's writing assistants, Gary Brittsan, said he knew what makes her happy, it's when "she's working with a student and the student has that moment of realization when everything clicks."

Watching Fridley with a student you see what her husband called passion. Michael Fridley said no matter what she’s doing she brings passion and compassion to it. He loves that about her.

He said that he’s “proud of her achievements and her humility with which she makes her achievements.”

The Writing Center as we have it now is one of her achievements.

Q: How have you changed the Writing Center in the time that you have been here?

Fridley: The person who was in this position before me, Greg Rather, was a part time English faculty and he was wonderful. He let me bring my own ideas. One of the immediate things was to change the look of it. When we started we kind of had these ugly partitions up and a couple ugly kinds of nonfunctional tables and I wanted to get some small round tables for our one to one work. I wanted to rearrange it constantly to make it more appealing. We changed the whiteboard to a place where students can share their poetry and quotations they love or to draw. I created the Writer’s Wall so faculty and staff and classified and students can share their writing with each other. We put chocolates on the tables. We keep trying to improve what we do. I’m very excited that next fall we’re adding another way that students can use our services. We’re going to allow students to make 30-minute appointments. That’s going to be really nice.

Q: What made you want this job?  

F: Many things actually. I really love writing. I love helping ease the anxiety and insecurity that a lot of people feel about writing. I love to teach but the thing I don’t like about teaching is grading. So I love working in the Writing Center because I can teach by explaining and by guiding students with their writing but I don’t have to evaluate it in terms of putting a grade on it; and that frees me to focus on composition. I also have a lot of students again and again and you really get to know what they’re working on, what their style is like and your approach and help for them is very personalized and I love that.

Q:Tell me some of your background in writing.

F: I got my MFA at Davis’s playwriting. I had the opportunity to have three of my plays produced when I was there as a student and learned just a lot. It’s certainly not a practical degree. It’s about as practical as poetry in terms of making any money from your work. It’s difficult to get any productions of your plays but it was wonderful. It was a very creative time. One of my plays had several productions and it’s being used in hospitals and some grief training groups across the country because it’s a play about two mothers whose children have leukemia, one who’s child is dying and one who is newly diagnosed. Doctors and social workers and nurses really wanted me to do something with it. I thought about it as a play. It was going to be produced at a theatre company with a playwrights group I belonged to. But they wanted it to be videotaped. I had not really thought about that until people asked me, but I did get it videotaped. And then Dr. Donna Wong, who wrote the leading book on pediatric nursing, wanted me to write a discussion guide on it and to promote it. Now it’s available for sale again. It’s been converted to DVD format.

Q: Do you have a best memory of your job?
F: The really incredible moments that I treasure have been with students. Like to have a student start out a session with me saying they're a horrible writer and they hate writing and then in the process of looking at their work we are able to identify some really beautiful strong things and all of a sudden there's this light that comes on, you know the "I can do this!"It is just the most rewarding job. 

 

Q: Tell me something about yourself most people wouldn’t really guess.

F: I wouldn’t say necessarily most people. Because I’ve always been in really people-intensive jobs and I really like people, when I tell someone that I’m shy or introverted they don’t really believe me. But I am: very shy and very introverted. I have come to realize that you can work very well with people and really enjoy people and still be introverted.


At-a-glance:
Who: Victoria Fridley
Family: Married 24 years to Michael Fridley, with a 20-year-old son named Daniel
Education: B.A. in English, Master's at U.C. Davis, MFA in playwriting
Favorite thing in the whole wide world: Books
Pet peeve: Her husband leaving things on the floor
Failings: A self-professed coffee snob