The Art of the Gut Renovation: Revising as Rebuilding
$230
When you’re writing a draft of a new project, not only are you trying to create a whole narrative arc — you’re also creating the very language with which to tell your story. It’s only natural that in the early stages of drafting, things don’t come out perfectly. But big revisions can be intimidating. You’ve already done a lot of hard work to get the words down, but it may feel like there’s a long way to go. Where do you begin?
In this four-session class, we’ll focus on taking a project apart and putting it back together again in a new configuration. You can call this a “gut renovation.” (Construction metaphors are helpful for thinking about the drafting process: A first draft yields all the building materials you need to make a piece of writing, but they might not be put together quite properly yet.) This revision process is extremely tactile, designed to get you thinking about and interacting with your work in new ways. We’ll also spend some time reading other writers on revision and discussing your own, existing self-revising and -editing tactics.
This class is designed for nonfiction writers, so essayists, memoirists, and writers of literary reportage are all welcome. Please come with a complete early draft of a project — maybe it’s something fresh, or maybe it’s simply a piece on which you feel a bit stalled. By the end of the month, writers will emerge with a new set of revision strategies, and a clear path forward for revising their work-in-progress.
Access Program
We want our writing classes to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class and seminar tuitions at a reduced rate. Most writing classes have at least one access spot available.
Please apply here for access rate tuition. Contact Susan Moore at susan@literary-arts.org if you have questions.
Liaison position
Every in-person class and seminar at Literary Arts has one liaison position. Liaisons perform specific duties for each class meeting. If you are a liaison for a class or seminar, the full amount of your tuition is covered by Literary Arts.
Apply here for the liaison position.
Katherine Cusumano
Pronouns: she/her
Katherine Cusumano is a journalist, essayist, and teaching artist whose work focuses on the intersections of culture and the outdoors. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Outside Magazine, Bon Appétit, and beyond, and she is a regular contributor to the New York Times for Kids and W Magazine. For her work, she has received funding and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences, the Spring Creek Project, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and others. She holds a BA in comparative literature from Brown University and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Oregon State University, where she was the recipient of the 2024 Creative Writing Award for Nonfiction.
