Have you ever worked on something for so long that you could no longer see it clearly? Then this session is for you! We’ll consider classic strategies for revising poetry and prose as well as more radical strategies that are worth a try. We’ll talk about low-impact and high-impact ways of seeing your work anew and coming up with a structure that feels exactly right. We’ll look at how revision differs for a stand-alone piece and for a book. Then we’ll open it up to your specific questions. The instructor, Aviya Kushner, has extensive experience with books that took ten years or more—and an essay, “A Duck With One Leg,” that took eleven—and she sometimes tells herself that revision is a form of prayer.
 
Aviya Kushner is the author of Wolf Lamb Bomb (Orison Books, 2021), winner of The Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, a New York Times New & Noteworthy selection, and a Foreword INDIES Finalist; as well as The Grammar of God (Spiegel & Grau/ Penguin Random House 2015), a National Jewish Book Award Finalist, a Sami Rohr Prize Finalist, and one of Publishers Weekly’s Top Religion Stories of the Year. She was a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts fellow in translation. Kushner is The Forward’s language columnist and is an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago, where she directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
 
Virtual Session | Sunday, Feb. 23, 3:00-4:15 ET | $40