Kevin Brockmeir came to campus yesterday and met with MFA students before heading over to Madison’s west side Borders for a reading. Right now, I’m halfway through his story collection, Things That Fall From the Sky, and have been really admiring how lyrical and poetic his style is. As I read this book I keep thinking to myself, like a good Comp/Rhet grad student should, man, this guy must revise like crazy. Each sentence is so rich and textured. He must obsessively return to his work!
Of course, during the Q and A I asked him about his revision process and he said that he doesn’t really revise all that much. He labors over each sentence and constantly goes over the relationships between the sentences as he pushes through each story, but, he told me in his oh-so-gentle voice, I really don’t return to stories. Once they’re done, they’re done for me.
It’s amazing that for as much as we talk about writing in Comp/Rhet—and the nearly divine process of revision—there really seems to be a wealth of moments when writers who can really knock your socks off throw whatever Composition theory we can come up with right back in our faces. That’s not what Brockmeir did (in fact, I couldn’t imagine a kinder or more adorable man), but I still felt like I had to revise what I considered revision to be. If he doesn’t return to stories once their “done,” I keep telling myself, then there’s something to be said for the individual revisions he puts each sentence through.
Something that really interests me about this is the way this gets at some of the “musical” qualities of revision. That is, if revision is returning to a piece of writing and re-performing the work we’ve done there in order to “improve” it or take it in a new direction—like a live performer “revising” a song on stage by changing the lyrics, rhythm, etc—then how could Brockmeir’s revise-as-you-go-then-leave-it-behind fit within such a framework? Would it be something like improvisation? Finding the “song” in each sentence, then creating a singular performance out of a wealth of songs? Is Brockmeir a jazz writer? Have I reduced the music-rhetoric connection to a metaphor?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I'd say that he is revising - he just isn't doing it on paper. Sometimes, I do a lot of internal revision before I write things down. If he had put those sentences on paper and worked through them, physically writing and rewriting, it would be more apparent. I wonder if it is more a question of if he is aware of how much he 'revises'.
Post a Comment