Revision as Listening

How to Return to a Draft with Curiosity

Revision can sometimes feel like correction, judgment, or pressure to make a piece “work.” In this two-hour workshop, we’ll reframe revision as a practice of listening: a way of returning to a draft with curiosity about what is already alive within it.

Through brief craft discussion, guided reflection, and hands-on revision exercises, we’ll practice noticing a draft’s existing energies: recurring images, unanswered questions, shifts in voice, moments of surprise, places of pressure, and possibilities for structure. Together, we’ll ask what a draft is already trying to do and what it may be asking for next.

This class is open to poets, prose writers, hybrid writers, and anyone with writing they want to revisit. Participants will leave with practical revision strategies, a renewed relationship to at least one draft, and a gentler, more attentive way to continue revising on their own.

What to have ready: Please bring one draft, fragment, or unfinished piece you are willing to revisit during class. Shorter pieces will be easiest to work with in the session (approximately 1–5 pages is ideal) but any genre or stage of draft is welcome. Participants may also bring a notebook or document for exercises.

José Angel Araguz

José Angel Araguz, Ph.D. (he/him/él) is the author most recently of the lyric memoir Ruin & Want (Sundress Publications) as well as the poetry collections Rotura (Black Lawrence Press) and La esperanza espera (Valparaiso Ediciones). His poetry and prose have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poetry International, The Acentos Review, and Oxidant | Engine among other places. He is an Associate Professor at Suffolk University and a faculty-at-large member of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program at Lasell University. He blogs and reviews books here at The Influence.