Revision and the Multi-Faceted Self

By Amy Beth Sisson

My sister recently sent me a photograph of a piece of paper that had hung on my parents’ bulletin board for decades. It was a poem I had written at age nine, and my current, much older self could not resist revising the words of my child self. Common advice to writers is to let a manuscript sit in between writing and revision, but my example is extreme—most don’t contemplate a fifty-year timespan. This experience made me question the relationship between writing, re...