Instructor: Traci Brimhall
Cost: $9 Members | $10 Non-Members
Tuesday, September 25, 2012 | 6:00-6:45pm

One of the most difficult and mysterious parts of the creative writing process is the role of revision. What should be cut? What should stay? Does anything need to be added? That struggle of determining what needs to be pared away is shared by aspiring paleontologists who go to a dig site to learn how to tell the difference between rock and bone. It's an intuitive art, indeed, and everyone has their own process or rules they abide by. Books on writing often overlook a comprehensive assessment of revision techniques, focusing instead of the elements of craft and writing prompts. Brimhall will demonstrate three major revision tools: the chisel, forensic reconstruction and the Frankenstein.

Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, FIELD, Indiana Review and Southern Review. She is a former Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, a current Emerging Writer Fellow at The Writer's Center, and the 2012 Summer Poet in Residence at the University of Mississippi.