Two Acclaimed Writers on the Art of Revising Your Life
About this episode
Sociologist and guest host Tressie McMillan Cottom sits down with writer Kiese Laymon to talk about revision — of prose and of the self. Laymon describes returning to Mississippi and confronting what it means to love a home marked by slavery and segregation, from the Confederate monument on the Ole Miss campus to the intimate histories in his memoir 'Heavy.' He discusses learning to live 'in revision': revising his relationships to family, body, and place without pretending the past can be erased. They talk about his fiction ('Long Division'), his essays, the young writers he mentors through his workshop, and how revision functions as a moral practice — a willingness to re-see, re-write, and take responsibility for who you have been and who you are becoming.