Processing Flax: Contending with the Violence of Revision

By Jessica L. Pavia

Despite my many years spent in school to be a writer, revision remains utterly mysterious. I finish a piece and comb through its mess, lost in where to start, how to make it better—wishfully hoping, instead, that it’s immediately perfect and polished.

So it was a shock that a breakthrough came not in the classroom, but during summer camp at a local living history museum as I walked my campers towards the farm to do their favorite activities: muck sheep poop and proce...