Tag creative nonfiction

Revision as Listening: upcoming workshop

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

On Saturday, September 12, from 3–5 PM ET, I’ll be teaching a virtual workshop with The Notebooks Collective called Revision as Listening: How to Return to a Draft with Curiosity.

Revision is often described as correction, and it can often feel that way too. From this correction-focused perspective, returning to a draft can feel like returning to a room where someone is waiting to tell us what we did wrong.

But there is another kind of revision fear as well: the fear of returning to a draft and finding only silence. The piece may not feel broken exactly, but it may not yet feel finished. It may seem to be asking for something more (another image, another turn, another structure, another pressure) and we may not know yet what that “more” is.

For this workshop, I’m interested in how approaching revision as listening can help us find a way forward between these two pressures: the pressure to correct what is already there and the pressure to discover what may still be missing.

What changes when we return to a draft with curiosity instead of judgment? What if we begin by asking what is already alive in the piece? What does the draft seem to know that we did not know when we began writing it? What might it be asking for next?

As an educator and editor, I’ve learned that writers often know more about their drafts than they realize. I’m interested in helping writers notice what is already there: the recurring image, the strange sentence, the unanswered question, the shift in voice, the place where the draft suddenly wakes up.

As a writer, I need this reminder too. In my own recent project, papeles / papers, I’ve been trying to listen more intentionally to what a draft reveals through revision. This listening has been a way of deepening my relationship to what the page is trying to hold.

For the workshop, participants should bring one draft, fragment, or unfinished piece they are willing to revisit during class. Shorter pieces will be easiest to work with (approximately 1–5 pages is ideal) but any genre or stage of draft is welcome.

Our goal is to leave with practical strategies and a clearer sense of what your draft may be asking for. Together, we’ll develop a gentler way to keep going.

Registration is available through The Notebooks Collective.

on ruminative reading

José Angel Araguz 1 Comment

One of the things I’m looking forward to exploring in my upcoming workshop Rumination as Route is a practice I call ruminative reading: a way of engaging with texts that invites lingering, layering, and the kind of close attention that reveals deeper textures over time.

I’ll be sharing how I approach reading as a writer, and how I tease out unexpected meaning through methods that mirror the digressive and associative structures I write in. This kind of reading isn’t about decoding a text once and for all, it’s about returning to it, turning it over, letting it shift in your hands and your memory.

My ideas around ruminative reading were shaped by my time writing creative reviews for The Bind, a review site devoted to books by women and nonbinary authors. Though currently on hiatus, The Bind remains a rich and inspiring archive, a space where reviews take many forms: lesson plans, maps, quizzes, writing prompts. It honors writing at important intersections, and I encourage you to spend time on the site if you haven’t already.

As I prepare for this upcoming class on non-linear personal narratives, I’ve been thinking about how ruminative reading gave rise to the way I teach and write. Below are three reviews I wrote that embody this spirit, each one a small experiment in letting thought wander, spiral, and return.

Review of Jordan Rice’s Constellarium (Orison Books, April 2016)

For this review, I was drawn to the title’s connection to stars and from there wound up creating an astrological natal chart for the book, taking its publication date as its birthdate. Here’s some further info on the approach:

My interpretation focuses on the aspects of the chart that matter most in a book. In discussing this book as its own separate entity and being astrologically, I explore the reading-as-aesthetic-act process to which poetry uniquely lends itself. To paraphrase Borges, a book is not an aesthetic act; the writing of one, however, is, and so is the reading of one. If astrology is talking about the stars in terms of “influence” on our lives, Constellarium becomes a space where the push and pull of said influences are shown and evoked.

Review of Lara Mimosa Montes’s The Somnambulist (Horse Less Press, 2016)

For this review, I was moved by the collection’s formal approach, specifically the ways Montes works with lyric fragments, maps, manipulated texts, and a photograph to create an immersive poetic experience. Here’s how I built off the idea of an open table in a game of eight-ball, one of the central metaphors of the book:

… I have arranged my thoughts on and reactions to The Somnambulist across the following fifteen moments from the text. Consider these thoughts arranged like a game of eight-ball after the break shot where nothing has been pocketed. The pool analogy stems from the narrative of the uncle, whose role as a hustler parallels the role of a poet for the speaker in the book. My aim is to have my thoughts parallel the excerpts in a like manner, with the review being another open table where what matters is not any grand point being made or “pocketed.” Instead, the back-and-forth between reader and text is the focus, the reading experience as a game without scores, whose play and movement are trajectories into poetry.

Review of Rosa Alcalá’s MyOther Tongue (Futurepoem, 2017)

After falling behind on writing this review due to L I F E, I found myself approaching this review as an archive of different reading experiences, an ideas inspired by Alcalá’s own engagement with archives in this collection. Here’s an insight into my review process:

One last archival note: Part of my process for book reviews is to use an index card as a book marker, and to keep a list of page numbers and notes on this card, a kind of map of my reading. There are 2.5 lists on the card for this book. One reading had me focused on “the idea of language + meaning + memory.” Another reading had me thinking “archive = self / traces.” Another reading had me thinking of margins: “ideas of the marginal = archive + misreading + remembering.” I look back at these notes and know, faintly, that I had something smart and polite to say about the book across them.

But that’s gone. All I’m left with is this index card, a set of words and page numbers, and the feeling of other lives I have lived. Which is really the only thing to not be late for: living.

Rumination as Route: Crafting Non-Linear Personal Narratives

Date & Time: Sunday June 1, 2025 @3-5pm EST
Where: Online (Zoom)
Cost: $60
Register here: https://thenotebookscollective.com/event/rumination-as-route/

Hope to see you there!

= José =