Title:“What We Owe and Are Owed”
Author: Kiese Laymon
Publisher: New York/Vox
Date: May 10, 2021
Form: Essay
Keywords: Revision, Friendship, Repair
This week, a short post that leans heavily in the direction of reading recommendation as opposed to analysis. That’s partly because the piece I’m sharing—by Kiese Laymon, published in New York magazine this week—isn’t argument-driven in the same sense as most of the writing this newsletter tends to take as its subject. Alexander Chee put it nicely on Twitter when he talked about Laymon as a writer who’s been working on “how to change from writing about to writing to.” Which might be to say that this is a piece of writing that works less along the axis running between an author and their subject and more on the axis between author and addressee. Less argument, more letter.
Anyway, I wanted to share it in part because it’s great and worth reading, but in part because, from a certain angle at least, it has something to say about editing. Or in Laymon’s term, about revision—a far more expansive concept.
Here’s the paragraph where he first gives his readers a sense of the meaning and the stakes of the term:
I thought he was talking about “revision,” a word our professors and high school teachers believed necessitated us reducing all of our Black rhetorical abundance into meager-ass absolutes. In my own sloppy work, on and off the page, I was beginning to understand “revision” as a dynamic practice of revisitation, premised on ethically reimagining the ingredients, scope, and primary audience of one’s initial vision. Revision required witnessing and testifying. Witnessing and testifying required rigorous attempts at remembering and imagining. If revision was not God, revision was everything every God ever asked of believers.
Revision—which for Laymon both is and isn’t about writing—definitely isn’t a question of filing off a sentence’s sharp edges to meet preconceived standards. It isn’t really even so much an aesthetic process, never mind a technical one, but rather an ethical one. It’s about (re)engaging with things already done—by you but maybe also to you. Doing so continually (from long before you have a first draft), and doing so in relation. Laymon’s is one of those definitions that (not unlike what Namwali Serpell does with the word “soul,” as discussed here) splits a word apart and defamiliarizes it. Revision becomes re-vision. And a lot of other things still.
In fact, here’s a list of all the re- verbs that Laymon uses in the essay; numbers 3 through 8 all appear in the paragraph above, but they’re all terms that are worth holding alongside revision as ways of thinking about the work that act might involve:
Repeat
Remind
Revise
Reduce
Revisit
Reimagine
Require
Remember
Return
Repair
Restore
Renew
Reiterate
There are two other re- verbs that don’t appear in the essay as verbs, but buried in nouns: relate (from relationship) and respond (from responsibility). These two feel just as important, because they both get at the fact that revision is something you don’t do in isolation, even if you do it alone. It’s about relating and responding, which I think is why Laymon emphasizes that revision is an act with ethical stakes.
I recommend reading the whole essay on its own terms, but amongst other things, I think it’s a fantastic prompt to think about what exactly we do when we revise, what we don’t do, and what a more expansive version might look like.