Writing Is Rewriting

Jesse Graves shares his experiences in revision.

At last Thursday’s event, Jesse Graves shared several poems about his life, his family, and the place where he grew up. I think every person in that room got something different out of the poems he shared. We found a bit of imagery or emotion we could latch onto and understood it within ourselves and our own experiences. Another beautiful thing about literature: It is so diverse and can mean something different to everyone at different points in their lives. But I think that also extends to us as writers and how we view our work once it is “done.”

Jesse shared, “My poems are like the rest of me, always growing and changing.”

I don’t think I have ever resonated with anything as a writer as much as this. People are ever changing and ever growing, so it makes sense that our writing would do the same with us. We continue to look back on the work we have done and think about what changes we would make to it now. When I look back at the work I have done, I see how much I have grown. I find little errors and giggle thinking about how naïve I was as a writer just a year ago. And then I giggle even more thinking about how I am still just as much of a naïve writer, but I won’t really be able to see that till next year when I have gained more knowledge, experience, and insight. But I think we can all look back at something we have written and find a way to make it more relatable to how our lives are turning out in that moment. Our perspectives are always adapting, and we have to rise into the writers we are meant to be.

In Jesse’s case, he published a book of poems titled Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine in 2011. This past year, he came out with a tenth anniversary expanded edition of that same book. Jesse explained part of the publication process saying, “In the first edition, there were three errors I noticed after publication. They bothered me, and I wanted to get them fixed for the tenth anniversary edition. Luckily, in the new edition, we got away with only one error.” (Laughter ensues.) I think it is a little bit perfect because while I’m sure Jesse is bummed about that one annoying mistake, at the end of the day, he did better. He fixed some of his mistakes, edited a few of his poems, added twelve new poems, and along with that, unfortunately, that one error slipped through the cracks, but that’s okay because he grew in his writing. He learned some new things about poetry, about himself, and about his book and decided he needed to give the world the revised, expanded, and edited version of his work.

I think this speaks to the idea that your work is never finished. While I don’t completely agree with the literal meaning of that concept, I would say there is a lot of validity in experience shaping how we view our previous writing. I think many of us have created a work with the story-book ending. We put it away and let it sit for a few days, a couple weeks, a month, maybe even two or three years. Then we take it back out and realize it wasn’t the piece of work we thought it was at all. We find a line we don’t quite remember writing or an underlying idea we didn’t realize we were projecting. And maybe we can appreciate them and love them and realize that we have changed, or maybe we need to do what Jesse did, and start working on another release because we have new ideas that could really make a difference.

“The Afterthought” is a weekly column by In Process Intern Lillian Reid.