how poet Heather Bowlan uses erasure, collage, and collaboration to rethink writing process and what makes a poem "done"
letting go of the workshop model and the idea of the finished poem and embracing community and process
Today I’m excited to share another interview in the new tending section, which will be a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. I’m experimenting with an interview + exercise format, so below you’ll find just one interview question, then a fun exercise related to that question.
Today’s interview is with poet Heather Bowlan, whose new book Highlights & Blackouts is a really exciting hybrid of poems, including collages and erasure poems, and visual art. I’d love your suggestions of other writers and artists to feature in this series, so if you have a good idea, feel free to let me know.
Today’s interview is a really special one for me. Heather Bowlan is my oldest poetry friend, and it’s a wild accident of geography that after years of living in different cities (and sometimes continents!) we’re back in the same part of the country. (Because I’m a Pittsburgher, I think in terms of rivers—we’re separated only by the Delaware and probably the Schuylkill.) Heather and I went to college together, and we spent one blissful summer as fellows through the University of Pittsburgh’s Honors College writing poems and getting paid for it! (With the support of our incredible poetry-mom Sharon McDermott.) That summer, Heather worked on poemss in conversation with feminist poets including Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Alice Notley, and more. When I read her new book, Highlights & Blackouts, I was reminded of that long-ago project and Heather’s ability to see connections and to build community across space and time. The book is deeply collaborative, including erasures of poems and visual art contributed by friends, and Heather’s been doing these incredible performances that go beyond the standard poetry reading to become really rich multimodal experiences. (I mentioned her performance for Philly Fringe in a recent post.)
Heather Bowlan is a writer, artist, and community organizer in Northwest Philadelphia. Her collection Highlights & Blackouts was published by _mixlit press in 2023. Heather’s work has appeared in the anthology Feminisms in Motion, the New Ohio Review, the Anarchist Review of Books, and elsewhere. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University and received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. You can find her mixed media collages in art shows around Philadelphia, and you can find her on instagram at @credencive.
If you’re interested in Heather’s approach to writing and process, you can join her for a free zoom workshop, Always Unfinished - Erasure as Revision, next Thursday, October 12 at 4pm eastern through Blue Stoop’s Thursdays on the Stoop. Read more here.
Below, Heather and I talk about why aiming for “good” or “finished” in your writing is “a little bit bullshit,” and she offers a writing exercise for revisiting and rethinking an old draft.
one question for Heather Bowlan
One thing I really love about the book as a whole is how it carries all these versions of the poems in it, with each one marked with the season and year of its composition, so reading the erasures and the re-imaginings is also like traveling through time. It really helped me to think about how any given piece of writing is an artifact of a moment in time, and how, in revision, we’re often creating these composite forms. (Though usually we’re the only ones who can see the traces of the old drafts inside the final one.) And it also really challenges the way we usually think about revision–that we’re working toward a better, finished product. Your poems are sequenced chronologically, but I don’t think you mean to suggest that the poems are moving from bad to good, or early draft to finished poem. Instead, it feels like, look at all these possibilities inside this text.
You and I have both spent tons of time in pretty conventional poetry workshops–make copies of your draft, hand it out, sit silently while your classmates tell you how to make it better, then revise. And this book is a really excitingly different way of thinking about and representing progress.
I’d love to know how you came to this form–the erasures of your own poems–and how the book as a collection of those erasures across time came together.
Heather
I love that you’ve identified the importance of possibility for this project and practice. I began working on Highlights & Blackouts after I’d stepped away from writing for quite awhile. The workshop model started to feel, forget restrictive, constrictive, and I needed time to let go of all that.
During that period I began making collages, and creating started feeling playful and vulnerable and exhilarating for me again. I came back to my writing. I reread every poem I thought was “finished,” published or not. And I brought the mindset that a fixed definition of “good” or “authentic” or “finished” is a little bit bullshit. And also, knowing I’m not 25 or 32, or whenever I wrote the original poems, my perspective on what inspired them, how I’d present that experience or emotion, has shifted.
So I just started digging into the work, reimagining the poems. I would physically cross out, highlight, cut up the poems. I did it many times over a period of months. Then I looked at the versions and how they spoke to each other.
That’s what brought about the idea to widen the conversation. Looking at the poems and erasures together, and thinking about what I consider my other craft–organizing and building community–and how to bring that into my art. I started posting the erasures with photos, videos, music on IG–first mine, then from other artists. Often the result would shift the poems’ mood or emphasis–sometimes the art challenged the poems, or became the dominant voice.
At this point I didn’t have a plan besides these little collaborations and I was having a great time. Then Warren C. Longmire, a very talented poet and programmer, was starting to build this digital literature project, _mixlit. He asked me, what if there was a space where people could move back and forth between erasures and see the shift and sit with the images and hear the music?
And so over a period of about two years we worked together to create Highlights & Blackouts. The full collection is online. It’s a site Warren built that we call a codepoem. We collaborated on the design and the feel and he turned those ideas into this dynamic user experience that encourages the reader/viewer to play. We incorporated my collages into the site, and they’re also in the chapbook we made together. Finally we decided to create a multimedia performance featuring work from the site alongside new audio and video, to share the project that way.
It’s been a powerful and necessary process: to approach art expansively, to decenter myself and try to live my belief in the importance of context and community.
if you’d like to try it out . . .
Find a poem that you feel is finished. Maybe it’s not your “perfect” poem but it feels complete. Remember what influenced you or felt important to you when you wrote it. You can make a list, if you want, or you can just take ten minutes to let your mind wander in that moment. Now zoom back a bit and think about what’s changed. What have you discovered about who you are and how you make art?
Reread your poem and see what comes to the surface. Highlight the words that stand out, you redact what doesn’t, try both. Try it more than once–maybe a day apart or months apart. See what this poem looks like for you now. Maybe there’s a photo or a song or a video that speaks to it. Put them together and start that conversation. (If you do, please tag me on IG at @credencive! I’d love to see it!)
If you’d like to read more, you can buy Heather’s book from Bookshop, directly via the book’s website, or at your favorite local bookstore. You can find Heather on instagram, where you can also learn about all the amazing performances she’s doing around Philly. And if you’re free, join us for her free zoom workshop, Always Unfinished - Erasure as Revision, next Thursday, October 12 at 4pm eastern. (I’ll be there!) You can read more and get the link here.
Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. You can find my books here and read other recent writing here. If you’d like occasional dog photos, glimpses of my walks around town, and writing process snapshots, find me on instagram.
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I love this interview and project! Thank you for sharing it <3