Writing Past the First Draft

We’ve moved online! All workshops will be conducted through Zoom, an interactive platform that allows you to participate in exercises and contribute to group conversation in your workshops. The day before your workshop you’ll receive an email with a link to Zoom for your workshop session.

Instructor: Liza Flum

How do you shape a rough draft into a second, third, or twentieth draft? How do you know when a poem is really “finished?” Considering such approaches as Allen Ginsberg’s maxim of “first thought, best thought” and the famous advice to “kill your darlings,” we’ll intensively explore the craft of revision. Participants are asked to bring one draft to revise in class through generative writing exercises.

Liza Flum is a poet and teacher living in the Finger Lakes region of New York. She holds an MFA in poetry from Cornell, and her poems appear in journals including Narrative, The Southeast Review, Lambda Literary, and The Collagist. She is a recipient of a Barbara Deming Individual Artist Grant, and her work has been supported by fellowships from the Saltonstall Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. She is currently a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah where she is a Vice Presidential Research Fellow. She works as a poetry editor for Omnidawn Publishing.