Always Unfinished - Erasure as Revision

We’ve all heard “a poem is never finished.” But what if, instead, there were many finished versions of a poem, all of them in conversation? This workshop explores erasure as a way to dive deeper into your writing and your expectations of what your “best” or “finished” work may look like. Bring three copies of a piece of older work (whatever that means to you, but ideally something you haven’t looked at for a year or so), as well as an image that you feel resonates with the poem, either when you wrote it or right now. We’ll perform three separate erasures of our poems and explore how context and experience can influence and unsettle our writing.

Heather Bowlan is a writer, critic, and community organizer from Northwest Philadelphia and living in Germantown after time in London, Hilo, Long Beach, and Raleigh, among other places. Her collection of self-erasures and collaborative poems, Highlights & Blackouts, was released by _mixlit press as a chapbook and code poem experience in 2023. Heather’s work has appeared in the anthology Feminisms in Motion, the New Ohio Review, the Anarchist Review of Books, and elsewhere.