Brilliant. I love the idea of editing as love. So many of us fear the red line of evaluation from days when that meant a poor grade, failure. But to see it as bringing forth (which is what the best teachers were doing) is freeing.
Our education systems are so hierarchical and classrooms are so ‘top down’, that receiving edits can be super-scary, triggering all sorts of childhood humiliations.
Hello everyone, and happy Sunday! Padraig, this makes me smile in recognition. Editing, at its best, really is a form of profound listening. I’m lucky to have a few first readers I treasure, poet James Morehead @dublinpoetlaureate among them, whose comments often arrive as small acts of precision that help to open the poem rather than judge it. I love the kind of attention that notices whether I’m “inhaling” or “sipping” and asks me to choose, not for correctness, but for clarity of image. Or the gentle nudge toward consistency of voice, like one of his reminders that if I begin with “They call me…,” I should probably stay inside the “I.” Those moments feel less like correction and more like someone holding a tuning fork up to the poem until it hums truer.
What I’ve learned, again and again, is that good editing doesn’t impose a voice. It reveals one. It says: I hear what you’re trying to do. Come a little closer to it.
Paid for by stew and bread, or by friendship and trust, it’s one of the great privileges of making poems alongside other people. Thank you for these Sunday prompts; they inspire me greatly and set the tone for the week ahead.
A poem can be edited but so can a person. I think of my husband. Since we met ten years ago he has edited me. Not with a red pen but gentle pencil markings in my margins that suggest a syntax of kindness. Just now we are having some stress with neighbours. ‘Wait a little’ he says, ‘before replying’. ‘She’s obviously worried.’ All this when my urgent finger wants to dance righteous fury on my phone! He has also added stanzas to my life. I’m more eco, less wasteful, less selfish (trying anyway..). I wonder how I’ve edited him? He’d probably say he’s tidier - if he was a poem it would be in a recognisable form 😂 Hopefully a sonnet ❤️
I used to be afraid, not to be able to receive and take editing in. As I became more loving towards myself, I started to notice that something in me really liked my writings to be edited. I discovered that editing brings me courage and nurturing. I now often experience it as an invitation to not hold back, but truly show more of my innerworld in my writings. I love the idea of editing - work dinners🙏🏽
As a language teacher, I always tell my students that it's my job to give them the language to tell their stories - that grammar is a tool to help them to do so more clearly - so editing for me is evidence of paying attention to their stories & their humanity - an act of love. (It is also an act of love & truth when they catch an error I've made, or ask a question for clarity in what I thought initially was clearly explained but evidently was not!) As one given to lots of words, I appreciate the challenge of poetical self-editing - distilling the truth & essence of words. I like the idea that "edit" means "to bring out" - rather than "to silence;" that's what I pray I do for my many communities - family, school, church & beyond - as they do for me.
I love this Dawn, especially the idea of grammar and editing as giving someone the tools to tell their story more clearly. Attention as care. It makes me think of a voice teacher I had who was meticulous about every physical detail of singing, tongue, jaw, breath, stance, resonance. In the practice room, it could feel relentless, especially when I was feeling vulnerable, but it strengthened my approach. Her repeated instruction has stayed with me. Here in the classroom focus, but when you step on stage, sing. Don’t bring the critic with you.
Writing feels similar to me. There’s a time for precision, distillation, and rigorous attention, and there’s a time to let the voice move freely. The paradox is that the critique (if it is trusted measured and kind) is what makes the freedom possible.
I am continually surprised at the power of my subconscious to edit – or “bring forth” – some feeling, emotion or experience that I didn’t realise needed to be articulated. It happens most often when I sit down to write about one thing but what emerges on the page is something else entirely, something that needed to be brought into the light of my conscious mind so that I could acknowledge and begin to make sense of it.
Thankfully, I have finally started to learn to go with what yearns to be said, instead of dismissing it in favour of what I “want” to write. As the Scottish poet Thomas A. Clark says:
The poet laureate of our city held court nightly in a dump of a bar. I brought my latest poem and laid it at the foot of his stein of beer. He read it, tore off the last stanza, returned it to me and said, “There. Much better.” The next day I called to thank him. “If you differ, you can always leave the stanza on” he said in his brief episode of sobriety. “It was my only copy” I said. “What???” he replied. Two observations from 50 years later: (1) my then ability to trust and believe so assuredly ( he WAS right) and (2) don’t leave home with your only copy of anything, including a great line, thought or insight, and give yourself away so freely. One person’s garbage is another person’s treasure. Retrieving a gift from your Muse may be impossible. - Dwight Lee Wolter.
Sunday morning I look forward to your missive. Todays piece on editing reminded me of my fear of criticism. My husband was a poet. When I shared my writing, prose or poetry. His comments felt like criticism. It always stung. I would crawl back into my shell and not share with him.
Your piece today shed a different light on things…
It really is difficult, Marilee, especially when we’re sharing something tender with someone we perceive as more skilled in the discipline than we are. There’s a vulnerability there that goes straight to the core. My husband (newlywed after twenty years together!) is a remarkably gifted musician, pianist, composer, arranger, producer, and the ways he has pushed my lyrics and melodies to grow have sometimes been uncomfortable. I’ve had moments of wanting to retreat entirely.
But over time, I’ve begun to understand that he is not judging, he is accompanying me (literally and figuratively!). When the intention is truly to serve the work, not to diminish the person, something shifts. Your note and Padraig’s reflection today remind me how much trust lives inside the act of sharing unfinished things with those closest to us.
Could I edit someone I love, that is, amplify them, help enlarge/ bring forth their special qualities? I too often nag. Re: my writing- I’ve recently gone under the cover with them. Thank you for this post. It’s making me rethink stuff.
Thank you for this. Your comments (and those of so many others on this thread) have made me reflect on how I have edited people over the years. I usually wrote well and starting in college friends have asked me to edit their writing. I so often "improved" it by writing how I would express the ideas. I've slowly learned (but not enough) that editing is to help strengthen what they want to say, not how I would have said it.
Your description of editing someone you love still suggests an intent of "nagging" at their weaknesses that bug you. "Bringing forth their special qualities" is moving in the direction of love, but still keeps the verb focused on your power and influence. I see my poetic editors as keenly observing the strength in a line, already there, perhaps made more powerful by losing an unnecessary word or verse. At work, I see my boss as having the gift of assisting each team member bring their special talent more to the fore. Clearly for example I still have not mastered brevity, but I've loved learning editing from keen eyed friends to improve a poem.
The neccessary process of being edited was initially a challenge to my sense of always being right. I worked with a colleague who was equally feisty producing written news and and internal marketing for a large organisation. We produced some brilliant stuff but other colleagues used to think we were fighting as we edited our work together - and we were fighting as we wrestled our work into submission.
These days, much later in life, I've just started an email correspondence where my haiku are discussed and edited but these days I seem to have surrendered my vulnerability and are much more relaxed about the process. Maturity perhaps, or maybe I feel less like I have something to lose when my income doesn't depend on it.
Strangely in another version of myself I was a community mediator for neighbour and family disputes - guiding people to edit their relationships was really rewarding. Perhaps my work colleague and I should have had a mediator!
Yes, it's an interesting one - I can trust myself but then when you come to submit work for publication it helps to have another eye when work isn't accepted.
as long as they routinely have their vision tested. and I don't become too willing to contort myself into a vision of what I think their vision might be. my experience is that editors often don't have any better a clue than you.
When we’ve made something from whole cloth, it can feel complete simply because it exists at all. After all, we carried it from nothing into form. Trusting someone else to step inside that space requires a kind of bravery. What you describe with your colleague, that wrestling toward something better, sounds less like conflict and more like shared devotion, even if it looked combative from the outside.
I love the arc you describe, too, from wrestling over language in a workplace to mediating human relationships. In both cases, it’s the same gesture: helping something speak more clearly without breaking it. A rare and generous skill.
What comes to mind for me is my experience as a sixth grader in my all boys Catholic school, where I was being tormented by the other boys. The ring leader paradoxically was a boy who I thought of as my best friend and he was when we were alone together. But when we were in the company of other boys, he made me something of a scapegoat. He was the best athlete in our group and each morning before school, we’d have a game of slap ball. I’d make a point of getting there early but he would wait until the 11th boy showed up to make sure I did not get picked. I would get demonstrably upset and this would lead the boys to laugh. This, of course, only made me more upset, and soon the boys were having a feeding frenzy at my expense.
In those days we had to wear a strict uniform of shined shoes, blue trousers, a white shirt and a navy blue tie. Before going into school, we would lineup in neat rows to be inspected by brother Sean. Any boy whose shoes were not shined, or tie not snugged, or shirt not tucked in would be singled out to the end of the line and required to wait in the hallway while the other boys took their seats. The ritual was that brother Sean would then go into the hallway and with his famous Board of Education,, wack the offending boy on the buttocks, the number of times in keeping with brother Sean‘s estimation of the egregiousness of the offense. I was meticulous in my preparations to avoid this outcome. But on the day I have in mind, brother Sean pulled me out of line and sent me to the back. I stood in the hallway, bewildered as to what I could’ve possibly done wrong and was not looking forward to re-entering the classroom, rubbing my sore butt.
When brother Sean emerged from the classroom and saw the anxiety on my face. he waved his hands at me and said “you did not do anything wrong. But I have to pull you aside to give you a piece of advice. I see what the other boys are doing, and I see how your reaction is causing them to do it more.“ I looked at him pleadingly and he continued “the more you react the worse it’s going to get, instead of getting upset, you should find a way to laugh at their jokes. I know that’ll be hard, but believe me once you can figure out how to do that they will quickly tire of tormenting you and move onto to someone else.“ he then wrapped his cassock around his palm and whacked himself three times and sent me into the class.
I didn’t believe him, but I was willing to try anything because I felt so powerless. And sure enough, I learned to deflect the attacks with humor, and though I never became “one of the guys“ I escaped that dreaded position that most boys fear of being the scapegoat. Like
I love your title and it's premise. It made me stop what I was doing and sit to read.
Currently going through the editing process myself, (on my writing work and commenting for others) I appreciate everything you said and the way you said it. Especially:
'Five came — and made magnificent chaos of my flat and my poems: interruptions, ideas, queries, gossip, pushback, more interruptions, food, pass-the-butter, edits, excisions, occasional praise, radical revisions, reordering, consensus, diverging, and constructive critiques.'
I enjoyed thinking about editing in new ways. I certainly try to help other authors cultivate their own voice to bell-ringing clarity.
But interesting what also came forward was your theme's opposite: As a female, being continually edited on a daily basis in the worst ways, often with the best intentions.
This, I will try to carry forward in my own writing with kindness. Because we all do get results we don't intend. What I now see clearer is a lack of love for self sends that lack toward others.
I hope I foster better conversation on this human foilble and cultivate more love.
Completely understand where you are coming from C. Continually being edited as a female with low self-esteem, the top of the mountain I climb gets higher the closer I am to it. Even the idea of hosting such a gathering —!— pass the salt along with the critiques. Ooof.
I can still see the red ink in the margins of the paper written for human metabolism class. They shocked me at first…I thought it was a good paper! After the shock wore off, I understood how the suggested changes could make the paper better. More than 35 years later, I am still connected to my mentor.
Yes, edits done with loving kindness are a gift. But edits in the world of work are not always made in that spirit, and those can make me prickle!
I gave up writing as a goal 50 years ago when my first freshman paper came back, red pencilled, with "Ick", "UGG!" and "Awk!". That mentor had us read "In Cold Blood" and he disdained my beloved Dickens, Alcott and Wharton. Luckily. I was born into the feminist generation and ten years later an older woman at work observed me secretly writing poems of pain, and shared her own heartbroken poems, which, unknowingly, we were each writing in back to back cubicles at lunch.
Uff! What comments for a teacher to make. I am sorry that halted your writing for a time, and very glad you and your cubicle mate discovered one another!
I was part of a writing group for almost a decade led by an incredible writer and teacher, Pam Houston, who also became a dear friend. Her approach to editing that she modeled for all of us was to be in service of the story. It felt like a pruning that allowed work to truly blossom. Writing, for me, always involves mystery. The work becomes itself as it unfolds and so, naturally, by the end some of the ways in to the heart of it are no longer needed and can distract and obscure. Rather than mourn them, we can thank them for helping us get to what was most true, and let them go.
This prompt brings forth a delightful memory. In the very early 1980’s I was finishing an undergraduate degree in literature, poetry, and creative writing. I studied with two amazing teachers, Tess Gallagher and Hayden Carruth. Hayden let me into a graduate level class in reading poetry. I distinctly remember one day as a few of us sat around a table. Hayden asked each of us to read aloud the same poem. When we students finished, Hayden, sitting at one end of this rectangular classroom table, began to recite the same poem, But, it wasn’t the same poem. Hayden, steeped and brewed in a lifelong kettle of traditional poetics, and a lover of playing jazz, clarinet I believe, recited a full concert of a poem, a symphony of sounds, rhythms, and in a flash of an eternal moment, edited our ears and voices. Thank you, Hayden! 🏮
Thanks, David, for sharing this memory. It brought to mind a beloved meditation teacher, Rob Burbea. He was previously a jazz musician and composer. Listening to his teachings on dharma was, indeed, like listening to a concert. My own thinking became more musical.
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit have a song, The Blue, that includes the line "Mark me up, so they can see, the best of me."
Not sure what Isbell had in mind, but that line always resonated with me as representing an editor. The literal marking up of written words on the page. To that end, I think of my wife, who has literally edited too many letters to elected officials and letters to the editor to count, but also has "edited" me through conversations, interactions, helping shape my life, etc.
The process of editing provides so much value, making sure that you're actually saying what you're trying to say, that it conveys correctly to the reader, and that it's not to long, or to vague, or both. And it's an act of love because the editor (most of the time) is investing in helping ensure your work something that has worth and value. Sometimes that investment comes when there isn't much there, early thoughts, a very drafty first draft. But the editor digs in, even knowing it might be a long journey, not necessarily knowing where you, they, and the piece will end up.
Brilliant. I love the idea of editing as love. So many of us fear the red line of evaluation from days when that meant a poor grade, failure. But to see it as bringing forth (which is what the best teachers were doing) is freeing.
Our education systems are so hierarchical and classrooms are so ‘top down’, that receiving edits can be super-scary, triggering all sorts of childhood humiliations.
Hello everyone, and happy Sunday! Padraig, this makes me smile in recognition. Editing, at its best, really is a form of profound listening. I’m lucky to have a few first readers I treasure, poet James Morehead @dublinpoetlaureate among them, whose comments often arrive as small acts of precision that help to open the poem rather than judge it. I love the kind of attention that notices whether I’m “inhaling” or “sipping” and asks me to choose, not for correctness, but for clarity of image. Or the gentle nudge toward consistency of voice, like one of his reminders that if I begin with “They call me…,” I should probably stay inside the “I.” Those moments feel less like correction and more like someone holding a tuning fork up to the poem until it hums truer.
What I’ve learned, again and again, is that good editing doesn’t impose a voice. It reveals one. It says: I hear what you’re trying to do. Come a little closer to it.
Paid for by stew and bread, or by friendship and trust, it’s one of the great privileges of making poems alongside other people. Thank you for these Sunday prompts; they inspire me greatly and set the tone for the week ahead.
“Small acts of precision” beautiful phrase!
Thank you Emily!
I love this idea of editing as close listening. thank you.
Thank you, Joan.
Inhaling or sipping, ***** !!!
A poem can be edited but so can a person. I think of my husband. Since we met ten years ago he has edited me. Not with a red pen but gentle pencil markings in my margins that suggest a syntax of kindness. Just now we are having some stress with neighbours. ‘Wait a little’ he says, ‘before replying’. ‘She’s obviously worried.’ All this when my urgent finger wants to dance righteous fury on my phone! He has also added stanzas to my life. I’m more eco, less wasteful, less selfish (trying anyway..). I wonder how I’ve edited him? He’d probably say he’s tidier - if he was a poem it would be in a recognisable form 😂 Hopefully a sonnet ❤️
What a beautiful thing you have described here. Write this poem!
Estelle! Similar experiences as I just mentioned to Marilee. I really like your musing on how we’ve edited them...
I used to be afraid, not to be able to receive and take editing in. As I became more loving towards myself, I started to notice that something in me really liked my writings to be edited. I discovered that editing brings me courage and nurturing. I now often experience it as an invitation to not hold back, but truly show more of my innerworld in my writings. I love the idea of editing - work dinners🙏🏽
I am touched by your comment, "something in me liked my writings to be edited. I discovered that editing brings me courage and nurturing".
Perhaps, I can entertain the same possibility for me and my creative endeavors.
As a language teacher, I always tell my students that it's my job to give them the language to tell their stories - that grammar is a tool to help them to do so more clearly - so editing for me is evidence of paying attention to their stories & their humanity - an act of love. (It is also an act of love & truth when they catch an error I've made, or ask a question for clarity in what I thought initially was clearly explained but evidently was not!) As one given to lots of words, I appreciate the challenge of poetical self-editing - distilling the truth & essence of words. I like the idea that "edit" means "to bring out" - rather than "to silence;" that's what I pray I do for my many communities - family, school, church & beyond - as they do for me.
I love this Dawn, especially the idea of grammar and editing as giving someone the tools to tell their story more clearly. Attention as care. It makes me think of a voice teacher I had who was meticulous about every physical detail of singing, tongue, jaw, breath, stance, resonance. In the practice room, it could feel relentless, especially when I was feeling vulnerable, but it strengthened my approach. Her repeated instruction has stayed with me. Here in the classroom focus, but when you step on stage, sing. Don’t bring the critic with you.
Writing feels similar to me. There’s a time for precision, distillation, and rigorous attention, and there’s a time to let the voice move freely. The paradox is that the critique (if it is trusted measured and kind) is what makes the freedom possible.
Thank you for using words as evidence of paying attention to their stories and humanity. Now I feel a little less uncomfortable with being edited.
I am continually surprised at the power of my subconscious to edit – or “bring forth” – some feeling, emotion or experience that I didn’t realise needed to be articulated. It happens most often when I sit down to write about one thing but what emerges on the page is something else entirely, something that needed to be brought into the light of my conscious mind so that I could acknowledge and begin to make sense of it.
Thankfully, I have finally started to learn to go with what yearns to be said, instead of dismissing it in favour of what I “want” to write. As the Scottish poet Thomas A. Clark says:
“… be one who
when the lightest breeze
thrills through you
takes note...”
I love all of this, thank you Anne.
Thank you Anne! Beautiful.
Wow!
The poet laureate of our city held court nightly in a dump of a bar. I brought my latest poem and laid it at the foot of his stein of beer. He read it, tore off the last stanza, returned it to me and said, “There. Much better.” The next day I called to thank him. “If you differ, you can always leave the stanza on” he said in his brief episode of sobriety. “It was my only copy” I said. “What???” he replied. Two observations from 50 years later: (1) my then ability to trust and believe so assuredly ( he WAS right) and (2) don’t leave home with your only copy of anything, including a great line, thought or insight, and give yourself away so freely. One person’s garbage is another person’s treasure. Retrieving a gift from your Muse may be impossible. - Dwight Lee Wolter.
What a great anecdote ...and cautionary tale.
Thanks, Steve Croft, from Dwight Lee Wolter. ~ P.S. I just posted another comment in this thread about AI and editing.
Agreed Steve!
Sunday morning I look forward to your missive. Todays piece on editing reminded me of my fear of criticism. My husband was a poet. When I shared my writing, prose or poetry. His comments felt like criticism. It always stung. I would crawl back into my shell and not share with him.
Your piece today shed a different light on things…
It really is difficult, Marilee, especially when we’re sharing something tender with someone we perceive as more skilled in the discipline than we are. There’s a vulnerability there that goes straight to the core. My husband (newlywed after twenty years together!) is a remarkably gifted musician, pianist, composer, arranger, producer, and the ways he has pushed my lyrics and melodies to grow have sometimes been uncomfortable. I’ve had moments of wanting to retreat entirely.
But over time, I’ve begun to understand that he is not judging, he is accompanying me (literally and figuratively!). When the intention is truly to serve the work, not to diminish the person, something shifts. Your note and Padraig’s reflection today remind me how much trust lives inside the act of sharing unfinished things with those closest to us.
Thank you so much. Your words are wise and comforting.🙏
Could I edit someone I love, that is, amplify them, help enlarge/ bring forth their special qualities? I too often nag. Re: my writing- I’ve recently gone under the cover with them. Thank you for this post. It’s making me rethink stuff.
Thank you for this. Your comments (and those of so many others on this thread) have made me reflect on how I have edited people over the years. I usually wrote well and starting in college friends have asked me to edit their writing. I so often "improved" it by writing how I would express the ideas. I've slowly learned (but not enough) that editing is to help strengthen what they want to say, not how I would have said it.
And that is a precious distinction!
Your description of editing someone you love still suggests an intent of "nagging" at their weaknesses that bug you. "Bringing forth their special qualities" is moving in the direction of love, but still keeps the verb focused on your power and influence. I see my poetic editors as keenly observing the strength in a line, already there, perhaps made more powerful by losing an unnecessary word or verse. At work, I see my boss as having the gift of assisting each team member bring their special talent more to the fore. Clearly for example I still have not mastered brevity, but I've loved learning editing from keen eyed friends to improve a poem.
Perhaps
The neccessary process of being edited was initially a challenge to my sense of always being right. I worked with a colleague who was equally feisty producing written news and and internal marketing for a large organisation. We produced some brilliant stuff but other colleagues used to think we were fighting as we edited our work together - and we were fighting as we wrestled our work into submission.
These days, much later in life, I've just started an email correspondence where my haiku are discussed and edited but these days I seem to have surrendered my vulnerability and are much more relaxed about the process. Maturity perhaps, or maybe I feel less like I have something to lose when my income doesn't depend on it.
Strangely in another version of myself I was a community mediator for neighbour and family disputes - guiding people to edit their relationships was really rewarding. Perhaps my work colleague and I should have had a mediator!
...and perhaps I should edit my own comments too 🙄
Yep, get that! :)
Trust yourself, Steve, but verify either others. -Dwight Lee Wolter
Yes, it's an interesting one - I can trust myself but then when you come to submit work for publication it helps to have another eye when work isn't accepted.
as long as they routinely have their vision tested. and I don't become too willing to contort myself into a vision of what I think their vision might be. my experience is that editors often don't have any better a clue than you.
Yes! It’s so difficult to discern the difference if lacking in self assurance. How to know? How to hold or fold?
When we’ve made something from whole cloth, it can feel complete simply because it exists at all. After all, we carried it from nothing into form. Trusting someone else to step inside that space requires a kind of bravery. What you describe with your colleague, that wrestling toward something better, sounds less like conflict and more like shared devotion, even if it looked combative from the outside.
I love the arc you describe, too, from wrestling over language in a workplace to mediating human relationships. In both cases, it’s the same gesture: helping something speak more clearly without breaking it. A rare and generous skill.
What comes to mind for me is my experience as a sixth grader in my all boys Catholic school, where I was being tormented by the other boys. The ring leader paradoxically was a boy who I thought of as my best friend and he was when we were alone together. But when we were in the company of other boys, he made me something of a scapegoat. He was the best athlete in our group and each morning before school, we’d have a game of slap ball. I’d make a point of getting there early but he would wait until the 11th boy showed up to make sure I did not get picked. I would get demonstrably upset and this would lead the boys to laugh. This, of course, only made me more upset, and soon the boys were having a feeding frenzy at my expense.
In those days we had to wear a strict uniform of shined shoes, blue trousers, a white shirt and a navy blue tie. Before going into school, we would lineup in neat rows to be inspected by brother Sean. Any boy whose shoes were not shined, or tie not snugged, or shirt not tucked in would be singled out to the end of the line and required to wait in the hallway while the other boys took their seats. The ritual was that brother Sean would then go into the hallway and with his famous Board of Education,, wack the offending boy on the buttocks, the number of times in keeping with brother Sean‘s estimation of the egregiousness of the offense. I was meticulous in my preparations to avoid this outcome. But on the day I have in mind, brother Sean pulled me out of line and sent me to the back. I stood in the hallway, bewildered as to what I could’ve possibly done wrong and was not looking forward to re-entering the classroom, rubbing my sore butt.
When brother Sean emerged from the classroom and saw the anxiety on my face. he waved his hands at me and said “you did not do anything wrong. But I have to pull you aside to give you a piece of advice. I see what the other boys are doing, and I see how your reaction is causing them to do it more.“ I looked at him pleadingly and he continued “the more you react the worse it’s going to get, instead of getting upset, you should find a way to laugh at their jokes. I know that’ll be hard, but believe me once you can figure out how to do that they will quickly tire of tormenting you and move onto to someone else.“ he then wrapped his cassock around his palm and whacked himself three times and sent me into the class.
I didn’t believe him, but I was willing to try anything because I felt so powerless. And sure enough, I learned to deflect the attacks with humor, and though I never became “one of the guys“ I escaped that dreaded position that most boys fear of being the scapegoat. Like
Pádrig and All –
I love your title and it's premise. It made me stop what I was doing and sit to read.
Currently going through the editing process myself, (on my writing work and commenting for others) I appreciate everything you said and the way you said it. Especially:
'Five came — and made magnificent chaos of my flat and my poems: interruptions, ideas, queries, gossip, pushback, more interruptions, food, pass-the-butter, edits, excisions, occasional praise, radical revisions, reordering, consensus, diverging, and constructive critiques.'
I enjoyed thinking about editing in new ways. I certainly try to help other authors cultivate their own voice to bell-ringing clarity.
But interesting what also came forward was your theme's opposite: As a female, being continually edited on a daily basis in the worst ways, often with the best intentions.
This, I will try to carry forward in my own writing with kindness. Because we all do get results we don't intend. What I now see clearer is a lack of love for self sends that lack toward others.
I hope I foster better conversation on this human foilble and cultivate more love.
Completely understand where you are coming from C. Continually being edited as a female with low self-esteem, the top of the mountain I climb gets higher the closer I am to it. Even the idea of hosting such a gathering —!— pass the salt along with the critiques. Ooof.
Interesting C, your observation on the societal editing of women. That sort of persistent editing can indeed be overwhelming.
An insightful and nicely stated comment! Thank you.
I can still see the red ink in the margins of the paper written for human metabolism class. They shocked me at first…I thought it was a good paper! After the shock wore off, I understood how the suggested changes could make the paper better. More than 35 years later, I am still connected to my mentor.
Yes, edits done with loving kindness are a gift. But edits in the world of work are not always made in that spirit, and those can make me prickle!
I gave up writing as a goal 50 years ago when my first freshman paper came back, red pencilled, with "Ick", "UGG!" and "Awk!". That mentor had us read "In Cold Blood" and he disdained my beloved Dickens, Alcott and Wharton. Luckily. I was born into the feminist generation and ten years later an older woman at work observed me secretly writing poems of pain, and shared her own heartbroken poems, which, unknowingly, we were each writing in back to back cubicles at lunch.
Uff! What comments for a teacher to make. I am sorry that halted your writing for a time, and very glad you and your cubicle mate discovered one another!
I just love this image of you two writing your cubicle poems. Thank you for sharing it and 3 cheers for feminist times!
I was part of a writing group for almost a decade led by an incredible writer and teacher, Pam Houston, who also became a dear friend. Her approach to editing that she modeled for all of us was to be in service of the story. It felt like a pruning that allowed work to truly blossom. Writing, for me, always involves mystery. The work becomes itself as it unfolds and so, naturally, by the end some of the ways in to the heart of it are no longer needed and can distract and obscure. Rather than mourn them, we can thank them for helping us get to what was most true, and let them go.
This prompt brings forth a delightful memory. In the very early 1980’s I was finishing an undergraduate degree in literature, poetry, and creative writing. I studied with two amazing teachers, Tess Gallagher and Hayden Carruth. Hayden let me into a graduate level class in reading poetry. I distinctly remember one day as a few of us sat around a table. Hayden asked each of us to read aloud the same poem. When we students finished, Hayden, sitting at one end of this rectangular classroom table, began to recite the same poem, But, it wasn’t the same poem. Hayden, steeped and brewed in a lifelong kettle of traditional poetics, and a lover of playing jazz, clarinet I believe, recited a full concert of a poem, a symphony of sounds, rhythms, and in a flash of an eternal moment, edited our ears and voices. Thank you, Hayden! 🏮
Gorgeous anecdote, David.
Thanks, David, for sharing this memory. It brought to mind a beloved meditation teacher, Rob Burbea. He was previously a jazz musician and composer. Listening to his teachings on dharma was, indeed, like listening to a concert. My own thinking became more musical.
I enjoy the “my own thinking became more musical”. Best, David🏮
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit have a song, The Blue, that includes the line "Mark me up, so they can see, the best of me."
Not sure what Isbell had in mind, but that line always resonated with me as representing an editor. The literal marking up of written words on the page. To that end, I think of my wife, who has literally edited too many letters to elected officials and letters to the editor to count, but also has "edited" me through conversations, interactions, helping shape my life, etc.
The process of editing provides so much value, making sure that you're actually saying what you're trying to say, that it conveys correctly to the reader, and that it's not to long, or to vague, or both. And it's an act of love because the editor (most of the time) is investing in helping ensure your work something that has worth and value. Sometimes that investment comes when there isn't much there, early thoughts, a very drafty first draft. But the editor digs in, even knowing it might be a long journey, not necessarily knowing where you, they, and the piece will end up.
https://tidal.com/track/36809705/u
I have never come across them. What a lovely song. All around really strong lyric, I love "I'm too scared to ask the right questions
and too tired to fill the right shoes
so I'll take advantage of the blues.” Thank you for the introduction!