God Stars is available for preorder now through Orison Books.
Dear Cherie Nelson Senie,
This semester, I taught my college students blackout poetry using an academic collection of fairy tales I bought at a library book sale for the sole purpose of ripping out its pages. Sacrilege, I know. I hope I’ll be forgiven.
I began instructing my students to scan the torn page before them and pick out which words or phrases caught their eye. It was important to me that they didn’t read the full text. I wanted them to think about themselves, rather than a Snow White snippet or the scholarly essays interspersed throughout the text.
Afterwards, I asked a quiet student of mine what she thought of the exercise.
She responded: “I had Little Red Riding Hood… It didn’t make sense, but it did. You know?”
I did. While my students were hard at work, I crossed out the lines of a Jack and the Beanstalk page. Having done blackout poetry countless times before, I knew that my takeaway from the original text would reflect more of myself than of Jack — but I hadn’t realized how far I would take it.
My work after redactions: “They had to live on every morning, and they didn’t know what to do,” and “We… wondered how to right the sky.”
Though maybe I should have, I hadn’t realized that my still-processing anticipatory grief would wind up on the ripped-out page. I hadn’t realized how much of myself I found through the process of redaction.
Reading God Stars, I was incredibly interested in the redacted essay/s that divide the text.
Repeated throughout the book, before a passage of blacked-out text, you input the following definitions for “redaction:”
“The action of driving back; resistance, reaction. Obsolete. Rare.”
“The action of bringing or putting into a definite form.”
“The action or process of revising or editing text.”
“A new version of a text.”
I am most drawn to “The action of driving back; resistance” and “putting into a definite form.” I am captivated by the continuous act of revising your own writing for new meaning, and giving them space on the page to solidify themselves into permanence.
In one of these redactions, you create, “Cut me down the middle and turn me inside out, look at the inside of my skin my shoulders tattooed in blue black ink these words, not truth, cut into new shapes.” Yet, in a way, these words are truth. This different way of seeing, this erasing, this inking-out — you choose the redaction synonym — is a way of cutting away to reveal the hearts, plural, of a story. It might even be the strongest form of truth-telling.
I haven’t redacted my own work, but this collection makes me want to try. I’ll send my work to the printer now. I’ll find a Sharpie somewhere.
Thank you for writing this. Thank you for sharing the many hearts of your story.
Very sincerely,
Carlin Steere
FanMail/Interview Editor
Carlin Steere
