(Bruce Beasley, Kat Finch, Lily Hoang, A.J Verdelle, Rachel Yoder) The teaching of specific revision skills often gets scant time in workshops, overshadowed by the process of critiquing first drafts. Authors of poetry, fiction, plays, nonfiction, and craft books, ranging from an MFA student to an editor of a journal devoted wholly to revision, discuss strategies for teaching revision techniques effectively in workshop. Handouts include unsuccessful first drafts of famous literary works and the revisions that got them from alpha to omega.

Published Date: August 26, 2015

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:03):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Bruce Beasley, Kat Finch, Lily Huang, AJ Verdell, and Rachel Yoder. You will now hear Bruce Beasley provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:34):

Good afternoon everybody. I'm Bruce Beasley, and this is second site teaching revision skills in the workshop. I'm going to speak first and then I'll introduce the panelists one by one as they come up. When I was an undergraduate creative writing student and later in an M F A program at Columbia University, I didn't tell anybody this, but I didn't know what it meant to revise poem, and I was ashamed to admit it, so I pretended like I knew what people were talking about. When they said revise, they always said revise, but they never quite said how to revise. And to me, it was far from obvious how to go from the welter of contradictory, complicated, argumentative praise and blame and suggestions and advice and editing. You got in a workshop to do something with the poem beyond that, to move it beyond. How do you move from that massive reaction and criticism and praise.

Speaker 2 (01:38):

Cut this, add this, clarify this. Open here, open there. Into here in there to a new draft of that by now mangled poem that you had hoped was already finished. And then one week in my M F A program at Columbia, Louise Glick came in and did a very short mini workshop where she focused on revision. And what she did is she brought all the drafts of one of her small poems in her book Descending Figure, which had just been published, and she walked us through every change she made in every draft, how she did it and why she did it. And I felt like a pinball lighting up. It's like, oh, that's what they've been talking about all this time. This is what you do. Since then, I have become an obsessive collector of very bad drafts, of very famous poems, and I've studied them at great length.

Speaker 2 (02:37):

I find it tremendously cheering and encouraging to read Yates's early drafts that survive only because his wife ignored his instructions to destroy them and pulled them out of the trash can. Because Yates's early drafts are often as bad as a poem can be. They are awkward, they're cliche ridden, they're hilariously sentimental and melodramatic. They're all the things that we're all ashamed of being, and yet we all are in our early drafts. And for years now, I've been using early drafts of famous poems, particularly bad ones, and the intermediate drafts to show people in class what the process of revising looks like. And what I find happens is two things. Looking at the early drafts makes the point that for most poets, the first draft is the beginning of a long sustained process of re-imagining, continuing to write the poem, coming to know the poem that was trained to be written in the first place rather than a solitary thing that is held up to permanent praise or blame in a workshop discussion.

Speaker 2 (03:50):

And the second thing it does is it assuages the dread that most of us have. I think that if the first draft is a mess, then the poem is already dead. So I like to use multiple drafts in class as a way to demonstrate the process of a poems coming into form. Elizabeth bishop's famous villain, L one art certainly did not start out as a villain el. It started out as a very prosaic ramble. And you have on the first page of the handout, I'm sending around the original draft of this poem and I'll read a little bit of it so you can see what I'm talking about. If you haven't seen it before, how to lose things one night begin by losing one's reading glasses, oh, two or three times a day or one's favorite pen. The thing to do is to begin by mislaying.

Speaker 2 (04:47):

Mostly one begins by mislaying keys, reading glasses, fountain pens, those are almost too easy to be mentioned, and mislaying means that they usually turn up in the most obvious place, although when one is making progress, the places grow more unlikely. This is by way of introduction. I really want to introduce myself. I am so fantastically good at losing things. I think everyone should profit from my experiences and the poem goes on. You might think this would've prepared me for losing one average sized but not exceptionally beautiful or dazzlingly intelligent person except for the blue eyes. Only The eyes were exceptionally beautiful. The hands looked intelligent. I've always found that line hilarious. The hands looked intelligent like what intelligent looking hands you have, but it doesn't seem to at all, not a piece of one continent or another continent, the whole damn thing he who lueth his life, et cetera. But he who loses his love, never, no, never, never, never again.

Speaker 2 (06:04):

I often show that poem in class to show how Bishop had no idea that the poem was going to be a villain El. She had no idea that she was going to use the recursive form of the vielle, which is itself a form of losing and finding the two refrain lines, or that she was going to amp up the form even more by almost losing the second refrain line altogether except for its last word, so that the poem would enact the very losses and disappearances and failed recoveries that it concerns. And it's not until many, many drafts in that she begins to find the form of the vielle and get rid of some of the poems. Clumsiness, talkativeness, exceptionally obscure illusions. Yates is Lata in the swan. One of the most famous sonnets ever written originally began with a pontificating abstract academic line. Now, can the swooping Godhead have his will?

Speaker 2 (07:07):

Before Yates figured out that he'd better begin the sonnet immediately as unpredictably, as fragmented as the attack on Lada by the God in the form of a swan was a sudden blow. The great wings beating still where in the new sentence fragment and double stress syllables and beating still and the multiple meanings of the words blow and still and beating the poem begins with an act of linguistic violence that mirrors the act of bodily violence that the poem concerns. I like to use the term swooping Godhead from that original opening. Now, can the swooping godhead have his will as a term for pretentious, awkward, overly abstract writing in a poem? And I'll often write in students in the margins of student poems. Is this a swooping godhead? And it always makes me happy when I hear students talking to each other about their work and they say, I think that might be a swooping Godhead.

Speaker 2 (08:21):

In the last drafts that later become sailing to Byzantium, we can see Yates trying on such howler lines as I live on love and now the day has come. I will speak on of those loves that I had in play that my soul loved, that I loved in my first youth. And for many loves have I taken off my clothes and laid on my bed that they might see and laid on my bed that I might be naked? They longed to see which lines when you look at 'em on the page are absolutely hilarious. And I often use that poem as a case study in diction music, clarity, image, metaphor, and concision. The first draft of Sylvia PLA poem Elm, which is on the third page of the handout, is one of the weakest first drafts I have ever encountered. It's reproduced by Ted Hughes in a note to Ariel, and it's in the bottom right corner of the page, Elm plus brilliant poem in which the speaker is the elm tree itself, but the speaker dramatically interacts with the psyche of the poet, becomes one with the psyche and the poet subject and object disintegrating opens, I know the bottom.

Speaker 2 (09:56):

She says, I know it with my great taproot. It is what you fear. I do not fear it. I have been there. Plus original draft is one of the laziest pieces of writing you can imagine. She's not easy. She's not peaceful. She pulses like a heart on my hill. The moon snags in her intricate nervous system. I am excited seeing it there. It is like something she is caught for me. The night is a blue pool. She is very still at the center. She is still very still with wisdom. The moon is let go like a dead thing. Now she herself is darkening into a dark world I cannot see at all. I've sometimes given that poem to classes without telling them who wrote it and had a sample workshop discussion. And it's fascinating to see people scramble for language to encourage this poem. And what it does is it gives people after the discussion, I tell them, this is the first draft of Sylvia PLAs Elm, one of the crucial poems in Ariel.

Speaker 2 (11:14):

And what it does is it gives the students a liberating sense that even very unpromising beginnings, if you stick with them, work with the vocabulary, the rhythm, the music, the image, the idea completely change, the form of the speaker can go on to brilliance. I've given you on the handout some resources on the first page for where I've found some of the most fascinating revision processes. Elizabeth Bishop's, drafts of one art are collected in Ed Garland poem in the Jukebox. Robert Lowell collected poems in Frank Edition has an enormous set of end notes that contain drafts and revisions of dozens of Lowell poems. Yates's poems are collected in three different collection in facsimile and a wonderful essay called the Craft of Diction Revision in Shamus Heney poems contains multiple drafts of a Shamus Heney poem, funeral rights, which often walk students through draft by draft to see the process of the poem coming into being. I'm going to now introduce our second speaker, AJ Verdell. AJ is a prize-winning American novelist published by Algonquin and Harper. She has essays published in Crown Smith, sodium Whitney Museum, random House, university of Georgia Press. She has forthcoming novels from Random House and teaches in the M F A program at Leslie University. Please welcome AJ Verdell.

Speaker 3 (13:02):

Good morning or afternoon, whichever one of those. It is still, I'm just setting this timer so that I can feel good when I'm done that I've compressed what I have to say. If you are able without sort of knocking anybody with water or knocking your computer over, if you just raise your hands like this for a minute, just raise them way up. Very good. And now lean this way a tiny bit. Very cool. And lean this way a tiny bit. Okay, done. So I don't know if you felt that on the sides when you raise them up, there's a certain number of muscles involved, but then when you turn, you can feel those muscles a little better and you turn and it invokes another set of muscles. And I want you to do that because writing and revision are physical issues. Revision I think more than writing.

Speaker 3 (14:00):

If you look at that word revision, it really is what it looks like. It means you have to look at this thing again and even though you're making the same move symmetrically, so you're doing one thing again, it requires a different set of muscles. And I teach students across the gamut. I have students who come to me in creative writing as undergraduates. They're like 18, 19 years old. And then I have graduate students and some of my graduate students are coming to writing as a second career. And I find it very helpful to understand that as many sort of movements and muscles that it takes to do these various singular ideas with your body, it also takes a lot of effort, a lot of different focuses to accomplish a singular idea with your writing. When I was a graduate student, I don't know if any of you have heard of Yvonne Rayner, but Yvonne Rayner was a dancer and then she became a filmmaker and she came to our graduate school and she did this dance move.

Speaker 3 (15:12):

It was very precise and after she did it, she said, this is what I have to do. It's not this, it's not this, it's not. And she did all these other sort of lazy permutations of it. The thing about it is the whole point of revision is to pursue exactness, which is different than drafting. Drafting is the place where you actually want to be most free, in my humble opinion. Drafting sort of when you are first attempting to express your idea, this is such an August room and I'm trying to make sure that I'm talking to some of you who are way up there. I'm inspired by the thought of people who talk in this room and it's full anyway.

Speaker 3 (16:03):

In your draft, you come to your work, your poem, your story, your novel, your novella, your play, your screenplay with an idea. And the best thing to do as you draft is to just try to go at that idea as best you can. And I find that the confidence knowing how to revise gives me is that it enables me to be completely free in the draft. Because no matter what you've put in the draft, you can constrain it, you can refine it, you can re-see it, you can redo it, you can make it smaller, you can make it taller, you can do it this way or that way in the revision. So for me, revision is the skillset that enables me to really dream my drafts. That is to write a draft that is as crazy, funky, out of bounds, inbounds, tiny, huge whatever it is.

Speaker 3 (17:13):

Often what that translates into for me is that I write my first drafts without punctuation. I'll just admit it. And the reason that I have been able to do that is one, because it's worked so well for me multiple times, but two punctuation is so small that I know that I can go back and punctuate. That's like not going to oppress me. It's not going to confuse me and without punctuation, I have to make decisions about where my sentences are going to start. And many times they start in places where I hadn't intended. When I write with punctuation, I end up with way more thes T than I would even imagine that I would think of as a writer because I want my language to be sexy and the is a decidedly not sexy word, but I eliminate a lot of those when I go back to punctuate my drafts because I see them differently.

Speaker 3 (18:10):

They're not just all plunk there sitting at the beginning of a word, beginning of a sentence sort of automatically. Okay, I gave out the blue handouts. Some of you have a blue handout that has this big circle on it in my handwriting, which isn't all that cute. It's okay if you don't have it, maybe somebody near you would have it. But anyway, in the middle of this handout it says hot center and that hot center is the part of the draft that I'm talking about that drove you to do this story. Nobody writes without having a hot center. What are you writing about? You're writing about losing your mother or you're writing about finding your mother, or maybe you're writing about finding your father or maybe you're writing about having your kid or maybe you're writing about people who are made up who were determined to fly to ceilings like this.

Speaker 3 (19:00):

Whatever it is you're writing about, that's the hot center of your work. And once you finish a draft, and for me, I do not advise revision until you have a draft. That's sort of the baseline of everything I'm saying to you. Why? Because until you have a full draft, it's sort of like you don't know where you're going. You haven't been to the destination. So before you change the directions of how you're going to get where you're going, it'd be great if you at least knew where it was. You've seen that church one time before you go there to get married. So then you can take a shortcut to get by traffic or something and not miss your wedding. So you have this hot center, it drove you to write the story. Once you have a full draft, then what I recommend is the first thing you revisit is why did I write this story and actually answer for yourself, why did I write this poem?

Speaker 3 (19:57):

What was I trying to write about? One of the things workshop often teaches us, I don't know if any of you have this experience, it's kind of like this. You don't want to go this way and in workshop everybody's saying you went that way. Well, you have to answer also, did I write the story or did I write the poem that I intended to write? Sometimes especially if you're a novelist like me, by the time you get to the end of your draft, you get to the end of your story. The story that you started out to write is not the story that you wrote. So then you have a question to answer. As I revise, do I want to make my story the story that I intended to write or do I want to make the story that I wrote better? Different approach depending on what your answer is. James Baldwin, who's one of my hands down all around favorites, I cut my teeth on James Baldwin, I would read James Baldwin, then I'd read Tony Morrison, then I'd go back to Baldwin, then I'd go to Morrison and James Baldwin said, you don't get the book you wanted. You get the book you get.

Speaker 3 (21:03):

So that answer is you make the story you wrote better. The reason that answer is valid for me is because it takes me six, seven years to write a novel and I'm a different person at the end of that seven years than I was when I started. So if I try to make the book, I got the book I wanted. I'm sort of pushing myself into the YA world because of how much younger I was when I started working on that story. Anyway, once you decide what story am I revising, is it the story that I wanted about never growing up or is it the story that I got about learning how to rise in front of people into beautiful ceilings like this and staying there until they broke their necks looking at me, right? You decide which one you want and then all of your revision decisions will be based on making that story better.

Speaker 3 (21:57):

There's some sort of basic strategies. Number one, when in doubt take it out. If you're looking at something in your work and you can't figure out whether it's good or not, stop deciding. Just take it out. It'll show up in some other way. And you have to revise with confidence. Just know that you're going to make the best decisions because the truth of the matter is, and this is the other piece of this hot center thing, the truth of the matter is that no matter what you select to make revisions with which elements of narrative, they're all going to lead you back to the same place. If you've decided what story you're going to revise for, and that's why you can confidently apply that rule. When in doubt, take it out. Another thing you always want to look at, especially if you're writing prose, is your verbs.

Speaker 3 (22:46):

If you consider or accept that stories are told by actions that characters take, then one of the things you have to humbly acknowledge, you almost have to genu flex before, is that no action takes place except by way of a verb. So if your verbs are weak, your story's going to be weak because your actions are going to be weak. So most of the students that I've had who've published books and I've had a number and I have a number of students who publish stories, they'll all come back to me and tell me some story about how they circled every verb in their manuscript, which is what I make them do in my class. Circle all your verbs, and a lot of times they'll read them. After I circle them, I'll give them 15 minutes, circle all your verbs. I have them read them out loud and they say is was have had jumped, is, was is was dance had have.

Speaker 3 (23:43):

And it's like, okay, if your verbs are good, they'll give you a sense of the story as you read them aloud. But not only that, if your verbs are like the verbs that I just rattled off, oftentimes your verbs are lurking in a noun or an a verb. You have some of you a sign that says elements of fiction. It's on the back of the hot center. This is a list of elements that you can use to revise. There are 27 there. I don't recommend that you use 27. I recommend that you use three or four because they're all going to take you back to the same place. So you just pick not the three or four that you like the best, but the three or four that are there that you never thought of. Because if you never thought of them, then you're probably not using them to their best effect.

Speaker 3 (24:39):

So that's what the elements of fiction are. Where's the other blue? Oh, here it is. Okay, so some of you have something that says tools writers use. This is another series of approaches that you can take to revision. Again, you want to focus on the things you've never thought of. And then on the back of tools, writers uses this great diagram that I really love. It came out of a book called The Short Story, which was published in 1960. But anyway, it just has this continuum of emotion. At the top is ecstasy, at the bottom is despair. And the guy writes that we start writing somewhere between assurance and animation. We go up to ecstasy and then we drop way down to between doubt, dejection and despair. And the reason that he puts this diagram together is because a lot of work is finished in the space between dejection and despair, okay?

Speaker 2 (25:45):

We wanted this panel to include people teaching revision and workshops, but also people learning revision and workshop and practicing revision and workshop. Our next speaker, Katt Finch, is a poet tree, m f a student at the University of Michigan, Helen Zell Writers Program and works as a poetry editor for Mixed Fruit Magazine. She's a member of the 3, 4 5 writing community. And Katt is going to talk about what she's learned in workshops that help her understand how to revise her own poems and maybe what you need to know in workshops that will help you revise your own poems. Kat Finch.

Speaker 4 (26:29):

Hi. Okay, so what I would find myself saying is I hate revision. And I would say that over and over it became a mantra. I hate revision, I hate it. And I realized that a lot of people thought the same thing or that we thought we thought that. And I found was because I don't actually understand how I revise or understand what it means to revise a poem. So I'd like to see the poems come back into the workshop because I feel like that's what I've been missing in my workshop experience because there's some really great tools you can use if you see that work at gig because a lot of my experience, at least in my M F A workshop is that we generate a lot of work. We're trying to create a book, we're trying to create this big massive microcosm of work, but we don't get into the little nitty gritty parts.

Speaker 4 (27:15):

And that's something I would want to talk about. So some of my strategies in the M F A during workshop is to write down everything everyone is saying, whether I agree with it or I disagree with it, or I hate that person right now at the moment I write it down and sometimes I'll take it with their name, but I always write it down even if I know that it's in their notes to me because I don't want to be defensive and I don't want to be like, oh, well that's not what I meant. You're just not reading it right? Maybe there's something there that I wasn't thinking about or a better phrase or a turn that I can't get to on my own. And so when I'm in the workshop, that's my plan of action. And from that, I go to disassemble it later and I usually take about a week or two so I can forget everything that people said.

Speaker 4 (27:59):

And if I still agree, if I still think that they're right or they're wrong, then I can go back and arrange that. And I feel like a lot of people, what the problem is, is the workshop is you have someone saying, this is the best thing. I love this. This is really nice. And then someone else is going, this just isn't working. I think this is really cliche. So what do you do? Then you're kind of alone, and this is how to me, workshop is or revision is presented in an M f A, you go alone and you do this thing and no one really talks about it. It's a dirty secret. So I want to see the poem again. So we go and we do that, and no one ever gets to see that work again until maybe you have a thesis workshop or you have a reading or it gets published in a magazine or you win an award for it and someone's like, oh, I really like that thing that you changed or I think you changed it.

Speaker 4 (28:52):

But we don't really know. We don't get to see how other people revise their work unless you're working at a coffee shop with them. But they're still alone. They're still on their computer. So some of the things that have worked best for me is to introduce revision into the workshop itself. I really like when you bring in three copies of a poem from different stages. And this has to do with what Bruce was talking about a little earlier about Yates. This is where I first found it. I'm like, I should save copies of my drafts. This is a thing you should do. It works really well for me. I start off with the poem and I'm a reviser as I write. And so when I realize I'm starting to change it significantly, I start a new page, paste the poem there, and I start writing again and I change.

Speaker 4 (29:34):

And then I do that continually until I get to what is the the last version, which is usually not actually a last version. But so when you introduce it to the workshop, I think we have this fear of being bad, of writing bad things and people seeing us write bad things, which is this new culture that I think has brought up with the M F A program because when you apply you're like, oh, well I want to give them my best work. I want to show them that I deserve to be here. But they're also looking for people who can learn something. They don't want someone who's already an A-list star entirely. And so I think that idea needs to come back into the workshop where you are allowed to be bad. I talk with my peers and they're like, oh, this poem is so bad.

Speaker 4 (30:20):

I'm so sorry, I made you read it. And it's like, well, if you brought in a good poem, what was I supposed to tell you? You're amazing. No. So I want to talk about bad poems because I write bad poems and I want to make those bad poems, good poems, and then I want to make those good poems, great poems. And so back to Yates, he writes really terrible first, second, third drafts, they're really bad. I wanted to cry a little bit and seeing that allowed me to realize that all the bad poems I have here are bad poems, and that's okay. So in the workshop we had Colin Matawa, who is one of the professors at umes, he had us bring in these three different copies of a poem, first middle process, and kind of near the end basically. And from that, I got to see strategies that my peers were using and I got to ask them questions like, how did you go from this to this?

Speaker 4 (31:17):

Why would you change this? I think it was great. And when you get to really dig down into what other people are doing, you get to reflect back on strategies that will work for you. And so I would love to have a class where you only bring in two or three poems for the entire semester and you continually bring them in over and over and over again in your actual workshop to be able to come back to a poem you brought in two weeks ago and say, this is what I'm doing, this is the feedback I'm using, but I'm still struggling with this. Because that struggle is sometimes something your instinct can't figure out for you or you can't do on your own. So I also want to talk a little bit about other things that have worked for me. Reading a poem backwards, and I don't know if you can do this with fiction as easily, but if you read the poem backwards line by line, it tells a different story and it kind of points out the parts that are not really working together.

Speaker 4 (32:12):

That's something that always worked well for me. Finding your readers in a workshop is the most important thing with a lack of bringing the poem back in. Find your readers, listen to them. They'll just make little tiny things. They'll know your work because everything you bring in your poem is always asking to be read in a certain way. And if the poem can't communicate how it wants to be read and what it wants to be doing, then something is failing. And that doesn't have to do necessarily with meaning, but it could be with sound or content. And I feel like you're going to an M F A to work with other people. If you have been out of undergrad for a long period of time and you've been revising on your own, it's hard to get back into that workshop stage. And if you're not utilizing these other people, then I dunno what you're doing in an M f A program.

Speaker 4 (33:08):

It's for that. I've had four workshops in the M F A program and one of them is a thesis workshop, and that is the only place I've been able to see others work after they've written it. Two out of three of those classes, we turn in a poem every week. The other class was every other week, and we had a lot of readings and prompt poems. I feel like in the M F A, what would be nice to be introduced is that idea of community with provision where we have another class that is devoted to the art of revision and we talk about edges and books. That's what we're doing. And edges are like these kind of idiosyncrasies that aren't quite meshing together with the entirety of this book, what we're working for. And those things are good. They're the little things in the poem or the novel that make you, it's part of your voice, it's part of your vision.

Speaker 4 (34:08):

And we're talking about this as a full length book, but if we think about it like a poem having edges in revision, like the rough parts, the parts that feel like they're not quite working together. And I feel like sometimes we have this concept of over revising, especially when we're working alone and we don't have others to bounce things off of. And for me, some of the strategies I used to not over revise is that I leave the poem alone and I leave the poem alone for as long as I can humanly bear it before I go. I can't write this poem anymore. Parts of that process is creating something I call poetry notes. It's just a document where I put all the corpses of all the things that are not working, and that's one of those tenets that really works for me. That's what I have to say about drafts. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (35:07):

Thank you, Kat. Our next speaker is Rachel Yoder, who is the editor of draft, the journal of Process, which she'll tell you about, which is a journal devoted to publishing first and final drafts of stories, essays and poems, and modeling the revision process. She holds an M F A in fiction from the University of Arizona and an M F A in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts fellow. Please welcome Rachel Yoder.

Speaker 5 (35:40):

Hi everyone. Thanks for coming. So I'm going to talk a little bit about sort of practical tool for if you're a teacher, a tool you can incorporate into your classes. If you're a student of writing, this is also a tool for you if you're kind of interested in looking at pieces of writing that have already been published and seeing how those came to be. So draft to the Journal of Process is a journal that Mark and I started. Mark and I went to the University of Arizona together to get our MFAs. And as we were coming to the end of our time, mark got really sad because he didn't want Workshop to end. And so he said, what if we started this journal, it's called Draft and it has first and final drafts of stories we love. So the first concept was we wanted workshop to continue.

Speaker 5 (36:30):

We wanted to be able to keep discussing stories and process. The second reason we wanted to do it is we wanted to have an excuse to talk to all of our favorite authors and poets and solicit work from them. So the idea was that we're republishing work that appears in collections, it's already been published. And then the third reason we wanted to do draft was because we also were teachers of creative writing and we didn't have a tool for teaching revision. I mean, we had all heard revision's. So important, it's the most important piece of the creative process, yet you don't spend any time on it. In workshop as you were discussing, it's really rare to have a whole, I don't know, a whole unit on revision. It's kind of like put in your portfolio and I'll read it. It'll be great. So we really wanted this to be a textbook too, of sorts that teachers could use in their classrooms.

Speaker 5 (37:27):

So the way draft is set up, and I wish we had a projector, you can stop by our table 1939. If you want to take a closer look. We publish the draft side by side. So on this page of the journal, you'll find the first draft, and then running right next to it is the final draft. So you can kind of compare them. And then at the end we have an interview with the author and all of the questions are sort of cross-referenced in the margins. So if we're talking about this part of the story, it'll say, see question three, and you can flip and we'll be talking about that part of the story. So I just wanted to give you two examples from draft and then talk about how you might use these in your classroom or use these as a writer. So the first one I want to talk about is from issue three.

Speaker 5 (38:18):

This is an issue that has a short story in essay and some poetry in it. The essay is by Joe Wilkins. He's also a poet. He wrote this wonderful essay, it's my favorite contemporary essay. It's called Out West. It was an Orion, it was a finalist for Think the National Magazine Award at Best essay. And so let's see, one of the things we talk about in here is how he deleted some of the original scenes from his essay. And so I asked him about that. He talks a little bit about that. And then one thing he says is he mentions that, I'll just read his answer here from the very beginning. That section felt like it belonged in another essay, though it connects in some ways that short narrative also felt too far outside the rhythmic thematic rhythm and scope of the rest of the essay.

Speaker 5 (39:14):

Even writing that section, I think I remember feeling like it was indicative of the kind of work I've been doing earlier that inward EIC saying, though, I think I did turn this scene into a poem which appeared in my second collection notes from the Journey westward. It didn't take me long to cut it from the essay. And so I said, oh, you cut something and it turned into a poem. Can we have the poem? And so then we published the poem that that little cut turned into. And so one of the ways I would use this, if we were reading over this in revision, I would say to my students, okay, so go back to your document of cut lines, your trash doc, and let's salvage something and turn it into a poem, turn it into flash fiction, turn it into a beginning to a new work.

Speaker 5 (40:07):

And that's a really cool way of playing around with revision, right? That revision doesn't just have to be this reworking of the same words. You can kind of take what you thought you were going to throw away and turn that into something new. So that was a cool little section from Joe's piece. Also, in our first issue, which is a really fun issue, we featured some fiction by Stacey Richter and Matt Bell. Stacey's story, I dunno if you're familiar with her work, she's really playful and fun, and she has this great story in one of her collections called Velvet, in which the protagonist is a dog named velvet. Her first draft is really just an outline, kind of like a plot outline. It's like this happens and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens. That's literally her first draft. And so the question I asked her about the final draft is the ending of the first draft goes far past the ending of the final draft when Velvet dies, sorry, if you're going to read it, velvet dies at the end and veers much more toward the mom and her story.

Speaker 5 (41:15):

At what point did you know that ending wasn't necessary and in what ways was it not serving the eventual story that emerged? And this is Stacey's answer to that. This story languished, I knew this draft wasn't really a story since it didn't have unity or direction or a plot or even much of a point. I think I called it velvet a romance in an effort to make it be about something love. It's crazy, but it wasn't even really in the story, and I didn't really care about that anyway. I probably would've abandoned velvet altogether if I hadn't started to read Joseph Campbell. I read Hero with a Thousand Faces. Some others watched his Bill Moyer's interviews and picked over some screenwriting type books that Beatified Campbell's notion of the Hero's Journey. I was bothered. It's not that I hate the hero's journey, it's actually a very compelling story.

Speaker 5 (42:05):

I just hate how it's been exalted as the only story worth telling how unexploded its parts are and how the idea that the hero's journey is the best story has been used as a way of shutting down all thoughts about what kinds of tales compel us and why. Then it occurred to me that it would be funny and therefore worthwhile for me to write a hero's journey story. If the hero was a dog, I had no trouble moving forward. Once I decided this, I expanded velvet's counter with the coyotes because in Campbell's template, the hero must meet the wild man and voyage into the underworld in order to battle with the dark side. In this case, velvet meets the coyotes and has to crawl through a culvert. When she comes back from her battle, she's transformed into a creature who is deeply wild inside, but has also become a much better dog.

Speaker 5 (42:54):

Campbell calls this bringing a boon to the community. He might also call it learning. I'm not sure the silliness of applying these elevated metaphors to a butt sniffing terrier made me happy. But then, and this is to Campbell's credit, it began to seem compelling and true. It began to strike me as a vital story that could happen to a real dog. I mean, what do backyard dogs feel when they hear coyotes howl? It must be disorienting and profound and don't we all feel something similar when we encounter the primal forces around us, the crazy splash of the Milky Way, gut wrenching thunder, claps, bloody sunset, sunsets a herd of cantering deer. I feel that. Anyway, so I really loved her answer to this question because I too hate the hero's journey, but I liked hearing her evolution about how it actually became really useful for this revision.

Speaker 5 (43:48):

And this would be something that I would use with my students to say, okay, we all have these really kind of broken first drafts. How about we use this as a kind of instance to talk about the hero's journey? And the way that Stacey presents is to talk about it is it's unexploded parts, how it's been used as a way of shutting down thoughts about the kinds of tales to bring that into our conversation about the hero's journey. And then to have students apply that to their first drafts because maybe you're in a unit where you're talking about narrative or how you're manipulating time or plot and you want to bring this into kind of, okay, so take your first draft and let's apply the hero's journey to it, or at least a few steps of the hero's journey. Come back in and we'll see what happened to your stories.

Speaker 5 (44:37):

And I really liked too what you said about we don't really get to see revisions when we're in workshop. We see the first draft and often we never see another draft. So our little project here of draft is really about being able to see all of that and also proving to our students that we're not liars when we say that even famous authors revised a billion times. Stacey Richter here says that velvet was probably revised about 30 times, and you can tell that it's true because the first draft, no one would ever want to read ever. So yeah, that's what we do. If you'd like to take a closer look, I have a couple copies. Please stop by our table. We do also offer, if I may make a little gosh pitch, we do also offer discounts if you're going to use us in your classroom. And that's really, we want people to use this in the classroom. That's why we created this. So thanks so much.

Speaker 2 (45:45):

Thank you, Rachel. Our final panelist is Lily Huang, who's the author of four books, her short, novel, changing, received the 2009 Penn Open Book Award. She teaches at the M F A program at New Mexico State where she's associate department head and PS editor for Huerto Del Soul and nonfiction editor of Drunken Boat, Lily's edited with Joshua Marie Wilkerson, the anthology, the force of what's Possible Writers in the avant-garde and accessibility. Please welcome Lily Huang.

Speaker 6 (46:25):

Hi everyone. How's everyone doing today? Good, good. Fantastic. Okay. Revision is often slotted into the ghetto of the portfolio. I used to do this too, and so I'll be honest here and I hope you won't judge me. I used to skimm those portfolios at best before I even opened the file folder. Though I had a predetermined grade bracket and I have never met a portfolio that has lured me away from that path. Yes, the student probably, maybe, probably hopefully worked really hard on her portfolio, carefully taking in every suggestion from every workshop member and applying even the contradictions. The story is a mess, maybe even more of a mess than what it was before. How could it not be? And so I arrived at teaching revision in the classroom because the final portfolio approach was not working on two levels. One, it is apparent that offering criticism on a story during workshop has no correlation with how the author approaches, which is to say students aren't taught how to revise.

Speaker 6 (47:33):

They're simply told a bunch of contradicting opinions. And somewhere in that muck, they're supposed to pick up the slaughtered remains of their post-workshop story and make it better. And two, I'm too lazy to markup portfolio since most students never even come to retrieve them. So if I'm to address revision, it has to be in the classroom. For the past few years, I've added revision into pedagogy and students have never complained. I bring you three strategies I use to emphasize revision as opposed to the generation of new material in the workshop. The function of workshop, what is it? Is revision a part of the workshop or do we only want to holler advice and never see it fulfilled? So here's my first workshop. It's a 405 level workshop on fiction. So the basic structure, this split level grad undergrad workshop was themed the real and the magic.

Speaker 6 (48:29):

So shockingly, I'm going to tell you what the real and magic means. Okay? I required students to submit a real story and a magic story for workshop. It's shocking. So I divided the semester in a quarters. We spent the first quarter reading and workshopping real stories. The second quarter magic stories, and the last half of the semester, we workshopped revisions of one of the stories they generated for class. So if you think about it, one quarter of the workshop is not very much time, I believe in the fast workshop. So each workshop gets roughly 18 minutes, whereas the revision workshop is given much more time and weight because it takes up half of the class. So we spend 45 minutes on revision. This is what my workshop looks like. We sit in a circle. I am insistent on the circle. This is what my workshop sounds like.

Speaker 6 (49:21):

Applause, my students like to clap. Here's another one. This is English 5 74, and this is M F A Graduate Pros Workshop basic structure. This is an M F A workshop. Our M F A program requires a second genre requirement, and almost all of the poetry MFAs were in this workshop in addition to our regular fiction cohort. So the class was really large. I had 16 students in an M F A workshop, and that's way too many. I approached each workshop with a different workshop style, and the semester was divided into thirds revision, read out loud and speed workshopping. The first workshop story was revision. Students were asked to, again, surprisingly, revise any work. And remember, there are poets present. So I used work that has already been through an M F A workshop. The writer was to provide the original and the revision. The focus of the workshop was less on the revised as a finished product and more on how the writer got there, why she made the choices she did.

Speaker 6 (50:25):

And then I'll tell you a bit about the other ones. The second workshops, I asked student to read an entire story out loud. Students were provided with a hard copy right before the reading so others could follow along if they chose. And then finally, I set the students in groups of four. They would meet one-on-one with each of their group members for 30 minutes of intense discussion and conversation about the submitted work. And I can talk to you about the merits of each of these pedagogical approaches later, but I just wanted to give you a landscape. The revision workshop lasted 20 minutes per story. And the students in the end, I asked them which one they liked the most, and the revision workshop was by and far their favorite because they just never get it. The short workshop in the traditional 2.5 hour workshop, students are workshopped for about an hour and a quarter, which is a lot of time.

Speaker 6 (51:15):

And during this time, students bicker over comments and shit, who caress? So I cut down the workshop time such that there isn't time for all that extraneous small talk about commas and the versus a. Instead, the focus must be focused macro level concern pushed into a time limit. And although every student at the beginning complains by the time the first few students have actually been workshopped, everyone agrees it's the best that they've had. They love it. So the right way to approach workshop if there's a right way, whatever. Okay, English 3 81, fabulous fiction. I taught this at Cornell College in Iowa, and I will just start. Okay, this is an undergrad workshop. Talked at Cornell College in Iowa. So this is on the block system. And what they do is have, they have three and a half hour one class. It's called one class at a time.

Speaker 6 (52:09):

They have one class for three and a half weeks, and that's the only class they have. And so I can hold class anywhere from two hours to eight to 10 hours depending on what my whim is. I never did that. I think three hours is plenty of time because of the unique way time is structured at Cornell, I had much more flexibility with the workshop. Well kind of. Okay, so the class was three and a half weeks long. The 0.5, the first one happening strangely at the beginning of the block. So we read a book often more for every class. And these magical students asked me for more, as in we read a book a day and then they said, can we have more reading because this is really awesome. Students submitted stories for workshop on the Tuesdays of week two and three. So by the last day of class, Friday of week four, students had to revise or translate one of their stories into another genre.

Speaker 6 (53:03):

For instance, song painting, poem, et cetera. This was a total gamble for me. I'd never suggested anything similar to it. Usually a revision is a revision of text on page. But as I generated the course calendar for this very, very special class, I found more and more fabulous material that defied the printed page. And I wanted to introduce all of these different forms as fism to my students. And so revision puts on a whole new skin light is a feather. So the first day of class, I'm teaching fabulous fiction. It's amazing. And when I teach a magic course, I always have students gather in the middle of the room and we play light as a feather, stiff as a board, which is fun. So I have all of the students lay down, and of course it doesn't work. Physics tells us that it doesn't work.

Speaker 6 (53:50):

And so they sit there and I'm like, no, no, you've got to believe in it. Chant light is a feather stiff as a board. Just believe you got to believe in it. And then it worked. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. Physics tells us it doesn't work, right? I'll go back to that. Science tells us this. And so I had a whole lecture based around how it wouldn't work and how we're all skeptics as adult, we don't believe in magic anymore, blah, blah, blah. And then it worked. And I had nothing to say for the next two and a half hours.

Speaker 6 (54:23):

My students' project from fabulous fiction, and remember this, is to revise any of their workshop stories into another genre. My students' projects for fabulous fiction, the least impressive of them, hand bound letterpress books and broad sides that were sewn together, least impressive. Two shortstop animation films, magic fortune cookies, cookies delivered daily by the cookie fairy, a radio show paintings a three D mosaic, not one, but two video games. And this is the most special one because the student was a sound person and she had never written fiction before. So she came to me quite often and said, I don't know what to do. I'm really scared. And so one day she turned in a poem and it was not just a poem, it was a terrible poem, and I didn't know how to be nice to her in class. But the workshop was wonderful. And then she explained it to us and we're like, okay, that's pretty cool. But in my mind, it was not the best work and I was upset with her. But the final project, she rented out the black box theater and had us take off our shoes and the lights were dimmed down and she had put the constellations on the ground and she made us a soundscape for five minutes and asked us to walk around. That's a fucking revision.

Speaker 6 (55:55):

That to me is what revision is all about. And I think that's brilliant and I'm going to end there. Thank you all very much.

Speaker 2 (56:08):

Thank you, Lily. Thank you for coming, everybody. We're out of time. And thank you to all the wonderful panelists today.

Speaker 7 (56:21):

Thank you for tuning into the A W P podcast series. For other podcasts. Please visit our website@www.awpwriter.org.