MENTORSHIP RECIPIENT

Mentorship Recipient
​I tend to call at night

Mentor Commentary:
Matt Mitchell

On the Revision Process for "I tend to call at night"

by ​​Winshen Liu​

The editorial mentorship was such a gift for my writing. As someone new to poetry, I have been looking for guidance and mentorship from Matt was such a positive experience. From the start, Matt was a kind, insightful editor who not only shared what landed (or didn’t!), but also offered questions balanced between reflective and generative. He understood what I wanted to say about the grandchild-grandmother relationship, as impacted by diaspora, and asked me to examine why those things mattered to me.

I was so excited to have his astute questions, but in an attempt to answer them and place the speaker in scene, I wrote a horrible draft. While writing, I thought it was better because more details appeared on the page: the sound of talk shows and news on TV, how the paper fan used was made of car advertisements in magazines, memories of singing while cooking. Each stanza I added felt like a triumph because I typically write short poems. This became the longest poem I had ever written. But Matt’s review showed me how muddy the poem had become. The details were so disparate that the scene felt distracted from itself.

His comments were very kind and encouraging despite the mess I had made, and I felt motivated to keep revising. I saw my poem more clearly and zeroed in on two things: song and food. Deleting unnecessary details felt like a tightening of screws, a smoothing of the mechanics in the poem, so that the next draft was not only clearer than my original, but also more resonant emotionally with what I had been trying to say. 
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I am very grateful to Matt for the care he gave my work and his guidance. I used to focus only on being specific and invoking different senses, and he helped me see how different stanzas and details work together in a poem. Because of his mentorship on “I tend to call at night,” I came away with a much stronger poem and a clearer understanding of how to write future ones.

Winshen Liu is a Taiwanese American writer who has worked in various roles in non-profits, education, and tech. Her writing has appeared in Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, Raft, and is forthcoming in Baltimore Review. She hopes to one day raise three rescue dogs at once and live near mountains.