A ten-day intensive from July 21-30, this mostly asynchronous revision series will provide targeted suggestions, encouragement, and accountability for revising your writing. You should enter this class with at least one piece of prose or four poems that feel close to finished. 

 

We will have two Zoom sessions. On Day 1 we will meet everyone, set our purpose, and answer questions. On Day 10 we will celebrate the revisions we’ve made and look ahead to plans to submit this revised work. In the eight days in between, you will receive four revision tasks. By the following evening, you will send your revised material to a partner in the group, and you will receive their revisions (for longer pieces, we will limit exchanges to a section of the work).

 

For each revision exercise, your partner changes, so you will get brief feedback from four different readers, and you will also develop your own editorial eye by giving feedback to four different writers. (We expect everyone will have a high level of accountability to the group, but if something comes up and a reader can’t give you feedback, Anne and Rachel are standing by as emergency backups.) 

 

By our final meeting, you will have read four writers’ work with an eye toward what makes a piece ready for an editor, you will have received feedback on four of your own pieces/excerpts, and you will have concrete strategies to approach future revisions. At this point, you should have work you feel ready to submit! 

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***Participants of this class will be offered a $50 discount for Anne and Rachel's Fall Submissions Happy Hour class offered in September.

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Schedule: 

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Kickoff Zoom meeting: Sunday 7/21, 5-6 pm PDT

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Revision Task #1: Delivered Monday 7/22, exchanged Tuesday 7/23 (asynchronous)

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Revision Task #2: Delivered Wednesday 7/24, exchanged Thursday 7/25 (asynchronous)

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Revision Task #3: Delivered Friday 7/26, exchanged Saturday 7/27 (asynchronous)

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Revision Task #5: Delivered Sunday 7/28, exchanged Monday 7/29 (asynchronous)

 

Final Zoom meeting: Tuesday 7/30, 6-7 pm PDT

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About the Instructors:

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Anne Beatty has been writing nonfiction for the better part of two decades. She’s spent the same chunk of time inventing ways to force herself to revise and submit her work— and withstand the inevitable rejection. Her writing has appeared in The American Scholar, The Atlantic, Brevity, The Georgia Review, Longreads, and elsewhere. Her essays have won prizes from Hunger Mountain and Creative Nonfiction and been recognized as Notable in the Best American Essays anthology. A writer by night, by day she is a high school English teacher.

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Click here to learn more about Anne.

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Rachel Richardson is the author of the poetry collection Smother, forthcoming from W. W. Norton in early 2025, and two previous books of poetry, Hundred-Year Wave and Copperhead, both from Carnegie Mellon University Press. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in The New York Times, American Poetry Review, Orion, Yale Review, on The Slowdown; her nonfiction has been published in Literary Hub, Kenyon Review, at the Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. Born and raised in the Bay Area, she is co-founder of Left Margin LIT and a Trustee at The Frost Place. 

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Click here to learn more about Rachel.

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LEFT MARGIN LIT'S CANCELLATION/REFUND POLICY:

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If you find that you can't take a class for which you registered, you may request a refund, less a $25 administrative fee, at least 48 hours prior to the start of the first class session. If a class doesn't reach its minimum enrollment, it will be cancelled, and all students will receive full refunds.